The last Romans are still around
signoregalilei.com127 points by surprisetalk 4 days ago
127 points by surprisetalk 4 days ago
This is strictly about linguistic similarity and not genetic similarity.
On a genetic map, a PCA plot, Romans and Romanians simply don't overlap. Romanians cluster with their Balkan neighbors, (1) on account of massive Slavic migration from around the 7th century AD, and (2) on account of strong historical and genetic evidence to suggest that the Roman colonists sent to Dacia were largely recruited from neighboring Balkan provinces (like Moesia and Pannonia), rather than from the city of Rome.
Genetically, the nearest populations to Ancient Romans are Cypriots and certain other Mediterranean types, including Anatolians. But it's not neat; there's no clear unambiguous descent. A lot can happen in >1000 years!
Rome was famously multi-ethnic. This is sort of like asking who are the "ethnic Americans". It's just the wrong question to ask.
What do you mean? Native American Indians are exactly ethnic Americans. The rest are from other ethnicities. Just as there were (are) ethnic Romans.
While I can appreciate this, it was not the historical point of view of the people calling themselves Americans.
“What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
~J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, 1782 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/letter_03.asp
Does it matter much if they called themselves American? The tribes and nations on the continent were certainly more related to each other than to the arrivals from other continents. Just as European tribes and nations were more related to each other than to faraway peoples. And African tribes and nations.
The "American" described in your quote there by Crevecoeur is not an American in any ethnic sense. Any modern non-native person calling themselves an American, can only do that in a cultural and ideological sense. Which is of course immensely strong by itself. Just as Catholic, Protestant, Communist, and other non-ethnic labels people have identified with.
If you’re following this line of reasoning then even the “native” Americans aren’t actually native because they migrated here too. Further, the concept of “America” referring to what is geographically the United States today isn’t a concept that was held be tribal peoples. It wouldn’t have ever made sense to describe them in this context as the original Americans because they never held such a concept themselves.
Also, tribal peoples, whether that’s in Europe or elsewhere are defeated and destroyed and swallowed up by other tribes and civilizations and over the long arc of history lose the status of being original as they are absorbed into a new entity. You can’t describe or study a Roman people as if they are “native” but not extended that same viewpoint to the modern day United States, for example, because both have absorbed other peoples who were native.
America is a real physical landmass. Two actually. "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.
Otherwise we have to argue that dinosaurs didn't exist, because they had never heard about Pangea.
> Also, tribal peoples, whether that’s in Europe or elsewhere are defeated and destroyed and swallowed up by other tribes and civilizations and over the long arc of history lose the status of being original as they are absorbed into a new entity.
Well it's not true, because of genetical heritage. It still exists, and now in modern times we can study the human genome better than ever. It is messy, it is overlapping, but it's not unworthy of study and curiosity. They weren't swallowed up and disappeared, genetically speaking. Very rarely would a genocide be complete, because conquerors would take the women at least from the conquered.
Being ethnically Roman was not the same as being a Roman citizen or Roman subject. The tribes which ethnically were Roman can be found listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_tribe
Here is more about Roman citizenship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship
Just like in ethnical nations today, you can become a citizen by virtue of birth ethnicity, or by other procedures. And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.
> America is a real physical landmass. Two actually.
America refers to the United States of America in virtually all context in the everyday English speaking world.
> "American" is to be understood as those ethnicities from that physical and very much existing landmass. Whether they called it America or not, which they of course didn't. The same thing for discussing Australian native ethnicities for example.
Let’s put it another way…
The people who live here now are the natives over the long arc of history. You’re only focusing on a small sliver of time in a very constrained historical environment.
If you say the native Americans as they are called are the only “real” natives so to speak you have to apply that standard everywhere. And if you think that the disruption of native lands in the past was bad, you’d also have to believe that continuing to bring more people to America is also bad, ergo immigration to the Americas is immoral.
> And just like a foreigner cannot belong to any ethnicity or nation just because she has citizenship today, neither could they in Roman times.
This is untrue in the western world, specifically the Anglo-American world. It’s difficult for most of the world to understand our societies and I think this is a good example of how things get confused. I can’t, as a white American, become “Chinese”. But a Chinese man or woman can certainly become an American and belong to our nation. There is no question about that.
"American" is a poor demonym because "America" is both North and South America. USian would be a better fit and "Native USian" would naturally include all indigenous and non-indigenous people in the US.
