Modern day Italians I believe are descended from one of the barbarian groups (Goths? Etruscans?), so what happened to the ancient Romans? Is their blood still around today?
Yeah their blood is still around. A whole race of people don’t just disappear like that. When the Western Roman Empire went belly up, the people there pretty much mingled with the barbarians. When the Eastern Roman Empire (Otherwise known as the Byzantine Empire) bit the dust at around roughly the 1400s, I figure they’d do the same, mingling with nearby groups of people.
I’ve been re-reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon recently. I highly reccomend it. I had forgotten how utterly fascinating a read it is.
I was under the impression that as time went on, “Roman” became less and less a racial or ethnic marker and the people who were privileged to call themselves Romans came from all over the empire.
Yep Acsenray. I think there were even quite a few number of Emperors with a barbarian lineage.
However good a yarn Gibbon spins, you should probably keep in mind that his thesis hasn’t been taken seriously by Classicists for quite some time now.
Romans did indeed intermingle with the barbarians, to the point where even those who lived in the City itself weren’t `pure-blooded’ by any stretch of the imagination. Rome’s decline was gradual, really, more like a Mad Max decline into barbarism than a single turning point: By the time Odovacer ascended to the throne of the Western Empire in 476 (and was recognized by Zeno, the Eastern Emperor), the Empire had split and was culturally changing into a loose grouping of regions populated and governed by Romanized barbarians.
So, Rome didn’t disappear, it simply faded away…
As Derleth said, it faded away.
To be Roman didn’t mean you were of pure italic stock, it meant you were a citizen of Rome, which included everyone from Hispania, Gaul, all the way out to Dacia (Romania). So, as the empire fell and faded away, identities no longer were “Roman” but became regional, such as being a citizen of Asturica Augusta (whence “asturias”), rather than a Roman living in Asturica Augusta.
Even though the Barbarians took over much of the empire, in Spain at least they weren’t a huge part of the population. In fact, the visigots were a small part, though they ruled most of the peninsula. They actually adopted the culture of Hispania and they themselves faded away (only vestiges are primarily words and a few additions to Spanish grammar).
I wonder why no Tuscan have ranted at you for calling his/her ancestors barbarians.
The Etruscans where the original inhabitants of the region now named Tuscany (from Tuscos = Etruscans). The Etruscans where much more civilized than the primitive Romans.
Three of the first kings of Rome: Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus were Etruscans.
Even today, Tuscans are proud of there ascendancy and consider all other Italians kind of barbarians.
When a great civilization declines and falls, the people themselves don’t go away. What is lost is the upper crust, the aristocracy, the intelligentsiia, and any rarefied cultural refinement. Meanwhile the proletariat just goes on reproducing and slaving away for whoever their current masters may be. What happens when a civilization is conquered is generally the invaders replace the old aristocracy. They keep the peasants and proles around to labor for them.
It’s like ancient statuary and architecture. Once it was covered with colorful paint and veneer. Now only bare stone survives, the part that is less glamorous but more durable.
The inhabitants of Rome’s working-class neighborhood of Trastevere are thought to be the descendants of the ancient Roman proletariat. But the lineage of the Caesars was lost long ago. The peasants of modern Egypt are descended from the peasants of ancient Egypt. But if the the pharaohs and Ptolemids had any descendants that survived their fall, the trace is long gone. If anyone asks “What happened to the Mayans?” the Mayans themselves will answer. “Hey! We’re still here! We didn’t go anywhere.” It was just the more advanced achievements of their civilization that went into decline. But the people stayed on just the same. The hardy stock of the lower classes usually isn’t affected much by change of regime (barring genocide or mass deportation).
While it might be said that they were more ‘civilized’ than the romans at some point, is should also be pointed out that the etrurian tribes succumbed under the roman civilization in the last couple of centuries BC. When Claudius tried to compose an etruscan dictionary/history, he was reputedly unable to find any living etruscans able to speak their own language. (Although sources differ on this point. It’s hard to know, as we haven’t found either his work or any the sources he used.)
