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!
I'm a bit surprised that the "people from modern Rome" only got an honorable mention. After all, Rome still sees itself as the successor of the Roman Empire. When first visiting it, I was surprised to see the famous SPQR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR) acronym all over the place - on trash cans, manhole covers etc. etc.
Fun fact: The -gh endings of many English words share a proto–Indo European root with that enclitic¹ -que in Senatus Populusque Romani. I remember being skeptical of this when I first heard it assuming that the person was arguing for a shared Latin heritage until I dug in and discovered that it actually went back to PIE.²
⸻
1. For the non-linguists here, an enclitic is a suffix added to a word that either functions as a separate word (here -que means “and”) or as a grammatical modifier like the possessive ’s in English.
2. Proto–Indo European for those of you who don’t do acronyms.
when you see something histórical in Europe ask chatgpt if its something actually ancient that lasted until today or It was a xix century tourist marketing stunt made by the burgoisie
Or alterntively, that it's a relatively modern addition to add to it's mystique for tourism purposes. When did SPQR get added to the manhole covers and does anything else in Rome use similar signage?
Just wait for Hollywood to create a film about Roman mythology and not cast a single Roman!
But less tongue-in-cheek, the other thing is that the legacy of the Romans is pretty much all around us. The Roman Calendar (with July and August both referencing a Roman leader), the Latin alphabet (with the additional letters like 'y' being added later on to support Greek), the roads we can travel, etc.
It's not only July and August; January, May, June, and Mars, are named after Roman gods; February and April after Roman rituals; and September to December after Roman numerals (7 to 10th month, as they were when the calendar first started).
This brings to mind the wonderful Econtalk episode about Bruno Leoni [0]. The beginning of the podcast describes his untimely passing, which almost seems a Cohen brothers movie plot.
So, we pore over Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, for example, to
try to interpret what tests we will use to determine whether something is
going to be unconstitutional law. Leoni didn't want that. He argued that--and
again, he was proud of the Roman law contribution. He said that the Roman
jurist was a sort of scientist: that the object of his research was a
solution to cases that citizens submitted to him for study. So, an
industrialist or a scientist might look to a physicist to engineer a
technical problem. So, private Roman law was something to be described or
discovered, not something to be enacted. So, over time, these principles
emerge.
My name is Roman (father was Italian born in Rome and identifies as a Roman) and I always find it interesting that people try to speak something that sounds like Russian to me. Never thought about the fact they might think I’m Romanian and are speaking Romanian!
Besides Romanians, there are several more eastern european romance-language-speaking peoples ("Vlachs") like Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians. I think they might also deserve a mention.
Romanian is isolated now, but even quite recently there where languages forming a bridge between Romanian and the rest of Romance languages. For example Dalmatian, whose last speaker died in 1898. Now, most people think of Dalmatians as the dogs.
I bought a torrone (Italian nougat dessert) in local Auchan (French supermarket chain) today and while briefly researching the dessert history found out that it was popular in Ancient Rome named as cupedia and in some Southern parts of Italy it still called as cupeta.
Just imagine to make recipe so good that it not just transferred across generations through 2000 years, but also evolved to come in supermarket in Russia.
As an American with mostly Western European ancestors (according to a popular DNA testing site), I've always considered Romans as some distant/tangentially related group.
It was surprising to find out that I have "ancient" DNA matches with a couple of Roman and Etruscan individuals.
My grandfather was a smith in deep rural Spain. He made and fixed many roman ploughs, well into the 70s. They were called that because they were pretty much the same tool the Romans used.
Feel I should mention the Istro-Romanians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanians), a small group of Romanian speakers who settled in Istria (now Croatia) some centuries ago. Mostly gone now but one grandmother was from one of the Romanian speaking villages.
No mention of the Romansch, that's quite disappointing. But learning more about Romania and Romanian culture still made for a wonderful read, kudos to the author.
REG: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
To me, what would suck the most is living in a place after the Romans where you can see signs of their civilization but you're living a rural peasant life.
In many ways, that's how a lot of people feel in modern Britain: everywhere you see signs of XIX century grandeur, but "on the streets" life can feel depressingly backwards.
Brewing alcohol was known to hunter-gatherers.
Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities).
Medicine/education, that's the Greeks.
> Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities)
This is sort of like saying computers were invented in Mesopotamia because they did math.
Roman water and earth-moving civil engineering was absolutely cutting edge to the degree that the projects they undertook would have been unfathomable to their Bronze-Age predecessors.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Don't glorify Rome too much. It was a slavery based society that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks. Heck written Latin didn't even have punctuation marks, not even spaces. That's because it was only used by slave scribes. The nobility that could write, did so in Greek.
