Living in a time machine, and you can choose just who you are.

I tend to have noticable phases in my reading; I went through one period of reading my way through classic books, another of the norse myths, andother of Japanese literature, and so on. over the last year or so the definite pattern in my reading has been of the Romans and their histories. People like Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Livy and others.
Anyway, I was reading Cassius Dio's Reign of Augustus a few months back and one of the abiding impressions I came away with was just how much time he spent firefighting; that is, zooming around the empire putting down petty rebellions of minor tribes when presumably what he'd've rather been doing is having a fine old time whooping it up in Rome with some saucy Illyrian dancing girls. The thing which stuck in my mind and nagged at me about this was the question: Why did these petty little tribes bother? To the modern mind, it's a good question. You look at the map of the Roman Empire at the start of the book, note that it encompasses pretty much the entire Mediterranean and European world, and then wonder why a few hundred people who own a couple of hills in Iberia thought they had the faintest chance. Given the sheer weight of resources that the Romans could bring to bear and the fact they had the reputation of not taking kindly to people rebelling you'd think that people would know which side their bread was buttered, but no. Every year, tribes with names nobody even remembers now would look down from their palisade on top of a hill and say "You know what? I reckon those Romans are puffs", and Augustus would have to break off from watching the Illyrian fandango and go and sort it out.

The reasons for this made no sense to me until I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset. It's the largest Iron-Age hill fort in Europe, and an impressive bit of engineering it is too. I stood on the ramparts and looked out at the horizon and it dawned on me that if you'd been king of that particular castle, then you'd've literally been lord of all you surveyed. You'd've completely dominated the region, controlled trade, and you would, quite simply, have never encountered anything to match your power. You might have heard traders tales of some Empire over the sea to the south, but really you wouldn't have though much of them right up until the day Vespasian Caesar showed up and slaughtered every man-jack of your people. It was a reminder against the folly on my part of assuming contemporary knowledge and attitudes on the part of people who lived in the past, because it's an easy trap to fall into.

It's also easy to drift off into a bit of a reverie about how if one were to suddenly fall into a spacetime wormhole and wake up in the past you could use your impressive future-knowledge to conquer the world. Whilst it might be nice to imagine I could introduce the steam engine and the tommy gun to the Roman Empire and make all kinds of improvements, what would be significantly more likely is that I'd end up being fed to lions for general entertainment purposes. To be honest, waking up in the past pretty much anytime before the invention of antibiotics would be likely to suck quite a lot. I suppose the best hope I would have in the 'suddenly transported into the past' stakes would be to hope it was somewhere in Europe and to try and get into a monastery as fast as possible, possibly by showing off my command of letters and numbers.

So anyway, after that preamble, question for the day: You wake up in the past. Where/when would you hope to wake up, and what knowledge to you seriously think you might to be able to impart to the locals without being burned as an heretic/fed to lions/other messy demise?