It Goes Both Ways

Dearest Rachel –

Last night’s dream may have been short on details, but could be considered a source of all manner of speculation, I suppose it’s worth telling you about and getting into such speculation. Besides, as a Whovian yourself, time travel questions were always your jam, in a way – and it’s not as if yesterday’s real-life events contained much to write home about. That’s the problem with travel; it makes everyday life once you return seem so much more ordinary (although it does contribute to the question at hand).

Anyway, you may have left before the meme made the rounds, but since then, it’s been postulated that we guys think about the Roman Empire on a regular basis. To be sure, one is expected to take certain lessons from history (mostly in order to avoid its mistakes – and you can ponder whether that’s actually worked out particularly well for the male race), and it’s a field of study that tends to be dominated by men, so it makes sense that males would think about the topic more often than females.

But on a regular basis, like every day or every other day? I don’t know about you, but that seems kind of silly to me. Sure, those were days of war and conquest, where men were men, doing manly things, but it’s hardly unique in that respect. Consider, for instance, the Age of Exploration, and the life-threatening risks men would take to seek out literal New Worlds in those days (although, let’s not forget the wealth of returns – and the poverty of everyday life back in the Old World for the average would-be sailor – that would impel them to take such risks). It seems odd to focus on this particular time period, no matter how long it stretched in comparison to ours, for instance (and stick a pin in that, as it becomes part of my speculative meanderings once I woke up this morning).

Then again, one could argue that Rome has been the prototype for much of the modern world. Sure, Greece my have invented a limited form of democracy, but it only functioned on a city-by-city basis; Rome had it (albeit on that same “landowners only” basis) across a vast geographical area, and without the modern advances in communication. Plus, it was during the Roman era that the Christian era began (the largest group of us literally refers to themselves as the Roman Catholic church, after all), so certain touches of modern life can trace a direct line to either the Republic or the Empire (and the debates about which one truly was superior, and why, could go on forever). And in any event, it seems to have infested my dreams last night, so I guess I’m as susceptible to this whole thing as the next guy.

The setup, however, was an inversion of the usual time travel trope; instead of, say, bringing modernity to the Romans, what if a legion were to suddenly find themselves in the here and now? Would they be able to cope with it?

This is where my recent travels have a say in things. You see, modern man has gotten a bit soft (and I’m not excusing myself from that condemnation – it’s because I see it in myself that I bring it up), to say the least. There are places we go where we can’t live off the land, even if we wanted to (and for the most part, we most certainly do not). As a result, it’s considered axiomatic that while at some point, we might have sufficient technology and know-how – certainly, some of us have the desire, at any rate – to delve into the possibility of traveling into history, we wouldn’t survive long in any past era we might propel ourselves into. The past, by and large, is like the third world, only more so, and global. What wouldn’t disgust us – and a surprising amount of it would, let’s face it – would likely kill us, especially if we didn’t bring a doctor along with us. And no, no that Doctor – I’m talking about one who actually knew enough medicine to cure whatever disease we might come across that we were unprepared for.

But with that being said, would the lost legion, upon finding itself in what used to be the provinces of Romana today, fare any better? They would be of hardier constitution, no doubt, but after a couple of millennia, those microbes have evolved to survive that much better. Not that they would kill their hosts more efficiently, to be sure – why foul your own nest, especially a borrowed one? – but to stick around longer, rendering them at the very least uncomfortable, and possibly incapacitating them, for a lengthier period of time. As much as we wouldn’t be able to live in the past, it goes both ways – I don’t think they would be able to survive in their future.

And that’s not even beginning to touch on more obvious aspects of what a legion is meant to do; to make war. Let’s face it; for all the drill and discipline involved in being an elite legionnaire, they would be no match for a small (like, a hundredth its size) modern force armed with gunpowder weapons. Never mind that tactics have also evolved from actual fields of battle to single individuals picking off soldiers from a distance that would be impossible for Private Gaius to even imagine, let alone find a means to counter. And this only covers the idea of firearms; a well-placed and timed explosive could obliterate an entire legion with a single blast.

But of course, battles and wars didn’t occupy the typical soldier’s life every day, either back then or now. It was more a matter of readiness, and being able to defend the frontiers of the homeland. How would these fellows, lost in time, cope with the fact that there is no homeland to defend? What would our reaction be to landing in 4000 A.D. North America, only to discover that there is no more “America” as such? Armies function on morale, and that might be crushing in a way that’s just coming to me as I’m typing this. Without a nation to coalesce around, what is even the point? Who are they, if not Roman? The sheer existential nature of where (and when) they would be might be too much for them.

I’m not saying that they would just give up – the human survival instinct is a powerful one, after all – but I think they would cease to be the unit that they were. Some would manage, I suppose, but the challenges they would have to overcome would be immense. Even the language barrier, while not insurmountable, depending on where they found themselves, would be problematic; and let’s not even go into the bureaucracy involved in establishing an identity in the modern era. All in all, while time travel into the past has been established as less of the fun lark we used to think of it as, for those propelled into their future, it’s not any better.

So, yeah… that was what I woke up thinking about this morning, honey. How’s your day going?