- Go stand in the Hagia Sophia and tell me the Romans did little to improve architecture and engineering.
- I won't defend the Roman record on slavery, but I will point out that the Greeks (particularly the Spartans) were slave societies too.
- The Greeks were significantly more xenophobic and sexist than the Romans. If you washed up on the shores of ancient Greece, you could never have become a citizen. The Romans were far more tolerant and inclusive.
- Putting spaces between words was a medieval innovation. The Greeks wrote in much the same way as the Romans, and that was thanks to the Phoenicians!
- Romans revered Greek culture because their city started in a period when Greek colonies were spreading Greek influence throughout the Mediterranean and, specifically, in Italy itself. Greece was to Rome as Rome was to medieval Europeans: A colonizer.
----------
No ancient society smells of roses if you look close enough. However, it's also rare to find ancient societies that expanded and persisted for centuries without being innovative and progressive. The Romans were both awful and great, much like the Greeks, Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians, etc. before them.
Also, our own society right now will be someday considered barbaric by our descendants. I don't know what for, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will happen. We should show the people of the past some grace, the same way we might hope the people of the future will show us some grace.
Eating meat. Changes in moral perception generally are downstream of changes in technology. E.g. the modern conception of women being equal participants in the economy arose alongside the growth of the knowledge economy, where your average worker was sit in front of a computer instead of bolting doors to a car frame on an assembly line. I strongly suspect that once lab grown meat becomes ubiquitous, our killing and eating animals will come to become regarded as barbaric.
Sparta is quite possibly the pinnacle of horribleness for civilization, which is why I think they emphasized that it particularly was a slave society (80%+ slaves and a majority of the remainder were non-citizens).
As opposed to the Greeks, Parthians, Ptolemaic Egypt and Judea?
Unless you mean "fully dependent on slave labour" - then I guess we can mention Sparta and Athens.
> that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks
What does "little" mean in this context? This is a very fuzzy concept but this doesn't sound right.
Sparta is known for little other than their military prowess, which was a necessity for managing their much larger slave population.
Athens had a rather strange system of slavery. The majority of slaves, owned by State, earned wages and worked and lived unattended. It was much more similar to indentured-servitude.
It was one of the most influential civilization in all of recorded history. It's not about glorifying it, or justifying it. I think that a lot of people see it much more "civilized" than many others, before and during it. And perhaps after it too.
>Don't glorify Rome too much. It was a slavery based society that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks.
It progressed civic life, institutions, law, infrastructure, and other things, a lot. Modern law is a heavy percentage ancient roman law in basis.
Slavery-based society doesn't say much for 2 millenia ago. Most where. The US had slavery until less than 2 centuries, and Jim Crow and other such things until less than a century. And still has things like forced prison labor, so let's cut the Romans some fucking slack.
Slavery was legal in most society's 2 millennia ago but most society's were not built to be depended on slavery the way it was in Sparta, Rome and the American South.
They swept it under the carpet, keeping the benefits, but keeping it a side part of their economy. Kind of like a modern country depending on unprotected labor and even child labor in the third world for its minerals or even for its Nikes.
And a lot the later 19th-20th century "englightened" countries that didn't have explicit slavery in their midst, have enslaved and exploited whole countries as colonies.
I'd rather have a civilized prison system with human conditions, instead of an medieval revenge, profiteering, racism and exclusion, a prison-labor complex, and the death penalty - all created, ran, and cheered by bigoted Old Testament-types of human scum.
Especially if I get far far worse crime outcomes than countries with much healthier prison systems.
It’s ironic that the civilizations that directly contributed to us sitting here believing in egalitarian democracy, get far more hate for it than the ones that never evolved into egalitarian democracy at all. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and some people can’t see it.
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!
I still find it somewhat fascinating that the Slavs arrived in Europe during recorded history.
I'm a bit surprised that the "people from modern Rome" only got an honorable mention. After all, Rome still sees itself as the successor of the Roman Empire. When first visiting it, I was surprised to see the famous SPQR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR) acronym all over the place - on trash cans, manhole covers etc. etc.
Senatus Populus ... Que Romani! The senate and people of Rome.
Italy, per se, is a modern construct but the capital is still Rome and I think it fair to draw associations to the old empire.
I love seeing the SPQR logo and I think it is a really useful link to the past.
Fun fact: The -gh endings of many English words share a proto–Indo European root with that enclitic¹ -que in Senatus Populusque Romani. I remember being skeptical of this when I first heard it assuming that the person was arguing for a shared Latin heritage until I dug in and discovered that it actually went back to PIE.²
⸻
1. For the non-linguists here, an enclitic is a suffix added to a word that either functions as a separate word (here -que means “and”) or as a grammatical modifier like the possessive ’s in English.
