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

140 points by parsecs 5y ago

nefitty 5y ago
The presentation of this article is really nice. I’ve only seen it on mobile. It feels like a reading experience. There was one weird thing with a paragraph’s font that was suddenly bolded. It had a link in white without text decorations, but also bolded. The green text and white link started giving me the effect of flashing. Anyways, I think this site shows that even text-heavy content can be presented online in a visually pleasing way.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  Typography has a rich history. The rhythm and flow of a beautifully set book or poster is something to behold. Sadly, it hasn’t made to the internet.
- jeltz 5y ago
  I thought it was hard to read on desktop (Linux, Firefox) so switched to reader mode. The low contrast and the choice of font made it hard to read.
- COGlory 5y ago
  Also, there's an RSS feed which makes it even nicer to read.
ryani 5y ago
After listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "History of Rome" podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble. Their periods of greatest success were when they let people with the necessary skills and talent rise to the top regardless of their origin. That said, they definitely had problems with failing to culturally assimilate immigrants during the late empire -- when "citizens" of the empire didn't think of themselves as Roman but instead primarily part of some other group.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate. But that is a fairly non-consequential observation, at least when observed in 2021, and the mechanism cannot be easily carried over to modern world. For starters, there is a lot more of us humans nowadays. Instant communication means that even if you move thousands of miles away from your country, you are still fed a steady information diet about all the outrage back home, so you cannot really let go of the place you moved away from. And some culture clashes are very real. The later remnant of the Roman empire (Byzantium) fought against the Islamic world for centuries and finally fell to the Turks. They did not find a way to assimilate the newcomers. The religious barrier was too high. To be fair, they had a similar problem with Catholic Europeans, the Sack of Constantinople wasn't perpetrated by anyone else than fellow Christians. In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.
  - hkt 5y ago
    > In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well. Like most sweeping generalisations, this is wrong. Whether groups live in parallel is determined community by community, not by nationality. I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      "What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem." It does not seem as obvious to me. This theory seems to have too many outliers. At least here in Central Europe, racism/anti-semitism against visible minorities tended to be very strong. Historically, Jews were treated horribly, and in the more recent history, Vietnamese also. Growing up in the 1990s, there was a lot of shockingly casual racism against them. Looking across the pond, Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during WWII. The only worse level of racism is probably genocide. In all these cases, the communities are now very well integrated, though the memories of really bad treatment aren't that distant.
yyyk 5y ago
Reading histories of Rome's collapse mainly taught me to be skeptical of historians. At every period Rome's collapse was attributed to the cause du jour ignoring all the contrary evidence.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > Rome's collapse was attributed to the cause de jure ignoring all the contrary evidence What does this mean?
  - yyyk 5y ago
    e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs). I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times).
    - paganel 5y ago
      > was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies Case in point, the aftermath of Trajan's Dacian Wars [1]: > One hundred thousand male slaves were sent back to Rome Prior to that (think 1st century AD) they had most probably ethnically cleansed the entire area 50-to-100 kms North of the Danube, because for that period and area there are very few material/archeological remains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Dacian_Wars#Conclusion_and_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Dacian_Wars#Conclus...
    - whakim 5y ago
      > e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs). I don't really understand the obsession with Gibbon. Most fields have some "foundational" scholarship that is now considered outmoded thanks to more recent evidence. Speaking specifically to the history of late antiquity, a lot of archaeological evidence has come to light in the past century which has greatly augmented the textual evidence that we have. And, speaking of textual evidence, what we do have for the period is pretty poor: not only are the sources not very good/don't survive/were written hundreds of years later, but the "reliable" ones were written at a time when the Roman empire's decline was restricting the flow of information. (Sidonius Apollinarus is a great example of this.) Add to all this that we're talking about a pretty complicated subject, and it's no wonder that there are lots of historians positing different factors involved in what was a centuries-long process. > I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times). The thing is, the people who were doing the "beating up" by and large weren't "Romans" per se. During the empire, and especially after the crisis of the third century, Roman armies were actually pretty synonymous with barbarian foreigners - those groups who lived in border regions would often join the army and fight, perhaps remaining inside the empire after their terms of service, and perhaps going back home. Especially when discussing late antiquity, I think it's pretty misleading to draw a hard line between "Romans" and "barbarians" - it was simply much more fungible than that. That being said, if you look at things from a political perspective, the inability of the Romans to assimilate barbarian armies in the way they had been so competent at for so long (mostly because emperors and armies became so occupied with an endless string of assassinations and usurpations) led to some pretty crippling Roman losses at Adrianople and the Frigidus which the empire never really recovered from. So in that sense, multiculturalism does play a role.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Does Bret realize that private bills were in fact a common method of naturalizing people up until the 40s or so?
- jefftk 5y ago
  Since that is centuries after his specialty I wouldn't expect him to be up on details?
haecceity 5y ago
Rome fell because their economy depended on expansion of the empire and managing a huge empire is hard when you don't have Internet. God bless the Internet.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  They stopped expanding around three hundred years before the "fall."

