You often see westaboos romanticising western civilizations by saying shit like “Before the Roman empire unified everyone all those places were warring with each other! Rome ushered in centuries of peace!”
Or similar shit about America or Africa "Those slur tribes were all fighting each other anyway! It became more peaceful under colonial rule!
Even ignoring how silly believing imperial propaganda about “barbarians” is, life under these so-called peace times was fucking horrible. Slavery, apartheid and exploitation, the fucking collesium??!?. A huge portion of the population were literally kept like cattle, whipped, brutalized and forced to do the hard labour.
Peaceful for who, exactly?
there was like a 10% chance any given shithead with a military command would rise up yearly, look at this shit. and anywhere within ~100 miles of a border was seeing raiding/counter-raiding on the regular.
in some sense the scale of ancient/medieval warfare would be ‘easy to ignore’ for a lot of people due to slow communication and limited range/numbers of participants. but i feel like if we’re trying to make a kind of judgement of the society we should be talking about the full picture, not the parochial views some individuals adopted during the period