And of course Rome, already populated, already over-populated, became even more over-populated. Continued expansion covers that problem: temporarily.
Enter the Caesars. Galia est omni divisa in partes tres. Julius said that, Gaius of the Julii, the original Caesar. Romans didn't just defend their seven hills, they didn't just defend their country; they conquered your country, and then defended that: your country: as theirs!
Gaul ("Galia") referred to western Europe. There was no France, there was no Germany: there were peoples, filling their slots, then over-populating, expanding, getting beaten back: by geography, by climate ... by other peoples, by other ways of life.
Traipsing around Galia the Romans found prospering salt mines. Cavemen can live without salt mines; civilizations cannot. A little salt is good for lots of things; but an army can't travel, can't become (or remain) a standing army, without food preservation (and transport): salt. With enough salt you can feed old fish, old meat, old veggies to the chattel: especially to the troops. The bad food eaters will dominate the fresh food eaters. The over-populators will crush the groups who were living sustainably: take everything they have from them.
The salt mines the Romans "discovered" (as in Columbus discovered America) were run by the Celts. The Romans weren't good at inventing things; they excelled at stealing things from the inventors, from the developers, and then administering them. In Schindler's List the Nazis kill the Jew for giving them good advice, then follow her advice! (But the Nazis will be forever unable to invent the good advice in the first place!)
(How long will humans think they can murder the god and still have more golden egg?)
The poor Celts. They were beautiful, inventive, fertile ... They'd spread across western Europe, east and west. Till Rome, from the south, stomped on them. (And then Saxons, then Danes, then Normans stomped on them further, squeezing their remnants into Wales, into Scotland, Ireland, and corners of "France."
After the Caesars it was Romans who taught salt mining to the stomped-upon Celts.
But you know, contemporary history is no different: in too damn many essentials. I offered cybernetic data basing, community networking, in 1970, as a tool for the people to seize and use against coercive government. But the already stomped (and over-stomped) people sat with their thumb in their ass, waiting for the state to force them to feed themselves, to defend themselves, to learn to read, to go to work. Eventually, slowly, the fed saw the power of my tool. So they merely appropriated it: running it themselves.
(Me they knocked over, put me in jail.)
The Nazi saw the Jew invent a shiv. The Nazi takes the shiv. The Nazis use the shivs against the inventors. The enslavers steal the liberators' tools: and say nothing of the theft.
Stupid damn people think the government "gave" them the internet!
States are thieves. Oh, they invent: bombs, rifles, nukes ... Under the false banner of order they then order the inventors around.
Gaia birthed us. We showed some potential (as well as beaucoup embarrassing traits). If moma can't birth better babies she ought to bash baby's head against a rock.
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