This is the second part (I) of a series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the

Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies

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2021-06-25 05:30:05

This is the second part (I) of a series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an identity? Was this a homogeneous, ethnically defined group, as some versions of pop folk history would have it, or was ‘Roman’ always a complex identity which encompassed a range of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious groups?

Last time, we presented the common pop-culture vision of the Romans, presented as a uniform or homogeneous cultural group, envisioned (especially in English-language productions) with white British actors speaking ‘the Queen’s Latin’ (that is, British English, often upscale and without strong regional accents). And we noted at the end that this depiction has filtered through into a certain set of folk historical theories about Rome, in particular the theory that Rome began as a homogeneous, ‘national’ state, achieved its conquests as a result of this supposed homogeneity, but then collapsed when it became multicultural due to its conquests. It’s a vision that imagines the Romans as a singular people who expanded outward militarily, but with an identifiable ethnic core.

Let anyone think I am tilting at strawman windmills here, I should note that within hours of that first post in this series going up, I got my first upset comment insisting that I had “either ignorantly or deliberately the differences between assimilable and un-assimilable cultural groups” and that such “un-assimilable” groups (the examples given being “Visigoths and the Jews” – because of course it’s the Jews, never mind that a Romanized Jew, Paul of Tarsus, is easily one of the most important historical figures of the last two thousand years and was by no means unique in his cosmopolitan outlook) became “a fifth column that destroyed Rome from within.” While we will not get to the Visigoths and the Jews today (though we will get to them later in the series), we’re going to see that this theory simply does not survive contact with the evidence in any meaningful way. But it is, I think, sustained by that deeply rooted pop-culture image which imagines the Romans exactly as they appear in film, TV and video games: as a bunch of white fellows speaking Latin with a British accent.