I’m reading “The First Man in Rome” by McCullough and was trying to get a feel for average Roman features. I always figured it was dark hair, eyes, and skin. Is this the case?
Well, that brings up a different question- what do you think “Italians” look like? A Sicilian and a Neapolitan, for example, can look VERY different. In Northern Italy, blond, blue-eyed people aren’t uncommon.
Then, as now, people were mutts! The peninsula we call “Italy” has been settled, re-settled, conquered, re-conquered, populated, and repopulated, so many times, it’s almost futile to try to figure out what an “Italian” really is, in ethnic or genetic terms.
I totally agree - as an Italian American who livedin Northern Italy many years, trying to say what the average Italian looked or looks like is a lot like trying to figure out what the average American looks like - Good luck!
Here are some images of people as painted on the walls of the houses of Pompeii or Etruscan tombs and similar places for a general idea of how they saw themselves. The first is a school site with multiple links.
http://shot.holycross.edu/courses/Painting/F02/review
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/archaeology/ARY2002/images/Rome_images/webrome/Theseus.jpg
At the bottom of the following page are several Roman busts. Unlike the Greeks, who strived for ideal beauty, Roman sculptors attempted to produce “lifelike” representations, so the images are very likely realistic. (They will not provide coloring, but the features are recognizable.)
http://www.crystalinks.com/romeart.html
Also, “Rome” over time extended far beyond Italy. Several famous “Romans” were from Spain (the Emperor Trajan, Seneca), and the Balkans (Diocletan, Constantine). Rome even had an emperor named “Philip the Arab”; perhaps he was not an Arab in the modern sense but he was born in north Arabia.
Two arms, two legs, head on top; two eyes, nose in middle, mouth underneath… yeah, they tend to look a lot alike.
So the answer is yes.
So, do people in California tend to look different than people in Wisconsin?
Peace,
mangeorge
No, Romans wore togas, Italians do not.
Why don’t you ALL just hop on the smartass bandwagon. I do know that northern Italians often have light hair and light eyes but that’s after the northern Celtic influence. I was speaking of ancient Romans. And don’t get into this knee-jerk liberal shit that everyone looks the same.
During classics classes, my professors routinely pointed out that the Romans from the city and its environs were all what we would consider very short, to the point that they remarked on it when they encountered Gauls and Germanic tribesmen, who tended to be taller. I seem to recall that beards were rarely if ever in fashion, and Roman men tended to be clean shaven. Baldness was noted as common, affecting both men and women. Blond hair would be rare, red hair even more so.
A final warning. Modern ideas about population mobility have absolutely no application in ancient peoples. The flow of genetic information across distance and geograhic barriers could be difficult, or impossible, barring mass migrations of nomadic peoples. Common agricultural folk were born, lived, and died in a relatively tight geographic proximity for the most part.
Nuts to this!
Millions of human beings from all around the ancient world were taken to Rome as slaves. And there was plenty of midnight bumpin’ between different ethinic groups goin’ on. And that includes “bumpin’” with their owners.
My college history professor (a leading figure in the field, he’s the elder Speidel) mentioned once that the early Romans were of the blond hair, blue eye variety. He also said, I believe, that they were related to the Germanic tribes. I don’t really want to go digging through my notes, but I think they originated somewhere north of the Black Sea.
But with the more Mediterranean looking Etruscans to the north, Greeks to the south by and large those traits were smothered.
Sigh. Where to begin?
(1) Evidence from Roman Times Shows They Looked Like Modern Italians
I suggest you visit Italy. Look at the wall paintings in Pompeii, Tarquinia, and Rome itself. Better yet, look at the wall paintings in the House of Livia. She was Augustus’s wife, and a noble Roman. The wall paintings show a mostly dark, Southern European group of people. The busts show people with larger noses than most northern Europeans.
(2) You cannot generalize Italians and more so than this:
Italians are a diverse lot, because they are centrally located. But then again, so are the English. There are Southern Italians with blond hair, that doesn’t come from barbarians. There are very dark northern Italians. 50% of Southern Italians have green or blue eyes. But don’t expect clear cut pronouncements, which verge on the ridiculous. Generally, a Norwegian will be a little blonder than a German. A German, a little lighter than an Austrian. An Austrian, a little lighter than an Italian.
Italians are, and have always been, an intermediate Caucasian group. They’re slightly darker than other Europeans.
(3) There are plenty of towns in Italy that have NEVER been invaded.
You want to see unvarnished descendants of the Romans? Pick up a history book and buy a plane ticket. There are towns in Italy settled by the Romans, forgotten, isolated, and never invaded since. Imagine some podunk town of lower middle class Romans. They own no slaves. When barbarians invaded Italy, they overlooked your town. Too small, too out of the way. There are a ton of towns like this in Italy. There live the descendants of the Romans. News flash: they look Italian.
**
(4) Dont get so hung up on a name.**
Italy originally referred to modern Calabria. Then just the part of the peninsular south of the Rubicon. When modern Italy named itself in 1861, it was debated whether to name the new country Rome. Would that make the decision easier for you? China has always been named China. But just because it was called the “Roman” empire doesn’t mean Rome isnt in Italy.