140 points by parsecs 5y ago

The presentation of this article is really nice. I’ve only seen it on mobile. It feels like a reading experience. There was one weird thing with a paragraph’s font that was suddenly bolded. It had a link in white without text decorations, but also bolded. The green text and white link started giving me the effect of flashing. Anyways, I think this site shows that even text-heavy content can be presented online in a visually pleasing way.

gherkinnn 5y ago
Typography has a rich history. The rhythm and flow of a beautifully set book or poster is something to behold. Sadly, it hasn’t made to the internet.
jeltz 5y ago
I thought it was hard to read on desktop (Linux, Firefox) so switched to reader mode. The low contrast and the choice of font made it hard to read.
COGlory 5y ago
Also, there's an RSS feed which makes it even nicer to read.

ryani 5y ago

After listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "History of Rome" podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble. Their periods of greatest success were when they let people with the necessary skills and talent rise to the top regardless of their origin. That said, they definitely had problems with failing to culturally assimilate immigrants during the late empire -- when "citizens" of the empire didn't think of themselves as Roman but instead primarily part of some other group.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate. But that is a fairly non-consequential observation, at least when observed in 2021, and the mechanism cannot be easily carried over to modern world. For starters, there is a lot more of us humans nowadays. Instant communication means that even if you move thousands of miles away from your country, you are still fed a steady information diet about all the outrage back home, so you cannot really let go of the place you moved away from. And some culture clashes are very real. The later remnant of the Roman empire (Byzantium) fought against the Islamic world for centuries and finally fell to the Turks. They did not find a way to assimilate the newcomers. The religious barrier was too high. To be fair, they had a similar problem with Catholic Europeans, the Sack of Constantinople wasn't perpetrated by anyone else than fellow Christians. In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.
- hkt 5y ago
  > In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well. Like most sweeping generalisations, this is wrong. Whether groups live in parallel is determined community by community, not by nationality. I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem." It does not seem as obvious to me. This theory seems to have too many outliers. At least here in Central Europe, racism/anti-semitism against visible minorities tended to be very strong. Historically, Jews were treated horribly, and in the more recent history, Vietnamese also. Growing up in the 1990s, there was a lot of shockingly casual racism against them. Looking across the pond, Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during WWII. The only worse level of racism is probably genocide. In all these cases, the communities are now very well integrated, though the memories of really bad treatment aren't that distant.

yyyk 5y ago

Reading histories of Rome's collapse mainly taught me to be skeptical of historians. At every period Rome's collapse was attributed to the cause du jour ignoring all the contrary evidence.

pedrosorio 5y ago
> Rome's collapse was attributed to the cause de jure ignoring all the contrary evidence What does this mean?
- yyyk 5y ago
  e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs). I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times).
  - paganel 5y ago
    > was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies Case in point, the aftermath of Trajan's Dacian Wars [1]: > One hundred thousand male slaves were sent back to Rome Prior to that (think 1st century AD) they had most probably ethnically cleansed the entire area 50-to-100 kms North of the Danube, because for that period and area there are very few material/archeological remains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Dacian_Wars#Conclusion_and_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Dacian_Wars#Conclus...
  - whakim 5y ago
    > e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs). I don't really understand the obsession with Gibbon. Most fields have some "foundational" scholarship that is now considered outmoded thanks to more recent evidence. Speaking specifically to the history of late antiquity, a lot of archaeological evidence has come to light in the past century which has greatly augmented the textual evidence that we have. And, speaking of textual evidence, what we do have for the period is pretty poor: not only are the sources not very good/don't survive/were written hundreds of years later, but the "reliable" ones were written at a time when the Roman empire's decline was restricting the flow of information. (Sidonius Apollinarus is a great example of this.) Add to all this that we're talking about a pretty complicated subject, and it's no wonder that there are lots of historians positing different factors involved in what was a centuries-long process. > I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times). The thing is, the people who were doing the "beating up" by and large weren't "Romans" per se. During the empire, and especially after the crisis of the third century, Roman armies were actually pretty synonymous with barbarian foreigners - those groups who lived in border regions would often join the army and fight, perhaps remaining inside the empire after their terms of service, and perhaps going back home. Especially when discussing late antiquity, I think it's pretty misleading to draw a hard line between "Romans" and "barbarians" - it was simply much more fungible than that. That being said, if you look at things from a political perspective, the inability of the Romans to assimilate barbarian armies in the way they had been so competent at for so long (mostly because emperors and armies became so occupied with an endless string of assassinations and usurpations) led to some pretty crippling Roman losses at Adrianople and the Frigidus which the empire never really recovered from. So in that sense, multiculturalism does play a role.

selimthegrim 5y ago

Does Bret realize that private bills were in fact a common method of naturalizing people up until the 40s or so?

jefftk 5y ago
Since that is centuries after his specialty I wouldn't expect him to be up on details?

haecceity 5y ago

Rome fell because their economy depended on expansion of the empire and managing a huge empire is hard when you don't have Internet. God bless the Internet.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
They stopped expanding around three hundred years before the "fall."