So breaking down the five categories, and how the scenarios listed are tied together by their larger questions:
- Did Rome have to Rise? Or at the very least, did they have to be such d***s about it? Even if they still won beat the Phoenicians the first two times, the Macedonians the first three times, and checked the Seleucids in the middle of all that -- did the Roman Republic have to annex so much overseas territory? Hell, for that matter, did they have to utterly destroy cities like Carthage and Corinth, or scare the King of Pergamon so badly he just gives them his kingdom? And even if all that happened, did Rome have to become an army with a state, then fight a brutal series of domestic and civil wars to settle their political questions, all before asserting direct rule over pretty much the entire Mediterranean?
- Did the Republic have to fall? What is it that fascinates myself or others about the Late Republic specifically? Is it that it's around this period that Roman primary literary resources see the start of something of a "golden age" of abundance (one that, once it came to an end, would not be matched in the West until Renaissance Italy)? Perhaps, but I think it's more -- the Wars of Marius and Sulla had by violence answered a number of fundamental questions about Roman society that the Republic could not hope to endure without answering in one form or another. See, for example, the absurdity of a city-state asserting h egemony over both its own home peninsula and massive overseas provinces, while doing little to get their closer allies to "buy in" to the arrangement; once those wars happened and the questions were tackled, you had a conception of "Roman Citizenship" that encapsulated pretty much all of Italy; this began a period of about three centuries where the "Roman Empire" (or "Roman Power" before it was technically an "Empire") could be understood as Italy ruling over the Mediterranean. That's system that rules the hegemonic region hardly has to be an autocracy in this scenario.
- Did the Empire have to rise? To use words unclearly specific ways -- even after "the Republic" fell, did the "Empire" have to rise in its place? In other words, even after the-man-formerly-known-as Gaius Octavius emerges as the undisputed top power in the entire Roman World (following the defeat of Antony), did the Institution that OTL came to call The Principate have to emerge in the form it did? Augustus, of course, did much to invent the idea of what a "Roman Emperor" was supposed to be, but his successor Tiberius should be given almost as much credit in this respect. I would also go so far as to say it wasn't until the reign of Caligula and the immediate aftermath of his assassination that the question of "What is a Roman Emperor really?" had anything resembling a coherent answer beyond the example of just a set number of men. And even then, the question of "What is the Principate really?" had one very important aspect -- that of the practical impossibility of any level of accountability without sending the empire into chaos -- which did not become clear until the later years of Nero's reign. In other words, it wasn't until the end of the Julio Claudian Dynasty that "the Roman Empire", even broadly as OTL understands it, had fully supplanted the "Roman Republic".
- Did Rome have to Decline into the Late Empire? What I mean here is, did the broad outline of the OTL story of the Crisis of the Third Century -- that Rome was once peaceful and proserous, then declined, then faced an existential crisis, which it then recovered to some extent, but only as a shell of its former self -- did this kind of broad outline have to be the case? Could the Empire have made different decisions at he height of the Pax Romana? Could, once the period of decline began, have made better decisions to weather the storm? Or for that matter, just before the Worst of the Crisis hit? Or, failing all of that -- did the Empire really have to "recover" from this Crisis period? Could the devastation that left it as shell of its peak have simply left it in pieces, taking away the legacy of the "Late Empire" altogether?
- Did Rome have to Fall? By which, of course, we generally mean the Western Roman Empire, but at the same time, we're talking about more than the collapse in the 5th Century here. Did the Empire have to be split as it was under the Tetrarchy and most of its subsequent history? Did it have to see its military prowess decay from civil wars in the latter 4th Century? And even after the West fell, did the East have to ravage so much of what was left in an attempt at reconquest (during Justinian's Gothic War)?
Where this all starts getting really trippy -- to start, let's back away from Rome for a moment and ask a seemingly completely different question, "
How can the industrial revolution happen centuries earlier?" Well, my own answer to that question is a bit complicated, but suffice to say
when I laid out the steps and asked "What's the best possible PoD to achieve this?" the answer I got was --
Rome does not Rise. Ok, well that's a really cool idea, but then I thought -- what if I wanted the PoD to be later? So I worked backwards to find when the latest PoD could be, and (skipping over the complications),
I found the ideal late PoD to be --
Rome does not fall. In other words, when you're looking at Roman history in broad scope like this, you're seeing multiple lost opportunities for advancing humanity by a magnitude of centuries, even as your also seeing humanity achieve levels of material prosperity and achievement that wouldn't be matched for over a millennia.
And this doesn't even get into things like the Birth of Christianity and the Early Development of the faith. I could actually note how ten of the above "What if"'s could have very interesting B-plots in how Christianity is either killed before it gets underway or evolves into something completely different from what we'd recognize.
Here's a list of Early Christianity PoDs and the larger "What If" Scenarios they can be folded into:
- What if Augustus doesn't carve up Herod the Great's Kingdom, and Judea not annexed to Rome? (part of "What if Drusus the Elder lived?")
- What if Pontius Pilate wasn't Prefect of Judea, and the alt guy spared Jesus? (part of "What if Drusus the Younger lived?")
- What if Saul doesn't convert? (part of "What if Claudius was killed with Caligula?")
- What if Paul isn't martyred and the Temple of Jerusalem isn't destroyed? (part of "What if the Pisonian Conspiracy succeeded?")
- What if the Church had an emperor's ear during the Pax Romana (contra Trajan and Marcus Aurelius of OTL)? (part of "What if Titus Flavius Clemens lived?")
- What if Roman state religion didn't open itself up to more "eastern" influence in the early Third Century? (part of "What if Commodus killed in 182?")
- What if the Empire collapsed before it could embrace Christianity? (part of "What if Claudius Gothicus lived?")
- What if the Empire unified under a different religion (Sol Invictus)? (part of "What if Aurelian lived?")
- What if Christianity had to rise to prominence without the support of a powerful, unifying emperor? (i.e. "What if Constantine had failed?")
- What if Augustine of Hippo wasn't as dominant a philosopher in Church doctrine? (part of "What if the Western Roman Empire didn't fall?")
As you can see, the implications of the history of one religion alone -- albeit possibly the most important world religion to subsequent history -- are pretty massive, when we talk about Roman History in general.
All in all, definitely something you get really into for a period of time.