"Where are the Romans now?"
"You're looking at them." - Tony Soprano
The last Romans are still around
21–30 of 245 posts
Re: The last Romans are still around
#22No 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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#23No 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.
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 unt…
> forced prison labor I'd rather work than be in a cell.
If it is forced it is not what you would rather do.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#25[flagged]
Re: The last Romans are still around
#26Don'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.
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#27[flagged]
> negligible ... impact ... overhyped ... empire
There's some other ways they've left a mark on you.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#29Don'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.
> 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 unt…
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#30This 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!