2. Proto–Indo European for those of you who don’t do acronyms.
when you see something histórical in Europe ask chatgpt if its something actually ancient that lasted until today or It was a xix century tourist marketing stunt made by the burgoisie
Of course the manhole covers aren't ancient, but they're a sign that Rome still sees itself in the tradition of the Roman Empire.
Or alterntively, that it's a relatively modern addition to add to it's mystique for tourism purposes. When did SPQR get added to the manhole covers and does anything else in Rome use similar signage?
Just wait for Hollywood to create a film about Roman mythology and not cast a single Roman!
But less tongue-in-cheek, the other thing is that the legacy of the Romans is pretty much all around us. The Roman Calendar (with July and August both referencing a Roman leader), the Latin alphabet (with the additional letters like 'y' being added later on to support Greek), the roads we can travel, etc.
It's not only July and August; January, May, June, and Mars, are named after Roman gods; February and April after Roman rituals; and September to December after Roman numerals (7 to 10th month, as they were when the calendar first started).
Yup exactly :) I named July/August for the connection to real people, but yeah it’s pretty much all around us.
Every modern law system has its roots in Roman one.
> *English Common Law* has entered the chat
This brings to mind the wonderful Econtalk episode about Bruno Leoni [0]. The beginning of the podcast describes his untimely passing, which almost seems a Cohen brothers movie plot.
0. https://www.econtalk.org/the-underrated-bruno-leoni-with-mic...My name is Roman (father was Italian born in Rome and identifies as a Roman) and I always find it interesting that people try to speak something that sounds like Russian to me. Never thought about the fact they might think I’m Romanian and are speaking Romanian!
Besides Romanians, there are several more eastern european romance-language-speaking peoples ("Vlachs") like Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians and Istro-Romanians. I think they might also deserve a mention.
Romanian is isolated now, but even quite recently there where languages forming a bridge between Romanian and the rest of Romance languages. For example Dalmatian, whose last speaker died in 1898. Now, most people think of Dalmatians as the dogs.
I bought a torrone (Italian nougat dessert) in local Auchan (French supermarket chain) today and while briefly researching the dessert history found out that it was popular in Ancient Rome named as cupedia and in some Southern parts of Italy it still called as cupeta.
Just imagine to make recipe so good that it not just transferred across generations through 2000 years, but also evolved to come in supermarket in Russia.
If you feel daring, there's a group of people publishing ancient roman recipes up to Renaissance ones (and a bit later as well) in italian and English https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/recipes/
As an American with mostly Western European ancestors (according to a popular DNA testing site), I've always considered Romans as some distant/tangentially related group.
It was surprising to find out that I have "ancient" DNA matches with a couple of Roman and Etruscan individuals.
Small world!
My grandfather was a smith in deep rural Spain. He made and fixed many roman ploughs, well into the 70s. They were called that because they were pretty much the same tool the Romans used.
"Where are the Romans now?" "You're looking at them." - Tony Soprano
Feel I should mention the Istro-Romanians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanians), a small group of Romanian speakers who settled in Istria (now Croatia) some centuries ago. Mostly gone now but one grandmother was from one of the Romanian speaking villages.
No mention of the Romansch, that's quite disappointing. But learning more about Romania and Romanian culture still made for a wonderful read, kudos to the author.
REG: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
To me, what would suck the most is living in a place after the Romans where you can see signs of their civilization but you're living a rural peasant life.
In many ways, that's how a lot of people feel in modern Britain: everywhere you see signs of XIX century grandeur, but "on the streets" life can feel depressingly backwards.
Brewing alcohol was known to hunter-gatherers. Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities). Medicine/education, that's the Greeks.
> Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities)
This is sort of like saying computers were invented in Mesopotamia because they did math.
Roman water and earth-moving civil engineering was absolutely cutting edge to the degree that the projects they undertook would have been unfathomable to their Bronze-Age predecessors.
> Medicine/education, that's the Greeks
Egyptians, Shirley?
(Although they're such abstract concepts, I'm sure everyone had them to some degree).
They’re literally the 2nd group mentioned?
I 100% deserve getting flamed a bit for skimming and shooting off a comment when not paying enough attention.
Uh? They're the second group they talk about, just after the Romanians.
Rome had negligible demographic impact in Europe. An overhyped "empire"
> negligible ... impact ... overhyped ... empire
There's some other ways they've left a mark on you.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
username checks out
I am not my grandfather, and neither current descendants of Romans are Romans.
Don't glorify Rome too much. It was a slavery based society that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks. Heck written Latin didn't even have punctuation marks, not even spaces. That's because it was only used by slave scribes. The nobility that could write, did so in Greek.
