>>17800915
>>17802820
How about a plague that kills all their slaves and makes society more elite and paranoid. Blame the plague on germans and frantically fight to keep them out. The germanic border states would get stronger so Rome would need a stronger military machine and more efficient economy to survive. Add in your silk road gunpowder and we're cooking with gas.
Narrative:
>When the Emperor-killing plague subsided, equestrian Asinus Anonimus returned from his land in Britain. He quickly became successful as patron of Chudus the Elder, a Jewish merchant who brought gunpowder back from the far east. With their supply waning, engineers were called to replicate the material, necessitating the formation of a chemical academy. Their eventual success, added to that of Asinus, allowed the now-Emperor to construct a new palace city on Sardinia with the most modern methods. Heated by coal like Romano-British homes, filled with elaborate metalwork from the local mines, defended by the terrifying rocket and fire-spear, it was a beacon of civilization.
>Far from Rome and bored in his new paradise, Emperor Asinus continued to search for new breakthroughs. In the mountains he built the tallest dam in the world at that time, bringing high pressure water to the city, and at its base were experimental steam works. For the next 30 years they would attempt to build a steam container, thanks to Asinus's obsession with pressurizing things. In the year ---, germans defeated a Roman army and the Emperor's toys became weapons of war out of necessity, weapons the german had no resistance to. The need for fire-spears caused a clamor for engineers trained in the Chud academy system, and their ideas of water power, rotation, and steam spread throughout the empire. When a boiler breakthrough finally happened in ---, there were already wooden railcars working the mines and mountain ways of Sardinia. Gleaming bronze trains would appear soon afterward.
based!
