Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)
iosiflazaridis.github.io149 points by endorphine 3 days ago
149 points by endorphine 3 days ago
When you present data to real life human beings you need to make your visualizations clearer. The map is OK, but literally everything else is nonsensical to me. Please take this as constructive feedback, because you can make something very cool with this data.
Constructive feedback would be pointing to specific issues and how to improve them, not just "no nonsense"
"make no mistakes", my guy. Some people took these habits to communication with other people nowadays.
It seems perfectly clear to me. What is the problem?
> Play runs through them from the founding of Rome. Each dot is a place, its area the number of battles there, and its slices the opponents, starting at 12 o'clock and running clockwise in the order of the legend; grey is civil war. Diamonds are sea battles; dashed rings are battles placed only within their region, in the colour of the most frequent opponent; triangles at the edge point to Caledonia, Nubia and Arabia. Nearby dots merge as you zoom out and split as you zoom in. Hover or tap a dot for its battles; select it to list them with their full records.
This is technically "clear", because each clause is declarative, and states a fact. But it's unreadable because there's no rhythm, transitions or structure, which leaves a human reader's eyes glazing over.
It's a lot clearer than a lot of reporting dashboards that I know for a fact were created by people!
> which leaves a human reader's eyes glazing over.
You insist too much on the fact that you are "human". What a time to be alive.
This is not constructive feedback - how can they make it better?
Well, it's pretty obviously slopped together, which I think the commenter makes clear with "it's nonsensical."
The problems are obvious. The OP is not even toning down the 100 window height's worth of battle tabular data, it's pretty clear that OP just pulled the output from a simple claude code output without any taste or editorialization.
So I think it's pretty constructive. This is a cool map, I thought of doing something similar myself (for Alexander's conquest). It just needs to be de-slopped.
This is AI slop. Can’t expect more.
I disagree to an extent. A person did will this into existence and found the results interesting. People should be curious and share what they find! But, they need to present the things they find in a way that makes sense to them and others. Otherwise it's just sloppy.
Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle…
I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].
But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.
Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.
There never was any big battle.
There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.
Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.
So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.
I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.
[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.
That's interesting to read, thanks for the link.
It does sound like the counter-stance is mainly also the view of one person, Dr Miles Russell at Bournemouth Uni. But from bits I've read before, Sir Mortimer Wheeler was from the same era as Sir Arthur Evans, that time when they enjoyed absolute authority and could not be challenged. That meant their mistakes, and even deliberate lies, had to be considered to be 100% known fact and would not be corrected until after their deaths.
Well... yeah, but, it's more than an opinion: the dead have been radiocarbon dated, which is how we know they didn't all die at the same time as originally believed.
And if they died at different times, especially when most of them died before the Romans arrived, then the whole big battle theory just sort of falls apart from there.
.. it is a poor student that does not one day, out-do the Master
congrats and thank you for the detailed post!
Shitty ai website with impossible navigation, on iOS mobile at least.
looks fine on desktop. def AI, but I don't find it off-putting.
I think with AI we'll see a lot more of these little data viz projects that look good on machines like the one they were developed on, with little care for other devices.
Its not so bad. Before AI this information might not be even this accessible.
I think the data visualization component of these things are neat (ive been making stuff myself) -- since all the scaffolding and editing is super easy. I always have real questions around the underlying data though. It seems like the effort to put the site up is low, thus the vetting of data is probably very low.
Working great on desktop, and seems accurate for major battles at least. I'm impressed, personally, and I'd be happy to see a lot more use of AI for these types of educational tools.
My only frustration is that AI use is not acknowledged or clearly described, and that sources are not linked to translation/edition/pages. That would have been appreciated.
I find it always interesting that the Romans never reached modern Czechia or slovakia, even though they invaded Britain or went so far in the middle east.
Might be because of land travel in those days. I wonder how besides the large scale geography like mountains, the smaller scale and biotopes also affected it. Open farmland or steppes are different to travel than dense forests or cliffs. Even today, trade by land is still more constrained than by water, if you look at large container ships vs trains, and where most GDP is concentrated. Thomas Pueyol makes some nice twitter threads about this, how geography has shaped history. Of course simplified and with a chosen narrative, but something that the typical "great man theory of history" doesn't do.