Ok, but the vast multitude of Native American tribes absolutely identified as distinct ethnicities from one another. If you were to apply this to the Romans, then "ethnically Roman" would include Greeks, Celts, Berbers, and dozens if not hundreds of other ethnic groups, each of which was represented in all the social strata of the Roman state at various times.
I think the equivalent of various native tribes would be Romans, Etruscans, Samnites, Greeks etc. The core "Italian" Romans were themselves a mix of various Italian populations and they even fought the social wars to gain equal rights. And outside of that we have the Celt, Iberians, Berbers, Mainland Greeks, Anatolians, Illyrians, etc.
Broadly speaking you cannot draw an equivalence between Roman Empire and Americas because the dominant ethnicities in US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and other countries are from outside. But IMO this would be the closest analogy.
The equivalent would be if the Italian Greeks had become the dominant ethnicity in Italy and absorbed the Romans, Samnites, Etruscans, etc into their culture.
Certainly, as does everybody, all the way down to the core family level. Persons make up families, which make up clans, which make up tribes, which make up nations, which make up races. You are part of subdivisions within subdivisions, by heritage. Different persons give different value to each subdivision - or no value to them at all.
The native Americans would absolutely consider themselves as more similar to each other than to the European and African arrivals. Just by matter of undeniable physical features.
As for the Romans, it is within the mists of history and mythology (Rape of the Sabine Women), but nobody can deny that there was an original people there in Italy, and other peoples who became citizens and/or subjects of Rome weren't ethnically Roman.
Your clean-sounding taxonomic framework tends to be much, much messier in practice, but ok. As so often happens, I think this boils down to a vocab disagreement. Normally, you would refer to the ethnolinguistic group as "Latins". "Roman" is much more closely associated with the populus romanus, which was defined by citizenship.
It is messy, but that's why it is beautiful and interesting. It couldn't be any other way, seeing as it takes a man and a woman to make a child.
Once you loose the knowledge of your ancestry that connection is lost forever, until the end of time.
The deleware people are distinct from aztec people who are distinct from taino
There is no such thing as "ethnic American"
"America" is a place name created by Europeans and "Americans" an identity created by their descendants.
So there's no "ethnic" Americans because its an invented social identity.
No, the landmass physically exists and people existed there before European discovery, no matter what you call the place. They were and are the native people of America - hence the "Americans". As opposed to the people who came there recently from Europe, Asia and Africa mainly.
I wonder how large the spread of ethnicities is in Native American Indian populations. Just for fun, let's estimate our answer based on data from 1600, just pre the mass European arrival on the continents (plural).
Kind of. The empire was multi ethnic and so are modern Americans however often the question is about the foundation. Who are the descendants of the foundational Romans. Did they get diluted into oblivion? For Americans it’s easier as we can trace descendants of the founders of the nation. Of course Britain itself is the result of many waves of immigration, the neolithic, the celts, picts, romans, jutes, angles, saxons, norsemen, etc.
And according to Vergilius (aka Virgil), the foundational Romans were immigrants from Asia Minor. In this allegory, the "native Italians" are the Etruscans and Sabines (among others), and the Aeneid was the Roman version of manifest destiny.
Verily! The composition and control over Asia Minor was very different from today. There was lots of movement around the Caspian sea, Asia Minor, the Volga, the crescent, etc in those times.
None of these statements are meaningful without a definition on your part of what it means to be "Ancient Roman" in a genetic sense. Do you mean, say, a handful of villagers living in the area of today's Rome on 21 April 753 BCE? I'll grant you that those were possibly a homogeneous bunch. Anything later? Definitely not. Trying to pretend that there is something like a clear genetic definition of "Roman" is... what do you call it? Racism. But don't worry, not the "bad" kind, just the "scientific" kind.
Well we've got to define something ... I'd opt for something like Latium natives of 750-300 BCE, adding Etruscans. My point is to exclude Magna Graecia, because it would make it harder to make an ethnocultural statement or conclusion.
Consider this: We do not, in fact, have to define something. We don't have to define an artificial genetic category just so we can then categorize people into artificial genetic buckets.
This is a silly argument. Biology is inherently messy and “ethnicity” is just a fuzzy clustering. You can make the exact same argument about “species” - because that too is a human abstraction that breaks down in biological reality because there are no clear lines.
> This is a silly argument.
My main argument was that the OP's supposedly clear-cut genetic category was not defined. You also seem to be saying that it's not clear-cut and defined. So why are you saying that my argument is silly, as opposed to the OP's?
> “ethnicity”
Neither the OP nor I mentioned this word, of course. You're shifting the goalposts. One could pick out a certain set of genetic markers, and one could do a clear-cut classification based on those. I'm firmly of the opinion that one should not, but in any case, that would be about genetics (as the OP and I discussed), and not about this word that you are trying to drag into this to deliberately muddy the waters.
