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OK, what is "white"? Define it. I don't know about USA, but from european perspective, Armenians are as white as any other European nation. What is USA term for

OK, what is "white"? Define it. I don't know about USA, but from european perspective, Armenians are as white as any other European nation. What is USA term for that? Caucasian? Ironically, Armenians are as close to THE Caucasus region as anyone can be :) Additionally, the few Armenians, that I know in person, would consider and insult to be called Persian (for political reasons I think). Yes, they were ethnically diverse. That does not mean that Roman senators were any other than a bunch of white male people, and that the majority of its citizens weren't what anyone from Europe today would consider "white" or "caucasian". Of course, lots of people with even totally dark skin lived in Rome and other regions, but not to the extent of "Roman senators have to be depicted as black".

tovej 5y ago
Not the article, nor anyone in this thread so far has claimed that Roman senators were black. But now that you mention it, Septimius Severus was a dark-skinned Roman imperator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo
- dragandj 5y ago
  He was from Lybia, though. How dark is that? A funny anecdote from a book of my friend who backpacked Africa 15 years ago: A (dark skinned) Sudanese man was referring to some other Sudanese people from his village as "they are black". He himself also appeared black to my friend, but the man didn't consider himself black. It appears that (many?) people from North Africa are quite precise in differences of their spectrum of skin tone :)
  - tovej 5y ago
    Libya is still white then? It feels like you're just moving the goal posts to include all people under "white". If the Roman empire had covered all of sub-saharan Africa I wonder if you would be arguing that they're really white after all. The whole point is that ancient peoples, and especially Romans, are not a homogeneous group of people. Whether they define themselves as white is not what you should be arguing about, because most definitions of "white people" includes a diverse set of ethnicities as well.
    - dragandj 5y ago
      I don't know whether Lybians consider themselves white or not. The Lybians that I've seen in person (maybe a dozen) didn't appear much darker than my European compatriots. Yes, I can spot the difference, but it was more in facial features than in darkness of their skin color, which was fairly "whitish". WRT the Lybian Roman emperor: no one claims that ALL Roman citizen were white, or Italic, or European. Any such large Empire was heterogenous. But it is safe to say that a typical Roman citizen, espicially a Senator, would have been white for any reasonable definition of "whiteness", especially in a TV series. There was one black US president (his mother was white and father black if I remember correctly), but a typical US president so far was white. I don't have anything against hiring a bunch of Chinese or Zimbabwean actors to play Senators, but that would certainly look odd. In the same way as hiring a bunch of Ukrainians to play Zulu warriors would look odd.
      - tovej 5y ago
        What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population. You also seem to be really caught up on senators. If you read the entire article, you'll note very little attention was given to senators. Even so, that is not what the original argument was. The argument was that Rome was not homogeneous. Even in a heterogeneous society, there will be trends towards looking one way or another. The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British. Nobody has mentioned China or Zimbabwe, so this last argument is a lazy straw man.
        zozbot234 5y ago
        "White" is a very confusing term which should just be avoided in these discussions. Even talking purely about ancestry of ancient peoples (including Romans), it conflates very diverse origins - Old European farmers (reflected today most clearly by Sardinians), Near Eastern/Levantine (found peculiarly in ancient Etruscans, which agrees with their mythology that tells of a descent from some ancient people of Lydia), Eurasian steppe peoples (this would be the PIE culture-related component that people tend to think about most readily, but there was a lot less of it in the urbanized Mediterranean area than farther north in continental Europe!) were quite distinguishable back then, even though all of them might be described very loosely as "white".

tovej 5y ago

Not the article, nor anyone in this thread so far has claimed that Roman senators were black. But now that you mention it, Septimius Severus was a dark-skinned Roman imperator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo

dragandj 5y ago
He was from Lybia, though. How dark is that? A funny anecdote from a book of my friend who backpacked Africa 15 years ago: A (dark skinned) Sudanese man was referring to some other Sudanese people from his village as "they are black". He himself also appeared black to my friend, but the man didn't consider himself black. It appears that (many?) people from North Africa are quite precise in differences of their spectrum of skin tone :)
- tovej 5y ago
  Libya is still white then? It feels like you're just moving the goal posts to include all people under "white". If the Roman empire had covered all of sub-saharan Africa I wonder if you would be arguing that they're really white after all. The whole point is that ancient peoples, and especially Romans, are not a homogeneous group of people. Whether they define themselves as white is not what you should be arguing about, because most definitions of "white people" includes a diverse set of ethnicities as well.
  - dragandj 5y ago
    I don't know whether Lybians consider themselves white or not. The Lybians that I've seen in person (maybe a dozen) didn't appear much darker than my European compatriots. Yes, I can spot the difference, but it was more in facial features than in darkness of their skin color, which was fairly "whitish". WRT the Lybian Roman emperor: no one claims that ALL Roman citizen were white, or Italic, or European. Any such large Empire was heterogenous. But it is safe to say that a typical Roman citizen, espicially a Senator, would have been white for any reasonable definition of "whiteness", especially in a TV series. There was one black US president (his mother was white and father black if I remember correctly), but a typical US president so far was white. I don't have anything against hiring a bunch of Chinese or Zimbabwean actors to play Senators, but that would certainly look odd. In the same way as hiring a bunch of Ukrainians to play Zulu warriors would look odd.
    - tovej 5y ago
      What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population. You also seem to be really caught up on senators. If you read the entire article, you'll note very little attention was given to senators. Even so, that is not what the original argument was. The argument was that Rome was not homogeneous. Even in a heterogeneous society, there will be trends towards looking one way or another. The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British. Nobody has mentioned China or Zimbabwe, so this last argument is a lazy straw man.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        "White" is a very confusing term which should just be avoided in these discussions. Even talking purely about ancestry of ancient peoples (including Romans), it conflates very diverse origins - Old European farmers (reflected today most clearly by Sardinians), Near Eastern/Levantine (found peculiarly in ancient Etruscans, which agrees with their mythology that tells of a descent from some ancient people of Lydia), Eurasian steppe peoples (this would be the PIE culture-related component that people tend to think about most readily, but there was a lot less of it in the urbanized Mediterranean area than farther north in continental Europe!) were quite distinguishable back then, even though all of them might be described very loosely as "white".