Oh good point (and somewhat of a burn)! I read an article along these lines, about how… what was that show that was on NBC or whatever? Was it Timeless? I dunno, some time travel show… But one of the characters was a historian and she was entirely committed to not disrupting the timeline or changing history; but the author of the article made a good point, that some parts of the timeline maybe SHOULD be disrupted (like in the case of racism or the like).
So, in that case, how about bringing in the “technology” of the concepts of modern human rights regimes? Romans had the concept of a limited democratic system (from Greece) and the concept of tolerance (their religious diversity and ability to absorb new kinds of religious practices), so you could easily build on that.
I do wonder if this gets at questions that are often explored in alternate histories or time travel fiction, about the nature of time and history itself, whether or not it’s changeable or fixed.
Time travel shows are too uptight about changing history. You could step on a butterfly and start WWIII, or you could just as easily avert WWII. More fundamentally, if time travel exists, then history is already in constant flux*. There’s nothing that makes our particular timeline sacred or “correct.”
*and clearly we’re living in a future where Biff got the sports almanac
But how are you going to support yourself while you’re doing that?
I dunno… what do you think are the employment opportunities for single women in the incredibly patriarchal Roman empire who in reality is a modern historian? I’d bet that being an oracle might work out well!
I’ve been getting the feeling that we’re in the middle of the ‘past where something bad happened to the protagonist’, and everything’s sliding towards the ‘resulting dystopic future where everyone’s wearing evil goatees’ for - well, for quite a while now, actually.
My daughter told me that in maps of the Black Plague, Poland was spared. They had adopted the habit that the Jews had of washing their hands before meals and bathing once a week.
Hm, no burn was really intended. More I thought it was interesting that us history enthusiasts had all these plans for changes, all what can we teach, and your reaction was pure what can we learn. No fault on that! I bet if you did get around to making fixes, they’d be ones more likely to take.
I was making some fun of the panglossian notion you see in so much sci fi, that our history was the best possibly and tampering only ruins things. A time traveler might worry about erasing people who “already” exist, but otherwise I think kidnapping baby Hitler is a pretty safe bet. Helping a learned but slave-driven empire like Rome, on the other hand, could go a lot of directions.
Which presents an interesting thought experiment in itself. How would you go about doing that? If you take a forceful or activist approach, you’re confronting the full strength (and cruelty) of the Roman state, and even if you win the abrupt social change may create its own kind of suffering (think: US Civil War and its aftermath).
On the other hand, you could play a long game and introduce technologies that would make slavery less viable, on the assumption that people’s attitudes will change accordingly. But that, of course, means sacrificing however many generations are required for the gradualist approach to work.
How much of history is driven by great leaders, and how much by social forces?
Personally, I tend to favor the latter. I suspect that the engineer developing renewables is probably more significant than the climate change activist, though those two things are not mutually exclusive, and both are necessary.
Also, I’m starting to wonder if Elon Musk is a time traveler.
Taking that one step further, who ever said you had to help the Roman Empire when you go back.
Introducing the Ponzi scheme, or cultivating poppies and promoting opium smoking would be lucrative ways to accelerate the decline and fall, if you wanted to. Just be sure to have used your ill-gotten gains to provide an escape route.
Alternatively, if you want to ensure that the dark ages are kept to a minimum, you might want to spend some of your profits setting up a storehouse of knowledge at the edges of the Empire, so that the knowledge lost to time is preserved, and the renaissance kicks in early.
Rome would have contractors bid on how much they could collect in taxes, who had to make up any deficit but got to keep any surplus. I wouldn’t count too much on impressing them with modern corruption.
Y’know, a gal’s gotta eat…I’d be a courtesan. I’m sure I’d know _some_thing that they didn’t know back then.
Basically, I would attempt to become a female Spartacus in this way. And using my knowledge of history in that area would help me a great deal. It’d be pretty nasty on the way, but hey, when in Rome…
