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The last Romans are still around

signoregalilei.com

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Re: The last Romans are still around

#121

Post by meta_gunslinger »

trashb wrote: post #111

I think even in the Roman times anyone could be "Roman". The way I understand it being Roman was not a measure of your ethnicity but a measure of your devotion to the empire. Rome was an extremely militaristic society so they needed soldiers and what I understand is that your status in the military largely dictated your status in society. They requited soldiers from all of their empire thus all backgrounds within (la…

That's not true. Roman citizenship was sacrosant, there was even a war during the late Roman Republic time between the Romans and allied Italians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_War_(91%E2%80%9387_BC) fought over it. During the Roman Empire, Caracalla extended citizenship to everyone mainly to spite the Senate.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#122

Post by derdi »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #30

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 B…

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.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#123

Post by TFNA »

Shitty-kitty wrote: post #8

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.

> 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.

Greek of this same era did not have spaces either, as a look at any reproduction of an ancient manuscript will tell you.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#124

Post by broken-kebab »

trashb wrote: post #110
frollogaston wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are whatever, British ethnicity is a thing though

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…

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.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#126

Post by inkyoto »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #63

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!

Well. The Latin version of Roman is Romanus, which is believed to have descended from Romulus, one of the two legendary founders of Rome.

The popularity of Roman in Eastern and Western Slavic cultures is likely due to the cultural influence of the Byzantine Empire. Roman is also a rather popular name in Spanish speaking Latin American countries (Román) and is not entirely unknown in Germany (same spelling).

Re: The last Romans are still around

#127

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

noIdeaTheSecond wrote: post #120
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #30

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 B…

"On a genetic map, a PCA plot, Romans and Romanians simply don't overlap" Can you help me understand how do I look for Romans on a PCA map? For contemporary nations I think I can manage but for Romans I don't

Rome through the ages:

> https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay6826

The data suggests that Republican Rome was a mix of the local Copper Age populations of central Italy and incoming Bronze Age nomadic populations from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. This doesn't map neatly to any modern population, but is fairly generically "Iron Age European."

The Imperial Era was more cosmopolitan, with massive genetic inflow from the east Med:

> During the Imperial period (n = 48 individuals), the most prominent trend is an ancestry shift toward the eastern Mediterranean and with very few individuals of primarily western European ancestry (Fig. 3C). The distribution of Imperial Romans in PCA largely overlaps with modern Mediterranean and Near Eastern populations, such as Greek, Maltese, Cypriot, and Syrian (Figs. 2A and 3C). This shift is accompanied by a further increase in the Neolithic Iranian component in ADMIXTURE (Fig. 2B) and is supported by f-statistics (tables S20 and S21): compared to Iron Age individuals, the Imperial population shares more alleles with early Bronze Age Jordanians (f4 statistics Z-score = 4.2) and shows significant introgression signals in admixture f3 for this population, as well as for Bronze Age Lebanese and Iron Age Iranians (Z-score

Re: The last Romans are still around

#128

Post by lycopodiopsida »

Shitty-kitty wrote: post #8

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.

Rome was not at the spear tip of sciences and arts (it also the reason why roman elites liked greek arts so much - they had time and money for such activities) - but otherwise the impact of roman empire is huge and long-lasting. Law, engineering, political system were incredible. In fact, reading about political struggles in ancient Greece requires a good amount of explanation of the political system, but it is shocking how modern political struggles in Rome feel.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#129

Post by toyg »

benj111 wrote: post #100
toyg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>Mars While not technically incorrect(?) I'm guessing you meant March?

Yeah, freudian slip.

Re: The last Romans are still around

#130

Post by trashb »

broken-kebab wrote: post #124
trashb wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

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 arriv…

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.

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