(5) Those “non-Italian” Romans listed above are just plain WRONG.
When Rome conquered a place, it rewarded the soldiers by planting a colony there. Marry, have kids, breed good Romans, protect the land you conquered. So when you say “Trajan was Spanish” you just show your ignorance. He was descended from ITALIAN soldiers who were settled in Spain. He was not an ethnic Spaniard. Such a concept didn’t even exist! Sheesh!
(6) Colleen McCullough is Wrong.
She gets tons of letters about how OFF her coloring is. She baldly admits ignoring ancient sources. **Only one ancient source describes the coloring of Julius Caesar. It says “his eyes were so dark that the area surrounding the pupils was almost as black as they were.” ** But that he had pale skin and dark hair. Colleen McCullough? She describes Caesar as blonde, with blue eyes, and golden skin!!! Yes, I know it’s a ridiculous, a Fabio-esque, Harlequin Romance aspect of her cheesy writing. She always struck me as a dumb author of northern European heritage trying to make the Romans closer to her ideal.
(7) British accents on Romans are a relic of Shakespeare.
In his day, to distinguish the wealthy upper classes on stage from the dumb masses, a play producer had the patricians speak in proper Queen’s English, and the masses in Cockney. For some reason, this relic persists to this day. News flash: the Italians spoke Latin, which sounds a lot like Italian if you hear it spoken fast. Watch the Passion of the Christ!
(8) The Romans always described themselves as shorter and darker than the Gauls and Germans they encountered.
**
(9) Words for colors change over time and are often mistranslated.**
During the French Revolution, carrots are described as purple, which meant, then, orange - a color created by mixing red. Obviously, the modern word for Orange comes from the fruit, which was not imported into Europe until modern times.
The Romans described the Germans as having "red’ hair, say the translators. They meant ruddy, or dirty blonde.
The Romans and Greeks described as “blond” more accurately translates to “hair that changes color when exposed to the sun,” ie tawny brown.
**
(10) Don’t let the exception set the rule**
In a group of New Yorkers, the guy from LA is called “Hollywood.” In a group of guys from Hollywood, they can’t call each other that because they all share that characteristic.
There are occasional Romans who bore the nickname Rufus, Flavus, Ahenobarbus, etc., which can be translated into “ruddy”, “golden” or “reddish in beard” but obviously, in a group of brunettes, the one redhead gets the nickname “red”.
If all Romans were redheaded, you wouldnt call one Marius “the redhead”.
**(11) We feel a distance from Romans because we do not use the proper case when translating their names. **
In English, we use either the -us ending or the Shakespearian term.
Thus:
Marcus Antonius we call Mark Anthony.
Gaius Marius, we call Marius.
News flash: Romans, when referring to themselves, used the -o ending. Aand most other languages around the world, particularly Italians translate their names as:
Marcus Antonius = Marco Antonio
Marius = Mario
Julius = Julio
Sergius = Sergio
Now do they sound more Italian for you?
To be continued.
Celtic? Germanics are Celtic? 
christinam, what do you mean by “oranges were not imported into Europe until modern times”? There have been oranges in Spain since the Middle Ages - they even were exported to Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages.
Not sure what this has to do with how Romans looked, but Shakespeare was writing several centuries before the evolution of either “Queen’s English” or “Cockney”. Certainly there were differences in accent and dialect at the time (Shakespeare himself would have had an accent markedly different from his predominately London audience) but the sort of social division by accent that you’re suggesting is as much an anachronism as Julius Caesar’s clock.
Yes, words for colours can be mistranslated across time and cultures, but your examples make me question your conclusions.
The word orange does, indeed, come from the fruit – but oranges have been imported into Europe (and even grown here) since the middle ages, not “modern times”. And if French Revolutionary carrots were described as purple, they very probably were: carrots naturally range in colour from almost white to dark purple. The orange varieties we’re familiar with derive from a particular 17th century cultivar.
Do you have a cite for this comment on how the plays were spoken in Shakespeare’s time?
It is true that Shakespeare distinguished between classes, but he did it by writing the parts for the upper classes in blank verse, and those for the lower classes in prose, but that’s quite different from saying that they used specific accents, as you suggest.
Well, there is the Roman Nose. I’ve always heard George Washington is an example. Washington looked like a classical emperor. Bernie Madoff has a similar look.
QFT. Not sure about the rest of christinam’s pronouncements, but the bit about carrots is definitely bollocks.
yes, we got some purple carrots in our organic produce bin just the other day - along with some yellow carrots, some orange carrots, some white carrots, and some greenish-orange carrots.
Can we have a reference for this please? Given that the Scandinavian Vandals moved through pretty much all of the Italian peninsula, I assume you have some gene markers that establish that any individual’s blonde hair does not derive from barbarian influence evidence.
Can we have a reference for this please? Even the name of one such town with the evidence that this was true.
Quite frankly your post sounds so hyperbolic that I find it hard to credit any of it. However if you can provide evidence for these two claims, two of the simpler ones to verify if you have a factual basis for your claim, then I am willing to reconsider.