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An Alternative History of the Roman Empire: An Illness in Marcomannia

It occurs to me that while it's not been ignored in culture, the focus on this period is always Commodus, whereas you could easily get a good drama out of the period of a few decades before then just based on this summary.
 
Minor niggle here, Titus's reign was much shorter than that, from 79 to 81, not to 91. Which is why I'm quite doubtful of some of the claims made regarding Domitian, as he had fifteen years of rule without too much trouble.
 
The instance in the text where I've given Titus a longer reign, to 91 not 81, and Domitian a shorter one is one of the changes I've made to Roman history en route up to 180. I've made a few others, too, as will be apparent as the story develops; the 'longer reign for Titus' is a scenario I've explored in my Sealion ebook 'Eternal Caesars'. Some of the later changes will follow the course of my suggestions as to what could easily have happened in the successor book to 'Eternal Caesars', which is ready and will follow in due course - and when we move onto history after the West fell in OTl people will find some characters from Byzantine and Western post-Roman history popping up too in unusual contexts.

And later in the saga, I get onto the medieval period with the Mongols , and the 'Renaissance' where William Shakespeare and others come in too... and the Romans start tangling with the Vikings over North America.
 
It's an interesting read, but I think that perhaps @Gary Oswald needs to include a clearer introduction to it. I made the same mistake as @Redolegna- though I didn't spot the 'mistakes' so much as think 'gosh, I remembered that wrong.'

With so many straight historical articles on the main page- the Thirty Years War one just below it, for example- it was inevitable that eventually there was going to be some confusion between them and a good old-fashioned academic alternate history.
 
It's an interesting read, but I think that perhaps @Gary Oswald needs to include a clearer introduction to it. I made the same mistake as @Redolegna- though I didn't spot the 'mistakes' so much as think 'gosh, I remembered that wrong.'

With so many straight historical articles on the main page- the Thirty Years War one just below it, for example- it was inevitable that eventually there was going to be some confusion between them and a good old-fashioned academic alternate history.

I'll be honest with you, I didn't realise it was a full academic alternate history until I read that comment directly above myself. I assumed all of this bit was OTL and it was only post 180 that the changes happened.

Entirely my fault, I simply didn't know enough about the period to catch that, and I'll try and make it clearer in the next few articles when changes are made.
 
Most of my major changes after 180, eg to the length and circumstances of reigns, are signposted en route in the text; I'll take a look as each article is prepared and see if I need to add a bit more, but doing too much would interfere with the flow of the text and make it even longer! The overall narrative of the C3rd AD is overhauled from OTL so that the chaos and monarchic turnover has been reduced - we have less crises and more coherence.

Some emperors have been omitted or have a different fate , some are given longer or shorter reigns, and some speculation based on academic writers' interpretation of actual events or socio-economic trends has been added to the timeline. The original text here was written when I had recently done my university finals in Roman and Byzantine and European medieval history so I was able to recall the OTL events and write a narrative from memory; this was then elaborated 10 or so years later in an interval between jobs when I had the time. Extra , recent detail comes from my own research for my published 'Chronology of Byzantine History' (Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and 'Chronology of Roman History' (Continuum 2010), where I went back to the original sources for a publishing series project.

The post-fall of the West (476) timeline and list of emperors is one I drew up as a teenager for my own amusement, later elaborated on once I had done the subject at university. The original inspiration for it all was the late 1960s and early 1970s comic 'Look And Learn' and their 'Roman-style space age civilization on an alien planet' strip 'The Trigan Empire', drawn by Don Lawrence, which I read aged 8-12, so there is also a 'Star Trek' style sci-fi link!
 
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