# A couple questions about Rome **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 22, 2015, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339 "2015-02-22T13:03:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/1 "2015-02-22T13:03:39Z")
First of all. Why aren’t Romans considered to be ancient Italians? Sure Rome expanded outside of Italy later on and early in its history just encompassed a small part of Italy, but during the peak of the republic and empire wasn’t Italy pretty much synonymous with “Rome proper”? Would ancient Romans seem recognizably Italian to us in the same way the ancient Greeks and Chinese greatly resemble their modern day descendants? Another thing: why exactly did Mark Antony have Cicero killed and why did he hate him so much? Putting his head on a pike is pretty extreme, but I guess that’s just how politics was done in those days? ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/2 "2015-02-22T13:49:18Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > FAnother thing: why exactly did Mark Antony have Cicero killed and why did he hate him so much? Cicero spent a lot of time and effort in denouncing Anthony in his [Philippics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippicae). ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/3 "2015-02-22T13:54:08Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > First of all. Why aren’t Romans considered to be ancient Italians? Who says they aren’t? ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/4 "2015-02-22T14:23:01Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > First of all. Why aren’t Romans considered to be ancient Italians? Sure Rome expanded outside of Italy later on and early in its history just encompassed a small part of Italy, but during the peak of the republic and empire wasn’t Italy pretty much synonymous with “Rome proper”? Because “Italy” in the sense in which this word is used today denotes a nation state with a distinct culture and language; it’s more than just a geographic term denoting the peninsula which extends southward from the Alps. Neither the disctint Italian culture, nor the Italian language, nor the concept of an Italian nation existed in antiquity. I agree the same reasons could be used to argue that ancient Egyptians shouldn’t be called “Egyptians” because they have little in common with present-day Egypt (which is, culturally, an Arab country and thus very different from ancient Egypt). But in the case of Egypt, that terminology simply got stuck and is accepted by general convention, which isn’t true for Rome/Italy. > [@](#): > > Would ancient Romans seem recognizably Italian to us in the same way the ancient Greeks and Chinese greatly resemble their modern day descendants? I wonder what you mean by “recognizably Italian”. I doubt that there is anything recognizably Italian about present-day Italians which would allow you to distinguish them, on the basis of looks alone, from other European or Mediterranean nations with a statistically significant degree of accuracy. Nor do I think there is something “recognizably Greek” or “recognizably Chinese” (in the latter case, allowing you to tell Chinese from other East Asian people) within this meaning. ---
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/5 "2015-02-22T14:36:00Z")
> [@Schnitte](#): > > I wonder what you mean by “recognizably Italian”. I doubt that there is anything recognizably Italian about present-day Italians which would allow you to distinguish them, on the basis of looks alone, from other European or Mediterranean nations with a statistically significant degree of accuracy. Nor do I think there is something “recognizably Greek” or “recognizably Chinese” (in the latter case, allowing you to tell Chinese from other East Asian people) within this meaning. I meant culturally moreso than physically. Ancient Chinese and Greek culture, while of course different in many ways from today’s Greek and Chinese people are still recognizably “Greek” and “Chinese”. Would the Romans be recognizably Italian to us in the same way? ---
**Author:** ![MikeS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MikeS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MikeS)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/6 "2015-02-22T14:37:02Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > Why aren’t Romans considered to be ancient Italians? Sure Rome expanded outside of Italy later on and early in its history just encompassed a small part of Italy, but during the peak of the republic and empire wasn’t Italy pretty much synonymous with “Rome proper”? The center of gravity of the Roman Empire moved gradually east as the Empire went on. The most famous manifestation of this was Constantine’s decision to move of the capital to Constantinople in 330 AD; but well before then, the empire had been economically dependent on its eastern provinces. This meant that when Rome fell to Odoacer in 476, it was viewed as the loss of an outlying province. The folks in Constantinople went right on calling themselves “Romans”, as did their neighbors. Rome was reconquered by Justinian around 550; but even after it was lost for good in the late 700’s, the Eastern Roman Empire kept calling themselves “Romans”, and so did all their neighbors. There was a period of a good 700 years where if you called someone “Roman”, you would not have meant someone who lived in Italy. ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/7 "2015-02-22T14:47:48Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > I meant culturally moreso than physically. Ancient Chinese and Greek culture, while of course different in many ways from today’s Greek and Chinese people are still recognizably “Greek” and “Chinese”. Would the Romans be recognizably Italian to us in the same way? I can’t say much about China, but I wouldn’t say that modern-day Greeks are culturally recognizably Greek in a sense that they share much culturally with ancient Greeks. Sure, it’s part of the national identity of present-day Greece to invoke the heritage of ancient Greece and take pride in it, but when it comes to things that can be felt in practice, there aren’t many similarities. For one thing, religion is obviously totally different - Orthodox Christianity for modern-day Greeks, polytheism in classical antiquity. Linguistically, even though modern Greek draws a lot from ancient Greek and uses the same alphabet, the languages are not mutually intelligible. In terms of law and social order, today’s Greece has (luckily) very little in common with ancient Greece and is rather based on political and legal concepts developed much later in other parts of Europe and were later adopted by Greece (a country which, coincidentally, was under Ottoman, i.e. Muslim, rule for a long time and didn’t gain its independence from the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century). If you had a chance to talk to a person from ancient Greece in person, I doubt that his or her cultural identity and mentality would appear very similar to a present-day Greek person. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/8 "2015-02-22T15:46:08Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Who says they aren’t? The Romans themselves for instance. They fought wars over this issue. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/9 "2015-02-22T15:53:15Z")
> [@Schnitte](#): > > If you had a chance to talk to a person from ancient Greece in person, I doubt that his or her cultural identity and mentality would appear very similar to a present-day Greek person. For starters, even though they’d identify as “Greeks” in the sense of “not those unintelligible barbarians”, politically they would have identified with their individual polis. ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2015, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/10 "2015-02-22T16:58:30Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > For starters, even though they’d identify as “Greeks” in the sense of “not those unintelligible barbarians”, politically they would have identified with their individual polis. Exactly. The concept of a nation state - the idea that people with a shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnical background form a single polity, even though they’re spread across a larger geographic area - is a profoundly modern one. ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/11 "2015-02-23T00:19:15Z")
> [@MikeS](#): > > The center of gravity of the Roman Empire moved gradually east as the Empire went on. The most famous manifestation of this was Constantine’s decision to move of the capital to Constantinople in 330 AD; but well before then, the empire had been economically dependent on its eastern provinces. > > This meant that when Rome fell to Odoacer in 476, it was viewed as the loss of an outlying province. The folks in Constantinople went right on calling themselves “Romans”, as did their neighbors. Rome was reconquered by Justinian around 550; but even after it was lost for good in the late 700’s, the Eastern Roman Empire kept calling themselves “Romans”, and so did all their neighbors. There was a period of a good 700 years where if you called someone “Roman”, you would not have meant someone who lived in Italy. There are some citations from the middle of the first millennium AD which refer to what we would call the city of Rome as “Old Rome”, and to what we would call Constantinople/Istanbul as “New Rome”. Didn’t the Ottoman Sultans style themselves “Sultan of Rome” for a while after 1453? Though I’m not sure if that ever really took off. ---
**Author:** ![YPOD](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e99b99/32.png) [@YPOD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YPOD)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/12 "2015-02-23T00:42:19Z")
Romans would consider themselves Roman first and foremost, Italy was simply where the city was located. They would not be “ancient Italians” except by a geographical definition. Look at any Roman statue, vase, fresco, etc - they would look like any modern European, except maybe Romans had better teeth. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/13 "2015-02-23T01:48:24Z")
It would be truer to say that Italians identified as Romans in Imperial times, but in the 1st century BC there was an attempt by the Italian allies of Rome to shake off the Roman yoke and establish a separate confederation to be known as Italia. From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_War_%2890%E2%80%9388_BC%29) > [@](#): > > The Social War began in 91 BC when the Italian allies revolted. The Latins as a whole remained largely loyal to Rome, with the one exception of Venusia. The rebellious allies planned not just formal separation from Rome, but also the creation of their own independent confederation, called Italia, with its own capital at Corfinium (in modern-day Abruzzo) that was renamed Italica. Once the Romans had overcome the question of their dominance of the peninsula was settled and eventually they would grant Roman citizenship to all the Italian tribes. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/14 "2015-02-23T02:20:12Z")