> You can make the exact same argument about “species”
Proof by analogy is fraud, as they say. Even if the analogy holds. This one doesn't: There are fairly good ways of defining species objectively. For example, as the second sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species says: "It can be defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." I'm sure that there are a few exceptions around the edges, but this is much more clear-cut than any human divisions that you're trying to drag into this.
Everything is not racism, the ruling class made up concept to mold the commoners into a homogenous melted down sludge of America that serves corporate interests.
It’s like how peasants used to say that the King is a divine representative of God, because that was the king and the system’s con job back then, to make the dumb peasants obedient through religion.
Different religion, different enforcers, same con job.
You're right! To the Romans, every Roman citizen was a Roman. There was no "genetically Roman" category. The OP's "genetic" category is indeed a "made up concept", as you say! And the reason they made it up is the reason I stated above.
>It’s like how peasants used to say that the King is a divine representative of God, because that was the king and the system’s con job back then, to make the dumb peasants obedient through religion.
Well no one really knows because most of this comes from the writing ruling classes. If we're talking Middle Ages and the Modern Age, France offers an interesting example : absolute monarchy by divine right came very late (17th cent) and was almost never fully accepted. The system relied greatly on religion (which kept one's standing within a social class), weak origin stories (the Franks came and conquered the Gallo-Romans/ my ancestor fought in the crusades, which is why you're a serf), and a very strong system of local rights and privileges (I'm a legitimate ruler because I keep your right to hold poultry markets on Sundays, which the next village doesn't have).
The divine dimension you refer to was a constant effort in France and England (where the king was not a religious ruler) well described in "The Royal Touch" by Marc Bloch.
> Genetically, the nearest populations to Ancient Romans are Cypriots
I’ve often wondered what the ethnicity of ancient Romans actually was. Looking at pictures of Greek Cypriots on google was enlightening. The “Roman nose” is quite prominent for many people!
Their ethnicity would of course be Roman, and sub-tribes of Romans. Or am I missing something? We can't apply modern ethnicities as the template to fit ancient ethnicities. It can only be the other way around.
Why is genetics more important than any other tie to the Roman empire?
Don't know why this was down voted. Most people ruled by the Roman empire weren't ethnic Romans. Even in the early days it started as a mix of Italic tribes like the Latins and Sabines. And in 212 AD the edict of Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to all free men throughout the empire.
I imagined this was sort of the whole point of the article.
Also some rulers of the Roman empire weren't ethnically Roman/Italian, even if you don't count after the capitol was moved to Constantinople, but especially if you do.
>Don't know why this was down voted
I have noticed a trend of challenges to unspoken assumptions being down voted.
I don't know if it's being read as being argumentative/low effort.
I agree with you and the parent. How do you define ethnically Roman? Those from the city of Rome? Some average of the empire? What about when it split in 2? Is ethnicity even important? What ethnicity do you have to be, to be USian??? British?
Americans are whatever, British ethnicity is a thing though
British ethnicity is complicated. English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish? If Northern Irish then loyalist or republican? Do you count the Cornish separately? Germanic or Celtic? Norman ancestry.
Its not defined by genetics. A very high proportion of "white British" people I know (that is of those who have told me!) turn out to have all kinds of ancestry (Indian, Romany, and Polish examples come to mind) in recent generations.
Genetics do not refine race/ethnicity, culture and cultural definitions do. Americans have definitions even the culturally similar British do not understand (e.g. hispanic, white passing black). I am defined differently in different countries: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
Ok. So is a french person more British than a 5th generation black person?
Surely 'ethnic americans' are Native North Americans?
This is the thing. Ethnicity gets wrapped up in a value judgement. We don't want to talk about ethnic Americans, but are willing to talk about ethnic Britons. Which then implies some rights those ethnic groups should have. But I would dare say the majority of 'ethnic Britons' wouldn't identify as British.
So I'd rather not use it in a way that conflates nationhood with ethnicity.
> Ok. So is a french person more British than a 5th generation black person?
Yes
> Surely 'ethnic americans' are Native North Americans?
Yeah but they're normally called Native Americans
English, Welsh and probably some kind of Scottish ethnicity are probably a thing. DNA + history + cultural habits including language.
