diversity – Waiting for Winter

potatoimperatrix:

sapper-in-the-wire:

build-wall:

sapper-in-the-wire:

thefuturemayyetbewon:

teenagers in Ancient Rome: You are all hateful bigots, this is ***476*** and the barbarians just want to have the benefits of our empire!

This is an insult to Rome. They were far more accepting of foreigners and foreign customs than us today. They would add foreign Gods to their pantheon, and adopted nearly every culture and custom they came across.

Most of the foreigners they were surrounded by in a religious sense were also pluralistic and accepting of synthesis. The Romans completely rejected, mass-murdered and destroyed the temple of the one group that were not like this because they constantly tried to rebel, subvert and mass-murder Romans, partially due to their unbending religious beliefs. Ooh sounds familiar!

Outside of religion the Romans certainly DID NOT ‘adopt nearly every culture or custom’… tell that to the Celts, Iberian peoples, Carthaginians, Numidians and others whose cultures they destroyed and amalgamated into a Romanised mould.

What the fuck are you on about? In no way, shape or form was Rome insular. Yes, the Empire whose sword was Iberian, whose arches were Etruscan, whose armies were modeled after the Greeks, then Celts, then Parthians, the Empire that gave citizenship to everyone, regardless of origin, yeah, they were really insular and racist.

“Mass murder” they wiped out fortresses and armies that resisted, but otherwise the Romans were tolerant of the Jews and would often patronize them and their ceremonies, especially when it would piss of the Greeks. Yup, even the Christians were so persecuted that you could find Christians in the imperial court of Diocletian.

They didn’t destroy cultures you fuckwit. Coloniae and municipia mostly kept to themselves in a sea of “barbarism”. The locals were not forced to adopt Roman language or customs. (Tacitus, Agricola, also see

L.A. Curchin, Roman Spain: Conquest and
Assimilation.) In time they would voluntarily adopt things that they liked, but there was no official practice of forcing anything upon conquered peoples, besides taxes.

The post wasn’t alluding to war practices, it was trying to make a half baked implication on Roman immigration policy. Rome in no way was anti-immigration. If they were, they would have been stamped out by more numerous enemies like the Etruscans or Samnites. Rome was always marked by a willingness to incorporate people and nations into their empire. Hell, they were willing to provoke a war with Carthage in order to adopt Saguntum into their empire, weren’t they?

You’re half right, the Romans didn’t adopt everything they came across – they didn’t have any of the racial superiority of the Greeks. In Athens, you couldn’t be a citizen unless you were of “Athenian blood,” you could work and live in Athens, but you couldn’t own property, vote, or marry an Athenian woman. The Athenians were so worried about foreign blood they locked their women up on the second floor of their houses to prevent interbreeding. Meanwhile the Roman Edict of Caracalla declared that all free men in the Empire were full Roman citizens, regardless of origin. By the 2nd Century CE, around 50-60% of Senators were non-Italian. (M. Hammond, “Composition of the Senate, A.D. 68-235”)

In fact, the only culture or ethnic group the Romans were openly hostile to were the Greeks. Graeculus was a pejorative that the Romans used to describe anything corrupt and excessive. The Romans considered their own origin as that of rusticitas, i.e. they thought of themselves as barbarian. (N.K. Petrochilos, Roman Attitudes to the Greeks.)

Romanization was a two-way street, the Romans had no working practices that enforced anything near resembling Roman ethnic or cultural superiority.

I’m really at a loss as to how you can be so fucking daft. Multiculturalism was the the defining aspect of Roman conquest, and the primary reason they’re the longest lasting empire in Europe. It only took 150 administrators to look after 60 million citizens in the 2nd Century (K. Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire”). Subjects of the Empire were happy to be part of the Empire because they got citizenship without being forced to give up who they were.

So honestly, go fuck yourself. The Romans will not be used as an excuse for modern racism and insularism.

Hey I haven’t read all of this but in case you are interested there is a paper issued by Waseda University of Japan, “Multiculturalism and the Roman Empire,” penned by Kim Kyung-hyun. It does not only talk about multiculturalism itself but also draws a parallel with diversity in America.