I don't know why people are so confused about where the Romans are. There is a guy named Harun Osman Osmanoğlu and he's the current Caesar of Rome. It's pretty simple.
The last Romans are still around
171–180 of 245 posts
Re: The last Romans are still around
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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).
Re: The last Romans are still around
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The deleware people are distinct from aztec people who are distinct from taino
There is no such thing as "ethnic American"
Re: The last Romans are still around
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, saxon…
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is genetics more important than any other tie to the Roman empire?
It isn't, but OP doesn't say it is either. I think it's a worthwhile point to make that exceedingly few nations, cultures, ethnicites etc. correspond cleanly to equivalent groups that existed ~2000 years ago. Identity-building projects need simple stories, genetics (or history generally) rarely gives them.
Probably Georgia as a political entity, Armenia, Cambodia and Vietnam as nations probably.
I know other examples of relative ethnic stability: most of Northern Europe broadly has the same ethnic geographic boundaries as 1500 years ago (excepting the slavic / proto slavic things), the Basque, the Sardinians, Bretons and Bearnese, Tirolians, Kabyles, Laz "Greeks" (vanishing since WWII).
By some measures also Egypt (coastal cities excepted) and Iran.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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.
Re: The last Romans are still around
#178Just 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.
They're always British in film for some reason
Because of the allusion to British Empire?
Re: The last Romans are still around
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Comparing Britain and the Americas is a category error. Even comparing England to the USA would be incorrect.
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Re: The last Romans are still around
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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