#there's like 8 000 words of nothing but made up Roman politics in there now

[grimaldiapologist]

Butting in where nobody invited me, the question of how long the twins have actually been in power fascinates me, because we don't know, but it's both long enough to drive Rome on the brink of collapse, and not long enough to have a single person really on board with the whole situation or what to do with it at all.

The twins have no clue what they're doing and they're absolutely riding a high here. From the way it looks, their military campaign is going reasonably great - their soldiers are bringing them victories, but at the cost of stretching the Empire too thin too fast. They have too many fronts and not enough supply, and internal stability is getting ignored and fucked in the process. They don't seem to have much of a touch on the populace or understand that they need to have a back and forth with their people, currently they're just giving them that rockstar and think it's all that needs doing in terms of PR. It isn't, but I also don't really know what they're supposedly doing wrong. Killing everyone's fathers and sons and brothers in war? There's some form of a famine building as a result of the forementioned rapid expansion and ignorance toward supply lines? They're drawing from the people to feed their armies? The armies, which are also dying off at a faster pace than they can be built back up.

None of this has reached a tipping point yet, but they've been at it for long enough that it's become wholly unsustainable. Nobody tells them aside from Acacius and I guess the Senate tried, and they also don't listen.

Further, it's been 16 years since Marcus Aurelius. Septimius Severus, their father, in real life ruled for a decent time considering he was the last survivor of the Year of the Five Emperors, which started with the death of Marcus Aurelius and extended to Commodus in Gladiator 1, and then (buzzing, static noise, distorted video feed), ending with presumably him as it did with history. So we've had the Severan dynasty in power for how long now? How much did their father fuck up Rome with his campaigns? The RL dude died somewhere in Britain of an illness and it was Caracalla and Geta who put an end to that war front, but clearly they've been doing other things in this universe. But maybe they did close up shop in Britannia, and chose to focus south, where our story's looking toward? Severus had a succesful expansion down into African and Middle-Eastern fronts, so maybe they looked at that and went, you know what, we could do better. By chucking all of Rome's military prowess single-mindedly over there with all of the food also?

Throwing back to the Senate by the way - what the hell are the crimes against the Senate that Acacius accuses them of? Again RL, Severus was not popular with the Senate, but these two are too damn young to have had anything to do with that. Maybe they just didn't do anything to fix that, and made it worse, because their father got away with it and also who the hell cares about the Senate anyway? What are those old guys doing aside from nothing and being hostile?

Severus also, curiously, overhauled the Praetorian guard. He kicked out everyone he thought wasn't 110% loyal to him and replaced the command with his own men, and increased their pay by like a millionfold. I think, at the time of Gladiator II's story, with the Praetorian guard - things might actually be okayish for the twins, despite their growing hubris and the Praetorians' habit of discarding emperors that fuck with them. Because they're getting paid so much better than they ever were, and while Geta and Caracalla are both morons, I don't think Geta would go as far as being a moron about their personal security. I don't think they'd be cutting corners with the changes their father presumably put in place, and I think the Praetorians, for the time being, are putting up with their nonsense out of convenience - their job might be harder at this time, but they're being compensated, and they probably have lingering loyalty over.

But again in terms of the timeline - they can't have been in power for even two years. I can't imagine them lasting that long, or it having been that long, particularly when our available timeframe is 16 years, and we had to have other Emperors in that time, and they're so goddamn young. If they'd come into power at like, 15, they would have been either disposed of immediately or they would have been trained into the job to do better than they are. They wouldn't have lasted into their 20s being the way that they are.

So they've been on the throne for fuck all in terms of time, inherited a military behemoth from their father who presumably was good enough at his job to not get nuked the same way Commodus did and had a military mindset which he entirely failed to hand his children (probably because he was too busy beating them), and have in a matter of months driven that into the ground because they're insecure, unqualified, and lack any form of guidance and councelling to do their jobs better.

Somebody get these boys a babysitter who can handle budgeting at the same time.

I started to wonder how many emperors were killed by the praetorian guard and apparently it was quite a few lmao so the emperors were very much not safe with their own bodyguards

makes me wonder how many other little personal privileges the guards could take if they would even kill the emperors if they so chose and if the emperors were ever scared of them

the guard were elite soldiers and a branch of the military working as the emperors' private police essentially

they worked for the emperors and their job was to protect the emperors and to stop social unrest and also demonstrate the emperors' power but while they were ordered by the emperors they were not commanded by them but instead by their own commanding officers