It is worth pointing out that we today know very little about the etruscans. The little we know is from tomb stones and grave monuments, which give a rather biased view of their life.
One of my professors has a very Roman-looking face. He looks like some old senator who should have his face on a coin or something.
And there’s a bust of the emperor Tiberius at the Royal Ontario Museum… he looks exactly like Colin Mochrie.
I know a Roman. She was born in Rome.
What?
Consider the size of the barbarian invading populations. According to most historians the tribes numbered tens of thousands in some cases, and everything from a few hundreds to a few thousands for the minor ones, whereas the population of the Empire was millions.
There certainly was intermingling and cultural influences, but it was like dropping a bottle of ink in a pond (a big one, I admit): after a while you just have slightly darker water, but water nonetheless, not ink.
Indeed. The Severan emperors, for instance, hailed from North Africa and Syria. Philip the Arab, as his name suggests, was born in a small village in Arabia. Aurelian was born in the province of Moesia, which comprised portions of modern-day Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Constantine’s father’s family was from Illyricum and his mother was born in Bithynia (now part of Turkey). The last emperor of the Western Empire was Romulus Augustulus, whose father was a Hun (and a former employee of Attila).
Rome was a city state that expanded, mostly due to excellent bureaucy and good at planning for logistics. To say that people in Gaul or Syria were Roman is wrong. They were citizens of client states, many of which had kings.
The Romans even looked down on Italians, whom they thought were, if not barbarian, then at least peasants. Even though the rest of Italy was ruled for a long stretch of time by the Romans, they were not Roman per se, since they couldn’t vote.
As to were they went? Well several posters have already touched upon this. They didn’t really go anywhere.
Depends on your definition of “Roman” and the period you’re talking about. Your description applies best to the early Republic ( and even then some of the towns of Latium recieved full citizenship rights immediately on being incorporated into the Roman state, though most received only the partial, non-voting type ). After the Social War in 90-87 B.C., citizenship was extended to most of Italy, the towns of which became municipium like those Latin towns to which voting rights had earlier been granted and over a period of twenty years these new voters were integrated into the Roman system… After 212 A.D. all Roman subjects became Roman citizens with the right to vote ( of course since the Roman state was now an absolutist monarchy, that only extended to local and municipal matters and was far less significant ). The extent to which client states existed as internal entities or Rome can be considered simply a city-state with tributaries a al Aztec Tenochitlan is very much a factor of period as well. By Caracalla’s time, though the inhabitants of Rome proper may have still looked down on everyone else as provincial unsophisticates ( such is the natural social tendency born of living in a massively wealthy imperial capital ), the idea that they regarded, say, the inhabitants of Ravenna as “non-Roman” in any sense but that of not living in the city is probably mistaken.
- Tamerlane
Peoples are constantly flowing into new population groups. The only people that remain more or less steady over time are inhabitants of isolated islands or in remote areas such as the Amazon rain forest, and even they are subject to genetic drift.
I used to wonder the same thing about the Celts. 2500 years ago, nearly everyone from the British Isles south to northern Iberia and east through the Alps and even into the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Boehemia was a Celt. Now only a few million people in Iresland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany are considered to be Celts. So the Celts must have been killed off or driven to exticntion elsewhere right?
But all of those other Celts didn’t die off. They were just absorbed into the “Roman” population in much of the empire, which in turn was driven by Germanic peoples into the various ethnic groups we consider “Western European” today. If your ancestors are from a Western European country, you are Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and maybe if we go far back enough - Basque as well. There is of course more than a few Huns, Berbers, and Israelites wading in that gene pool too, but many people still insist on being lebelled as a “pure” something.
I read somewhere that the Celts where really not ‘a people’ in our sense of the word. It was more of a common heritage, perpeptuated by the druids caste (if that’s the word for it), much in the way the Catholic church is a common denominator for many people today. I don’t recall where I read this, though. Any pors or cons for that theory.
And yes, Tamerlane, I was being a bit sketchy in my description. If I’m not mistaken, the franchise was given to increasingly larger groups so that the current consul or power-monger could get a larger clientel, thus ensuring votes - at least as long as Rome remained a republic.