Who wouldn’t want to kill Cicero ? ---
**Author:** ![Nelson\_Pike](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c6cbf5/32.png) [@Nelson\_Pike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nelson_Pike)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/15 "2015-02-23T03:32:45Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > The Romans themselves for instance. They fought wars over this issue. Which wars did the Romans fight over the issue of whether they should be considered an Italian people? ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/16 "2015-02-23T04:15:20Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#): > > Didn’t the Ottoman Sultans style themselves “Sultan of Rome” for a while after 1453? Though I’m not sure if that ever really took off. They called themselves “Kayser-i-Rûm”, i.e., Emperor (Caesar) of Rome. AFAIK they retained the title until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. They also kept the name of the city as Constantinople. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/17 "2015-02-23T04:29:40Z")
> [@Terminus\_Est](#): > > They called themselves “Kayser-i-Rûm”, i.e., Emperor (Caesar) of Rome. AFAIK they retained the title until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. They also kept the name of the city as Constantinople. No. Mehmed II claimed it, but his successors didn’t. One of the Sultan’s titles was “Emperor of The Three Cities of Constantinople, Andrinopole and Bursa”, though. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/18 "2015-02-23T04:43:06Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > No. Mehmed II claimed it, but his successors didn’t. One of the Sultan’s titles was “Emperor of The Three Cities of Constantinople, Andrinopole and Bursa”, though. Wikipedia seems to imply otherwise: > **[Ottoman dynasty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_dynasty)** > > The Ottoman dynasty (Turkish: Osmanlı Hanedanı) consisted of the members of the imperial House of Osman (Ottoman Turkish: خاندان آل عثمان, romanized: Ḫānedān-ı Āl-i ʿOsmān), also known as the Ottomans (Turkish: Osmanlılar). According to Ottoman tradition, the family originated from the Kayı tribe\[nb 1\] branch of the Oghuz Turks, under Osman I in northwestern Anatolia in the district of Bilecik, Söğüt. The Ottoman dynasty, named after Osman I, ruled the Ottoman Empire from c. 1299 to 1922. > Duri... > **[List of sultans of the Ottoman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sultans_of_the_Ottoman_Empire)** > > The sultans of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish: Osmanlı padişahları), who were all members of the Ottoman dynasty (House of Osman), ruled over the transcontinental empire from its perceived inception in 1299 to its dissolution in 1922. At its height, the Ottoman Empire spanned an area from Hungary in the north to Yemen in the south and from Algeria in the west to Iraq in the east. Administered at first from the city of Söğüt since before 1280 and then from the city of Bursa since 1323 or 1324, the em... ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/19 "2015-02-23T05:13:56Z")
> [@YPOD](#): > > except maybe Romans had better teeth. How would we know this? None of the ancient sculptures show anyone grinning. As for the thread topic, I think the OP has a point. I don’t know how true it really is, but more than once I’ve seen the claim that modern-day Greeks can read their own classical philosophers’ works untranslated. I suspect the truth is considerably more complicated than that, but on the other hand we definitely do know that Italians can’t read Cicero unless they have learned Latin as a foreign language, and the same is true for the rest of Romance-speaking Western Europe. I’m sure that Greek has gone through some changes over 2000 years, but I’d be surprised if they’ve been anything like the wrenching changes undergone by Western Romance, in which–except for the verbs–the inflectional system has withered away to mere vestiges; similarly the phonetic system has been simplified as well. From what I remember of early medieval history I don’t think Greece had new conquerors and migrants constantly coming in the way it happened in much of Western Europe, nor was it so devastated by depopulation and plagues, since the Balkans, together with western Asia Minor, remained the heart of the Eastern Empire almost until the final fall of Constantinople in 1453. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2015, 10:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339/20 "2015-02-23T10:41:16Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > but more than once I’ve seen the claim that modern-day Greeks can read their own classical philosophers’ works untranslated. I’ve heard that at one point the Generals who ruled Greece insisted that the press be published in classical Greek. Certainly, as a student of Classical Greek, I was able to read the newspapers, though not with ease, and we’re talking of 30 years ago so I couldn’t do it today. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-couple-questions-about-rome/713339.md?page=2)