- Go stand in the Hagia Sophia and tell me the Romans did little to improve architecture and engineering.
- I won't defend the Roman record on slavery, but I will point out that the Greeks (particularly the Spartans) were slave societies too.
- The Greeks were significantly more xenophobic and sexist than the Romans. If you washed up on the shores of ancient Greece, you could never have become a citizen. The Romans were far more tolerant and inclusive.
- Putting spaces between words was a medieval innovation. The Greeks wrote in much the same way as the Romans, and that was thanks to the Phoenicians!
- Romans revered Greek culture because their city started in a period when Greek colonies were spreading Greek influence throughout the Mediterranean and, specifically, in Italy itself. Greece was to Rome as Rome was to medieval Europeans: A colonizer.
----------
No ancient society smells of roses if you look close enough. However, it's also rare to find ancient societies that expanded and persisted for centuries without being innovative and progressive. The Romans were both awful and great, much like the Greeks, Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians, etc. before them.
Also, our own society right now will be someday considered barbaric by our descendants. I don't know what for, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will happen. We should show the people of the past some grace, the same way we might hope the people of the future will show us some grace.
Eating meat. Changes in moral perception generally are downstream of changes in technology. E.g. the modern conception of women being equal participants in the economy arose alongside the growth of the knowledge economy, where your average worker was sit in front of a computer instead of bolting doors to a car frame on an assembly line. I strongly suspect that once lab grown meat becomes ubiquitous, our killing and eating animals will come to become regarded as barbaric.
Sparta is not exactly known as the pinnacle of civilization. As for the rest of your comment, you make some good points.
Sparta is quite possibly the pinnacle of horribleness for civilization, which is why I think they emphasized that it particularly was a slave society (80%+ slaves and a majority of the remainder were non-citizens).
> a slavery based society
As opposed to the Greeks, Parthians, Ptolemaic Egypt and Judea? Unless you mean "fully dependent on slave labour" - then I guess we can mention Sparta and Athens.
> that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks
What does "little" mean in this context? This is a very fuzzy concept but this doesn't sound right.
Sparta is known for little other than their military prowess, which was a necessity for managing their much larger slave population.
Athens had a rather strange system of slavery. The majority of slaves, owned by State, earned wages and worked and lived unattended. It was much more similar to indentured-servitude.
My point was that Sparta was far more dependent on slave labour for its existence than either Rome or Athens.
It was one of the most influential civilization in all of recorded history. It's not about glorifying it, or justifying it. I think that a lot of people see it much more "civilized" than many others, before and during it. And perhaps after it too.
>Don't glorify Rome too much. It was a slavery based society that progressed sciences, technology and civilization little from what they inherited from the Mesopotamian's/Greeks.
It progressed civic life, institutions, law, infrastructure, and other things, a lot. Modern law is a heavy percentage ancient roman law in basis.
Slavery-based society doesn't say much for 2 millenia ago. Most where. The US had slavery until less than 2 centuries, and Jim Crow and other such things until less than a century. And still has things like forced prison labor, so let's cut the Romans some fucking slack.
Slavery was legal in most society's 2 millennia ago but most society's were not built to be depended on slavery the way it was in Sparta, Rome and the American South.
They swept it under the carpet, keeping the benefits, but keeping it a side part of their economy. Kind of like a modern country depending on unprotected labor and even child labor in the third world for its minerals or even for its Nikes.
And a lot the later 19th-20th century "englightened" countries that didn't have explicit slavery in their midst, have enslaved and exploited whole countries as colonies.
> forced prison labor
I'd rather work than be in a cell.
If it is forced it is not what you would rather do.
I'd rather have a civilized prison system with human conditions, instead of an medieval revenge, profiteering, racism and exclusion, a prison-labor complex, and the death penalty - all created, ran, and cheered by bigoted Old Testament-types of human scum.
Especially if I get far far worse crime outcomes than countries with much healthier prison systems.
But, hey, that's just me.
I'd be content with a prison system that keeps the criminals away from victimizing more people.
Humane prisons aren't incompatible with public safety from violent offenders.
You should read a day in the life of ivan denisovich. In my understanding, the whole book is making your point
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Are you not entertained?
It’s ironic that the civilizations that directly contributed to us sitting here believing in egalitarian democracy, get far more hate for it than the ones that never evolved into egalitarian democracy at all. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and some people can’t see it.
I was talking about its economic system, not politics.
> progressed sciences, technology and civilization little
Roman engineering was pretty darn solid.
What civilization would you glorify?
Yawn. More rewriting of history to try to remove successful cultures.