I would guess because the whole region is surrounded by mountain ranges which must have been impassable "jungle". E.g. the Ore Mountains in the north were only settled after 1000 AD and mostly because of various "silver rushes". I guess the Bohemian forest to the west was similar harsh, no large rivers like the Rhine to transport troops on, and the whole area probably a scary, dark and "barbarian" wilderness like Germania north-east of the Rhine. Just speculating though :)
The ore mountains were mined for tin already 2500 BC, check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_Mountains
Danube, which runs through Slovakia's capital, was Roman Empire's border.
Oh, but they did reach those lands under Marcus Aurelius and indeed occupied them. Prior to his death, he intended to create two new provinces, Marcomannia and Sarmatia. There was even a Roman expedition that reached the Baltic in modern day Poland. (In the case of Poland, it would’ve been a terrible idea to try to conquer those lands, not least of all because they are situated on the indefensible Northern European Plain.)
I would honestly like to see this as an animation, where the battles were fought over time. Maybe the site can do this but if so it’s not obvious.
Ctrl+F Play
the second result is the play button that plays the map.
Oh, that's really cool! Why is it so hidden... only the AI can probably answer that.
"Roman" should be defined.
"1480"is like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour imo.
The Romans in the 1400s still called themselves Romans and saw themselves as Romans (in Greek: Rhomaioi). They never stopped.
So, no, it's not at all like calling the Iraq war a British Empire endeavour.
It was our own much later civilisation that made the historical distinction between the older East and West combined "Roman Empire" and its continuation in the East (and sometimes in the West) post ~476 AD ("Byzantine Empire"). The Romans themselves never saw the distinction.
Some people in Moscow call themselves the "3rd Rome", are they Rome?
An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power. Byzantium != Rome. It's different in multiple ways.
People call themselves European all over European. It doesn't mean Spain = Portugal. It's a larp.
Not at all. There was direct continuity here -- the Romans remained Romans in their eyes and never stopped. Indeed, the capital of the Empire never changed between 324 (well within what you'd call the Roman Empire) and 1204 (well into what you'd call the Byzantine Empire, when it was sacked and occupied by the Fourth Crusade).
The issue is that you are viewing a single entity differently, because of a hack in the way history was taught, biased by a Western Catholic church-based perspective.
The nature of being Roman changed from the early days of Rome to the final fall of the last remaining bastions in Crimea in the 1470s, of course. But the Republic was different to the early Empire, was different to the Empire in the 3rd century, was very different to the Empire in the 4th century, was different again to the Empire in the 6th century, was different to the Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, etc, etc.
But that's no different to me pointing out that the way people thought and lived and worked in the United States in the late eighteenth century was very different to how they live now in the 21st century. But we still consider these people to be American.
> An empire is an ideology which emanates from a seat of power.
Yes, not from a fixed physical location. If the empire fell when rome ceased to be "the seat of power" it was no longer the Roman empire by ~300 AD was it? Diocletian was larping...
The Roman empire continiously changed and evolved. The empire in ~300 AD wouldn't have made any sense to Romans from 100 BC (and probably a lot more sense to the Romans from 1000 AD)
If you squint a little you can probably make a claim that any particular country X is a true successor of Rome: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
how were the Romans involved with the battle of blue waters?
There's a tenuous Roman connection mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Theodoro
"with several scholars identifying the "Dmitry", one of the three Golden Horde princes in the Battle of Blue Waters (c. 1362/1363), with a Prince of Gothia."
The Dacians were not from Slavs, nor Balkans
*that we know of
Pretty cool
"Let this not be another slopped idea". Oh god, it's another one, just like the Swiss Minecraft one
and what is problem with that? isn't it 100x better than just an idea? it is opensource, it's a nice proof of concept that can be built on.
"The 7 entries removed in the fact-check" section has one entry that mentions "so the user should decide." So did the user make a final call here?
I assume it was heavily AI generated. Still very cool data and vizualization
In that case, would a link to the Wikipedia articles, detailling the context around the battles/wars, be a quick win to implement?
[sorry, I'm old school. I still Wikipedia is a damn good single source of truth]
Certainly a good source of linked data. I was just using it to investigate why there's a fort called "Babylon" in Egypt, and then admiring the well-preserved brickwork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Fortress
The map is good but you need to spend some time getting rid of all the crap that claude added around it. Make the map the focus, spend some effort thinking about how you want to present additional information, figure out how to tell a better story. People are saying "slop" because it looks like every other AI website out there right now.
Yer, LLMs are amazing at pushing the code out, but they are still far from understanding the project's intent within its broader context and constructing its presentation in a universally tasteful manner.
Slop