But on this topic the concept of German ethnogenesis is very interesting. The formation of Gothic identity and communities even more, though sources are extremely scarce and it's more of a mystery.
id put the a cree person as ethnically cree
dene for sure crosses borders
native american is a group of ethnicities reasonably unrelated to "american" so its not particularly useable as "ethnic americans" when its could be just as useable as "ethnic canadians"
> So is a french person more British than a 5th generation black person?
...yes?
Ethnicity is hard to define and a term that spurs a lot of debate. Therefore I think it is best avoided in serious discussion.
For America (and in extension the american continent) it is quite clear who is ethnically native, actually it is probably one of the clearest examples there is partly because it is near in history. And already it gets messy when you dig deeper because of limited record keeping etc.
Broadly in the Americas anyone that was there before Columbus is considered native. Anyone that came after is considered migrant. Anyone born into native heritage can be considered descendant of native and thus native themselves.
British ethnicity is a thing though
In the same fashion we can declare pretty much all words messy, simply because their meanings are context-dependent. It's true even for majority of hard science terms. However, it doesn't make that postmodernist way of cancelling words any less absurd as it makes all discussions impossible.
As a good example you yourself use "native" which is as messy, and complex as "ethnicity". You arbitrarily chosen Columbus arrival as definition point, which can make you feel comfortable in the moment, but it's neither universally accepted, nor universally applicable. Using the same logic it must be banished from serious discussion.
The points I've chosen as examples above are not arbitrarily. They correspond with an influx of people that may be considered of other ethnicity, for example from another continent or culture. You describe the ambiguity of what you interpret as a border for "change of ethnicity" is precisely the problem with the term. Unless you create a consensus about the use in the specific discussion you may be misinterpreting what is being said.
The meaning of any natural language term is up to discussion some more then others.
Native is a lot more clear if used to refers to where a single person was born.
1700ad is a good cutoff for the modern definition of Britain, which is when the island was unified under a single government. Norman Conquest was pretty transformative I heard, and by then the conquerors had already been assimilated, but idk how much that really matters since William wasn't like Tamerlane.
Caesar saw Europe differently back then but surprisingly not that different by geography, "omnia Gallia" divided by rivers plus Germany, Britain, and Spain. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT-R1QU...
The americas are really big. Grouping every person "pre columbus" into a single bucket is wrong
The americas are really big
Grouping every person "pre columbus" into a single bucket is wrong
You seem to be taking ethnicity pretty serious for a guy who says it should be avoided in serious debate.
Ethnicity is entirely arbitrary, that's why it should be avoided.
For example, the genetic line of what your calling the clearly Native Americans traces back to Asia. You've arbitrarily decided that their ethnicity is defined at a certain time in their lineage. Ehy aren't they Asians or even Africans?
There is culture that you can tie to a group of people at a certain time and that group frequently has similar lineage. That's usually what people mean by ethnicity. They're using physical characteristics due to lineage that is associated with a culture and they call that ethnicity.
In this context of of Romans, there is really no ethnicity that should map to the cultural identity of "Ancient Roman" as the empire had many subjects across it's empire.
You seem to be taking ethnicity pretty serious for a guy who says it should be avoided in serious debate.
For example, the genetic line of what your calling the clearly Native Americans traces back to Asia. You've arbitrarily decided that their ethnicity is defined at a certain time in their lineage. Why aren't they Asians or even Africans?
Ethnicity is arbitrary precisely because it is not clear what the boundaries of it are. I used Native Americans as an example, we all trace back to a few individuals in Africa. However Ethnicity is not just the genetics, it also includes culture, language, history, traditions and more. and it includes a component over time for example: "They have been living like this for x amount of years"(since after a war or similar displacement event) can be a divide in ethnicity.
You could subdivide ethnicity all the way until you reach the lineage and environment of a single individual. There are lots of ethnic differences between Native American tribes for example.
you havent stated it directly, but you are asserting that "ethnicity" is equivalent to "a set of humans with a membership rule" with the most important part being legibility
and that you can create subsets and most importantly, union any two ethnicities together to get a subset.
ethnicity does not have that latter property though, so starting from the largest group and subdividing does not work.
"the americas is really big" is actually describing "there are many ethnicities in the americas that cannot be unioned together"
the union rule for ethnicities is that you can union two ethnicities and get an ethnicity only if there's significant overlap in genetics, language, culture, traditions, geography, etc.
there arbitrariness in setting that line, but its not approximately zero, as you've been suggesting, and we can tease that out with sniff tests. You maybe just dont know much about native americans, but you'd never put inuit and maya in the same ethnicity.
seriousness in debate and language would be to take curiosity in why the critiques think that size does matter, rather than asserting that it doesnt.