The best "who would win if they fought" idea I've seen in a while...

The ancients had a whole different concept of "gods" than what modern day theists call god. The things that they called gods could be killed, weren't omnipotent and there were many gods and many pantheons. There wasn't "one true god" and there wasn't "one true pantheon." People could become gods or were gods or were sons and daughters of gods. Not to mention their outlook on life and the afterlife was different as well. All Romans went to the same place. If you died courageously or some such you got to go to Elysium which was just a separate area of the same place.


I think the Marines would find it amazingly easy to talk to a number of the Romans. Our language's base were all known by the Romans and Latin was one of the roots of our language and not to mention they were well traveled. They'd likely pick it up with a more than 50% accuracy (while the Marines being Americans would likely have issues but whatever)


another thing is you might have a dispute between killing the Romans or making a deal with them and you'd likely have some soldiers deciding that it is better to be a Roman king than a grunt in the Marines.

If the scenario isnt strictly group A fights group B, then yeah...Im a fan of this concept.

It's exactly like all those other times the Romans declared war on supernatural beings and sent a couple of legions after them.

It's not so much the Marines being Americans, as even Europeans and the like don't realize how much their languages have changed over time. Example: My father's from the Lake District, England. He had to train his accent when he moved to Canada because people had difficulty understanding him. When presented with a person speaking the Old English dialect that had been common to the Lake District hundreds of years prior, he was unable to understand it as well. The thing that threw him the most was the amount of slang. He was able to pick out some words, but the phrasing didn't give him enough context to understand the meaning.

What a lot of people don't realize that a *lot* of common usage is nearly all ages is a form of slang. For example: "Your pen has run out of ink." This is a slang phrase, and the one I was given when I started to lean French as a phrase that didn't translate into other languages well. 'Running out of ammo' is the same slang, and more pertinent to the topic. You're taking your amunition for a jog outside? What? Common Latin (and common other languages of the period) will be full of similar slang phrases that the Romans likely won't even realize are slang because it's the common phrasing of the time. They will likely need to approach the Marine's English as a mostly new language that uses some words that they've heard something similar to, but not in a way they're used to. The shifts in pronunciation will be tricky as well.

This can be overcome, of course, but it won't be easy for either party. It means starting of with the standard 'See Spot Run' stuff that both the Romans and most experienced Marines (as they've spent tours in non-English-speaking or English-as-a-fourth-language regions) will be familiar with when encountering people without common dialects.

Thinking it would be easy is somewhat insulting to people who train all their lives as official translators. What they do is *not* easy, as phrasing and dialect can completely throw a translation. And when there are people with weapons on either side of the translation, a thrown sentence can be disasterous.

uhhh no

Native there never fought because they thought the spaniards were the fulfillment of a prophecy and treated them as good gods. By the time they figured they weren't gods they were dying of various diseases.

The Romans were both polytheistic and polypantheonic, but they were also far more practical in their religious practice and far less philosophical. In fact, their practice of religion was so ritualistic in many cases the average person wasn't even aware of the foundational purpose of the rituals.

I do not see where you get from multiple pantheons to "look, its an evil god; lets kill it." The Romans were polypantheonic because their philosophy was "worship whatever you want so long as you don't offend the traditions of Rome." But that's completely different from how the average centurion would react if they perceived high technology to be supernatural. Hannibal got armies to freak out at their first sight of elephants, and those are just big animals people didn't see before.

The average roman soldier wouldn't necessarily perceive high technology as "god-like" but they would pee their uniform all the same. People do not spend lots of time classifying the unknown while they are running from it and watching it vaporize their comrades. "look, its an evil god; lets kill it" is seven words longer than the maximum limit of conceptualization under those circumstances.

Actually, many natives did fight - on the Spanish side. Cortez didn't take over the whole country single handed. The Aztecs were conquers, and Cortez managed to make a lot of allies with the native tribes the Aztecs ruled over, figuring the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The notion that Cortez was seen as a god is a bit controversial, specifically because the only source for that bit of information seems to be Cortez. But it does not appear to have been a determining factor in any case.

To be fair, the Inca did ask themselves if Pizarro and his men were gods - before deciding the answer was no. And that was before any major battles were fought.

Ray...when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!