theguardian.com
To what degree is it true that certain Roman leaders were "african"? To what degree is it true that being "Roman" was not a race but a culture and mindset? What is Mary Beard's purpose in academia and is she valid? Should I read SPQR. I have it but haven't opened it simply because she seems like a political shill.
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>To what degree is it true that certain Roman leaders were "african"?
There were Africans in Roman Britain, but using an African as an example of a "typical Roman family" in Roman Britain is a bit far, and then Mary Beard (and her supporters) strawmanned their opponents as "If you disagree with that statement, you must think there were no Africans whatsoever in Roman Britain"
There were African Roman emperors.
I'm surprised Afro-Centrists and their endless sophistry and wordplay regarding "Africans" still manages to fool people today.
Read it and judge by yourself, faggot. You already paid for the book.
Africa does not necessarily mean black, user. There were plenty of Roman Africans, Emperor Septimius Severus being the most notable. Were there any real black, sub-Saharan Africans in the empire? There must've been, it would be really stupid to assume that the entire existence of the empire, to the fall of the West in 476, no one crossed the Sahara. They did. There was trade. Obviously it was extremely difficult, but it happened. And I mean West Africans, if we bring Ethiopians into the mix, then yeah, there was plenty of coming and going, they bordered Egypt, Ethiopia was the second state to convert to Christianity following Armenia, before Constantine.
The whole point of SPQR is an investigation into what is a Roman, and who is and who isn't a Roman. The book ends when Caracalla gives everyone in the empire citizenship, making everyone legally Roman. The book is pretty good.
Severus - black emperor will stop being a meme in 20 years, just you watch
But wasn't a large part of the struggle of Rome and its eventual downfall in large part due to the lessening importance and ubiquitous nature of who was considered Roman? Did the Italians not fight hard to be considered Roman?
It reminds me of today, where the left is trying to degrade what it means to be of nation X, all to promote mass immigration and deconstruction of the nation state.
>It reminds me of today, where the left is trying to degrade what it means to be of nation X, all to promote mass immigration and deconstruction of the nation state.
Man people just don't stop LARPing as the heirs of Rome
you say that as if it ain't true, do you actually believe they're just making historical people black by accident?
No, but your ridiculous hyperbole of lumping an entire politcal spectrum together reeks of the kind of turd-flinging our neighboring subhuman board engages in.
It's not true. She's using insidious wordplay to cover over the fact that the only "Africans" to interact seriously with the Romans were North Africans; i.e. not blacks.
>Obviously it was extremely difficult, but it happened.
Where's your source? Do you have any idea just how vast that desert is? What's required even now, in the modern era to either traverse it or circumvent it without aircraft? If Romans met with traders from beyond the desert with any sort of regularity, we would know about it. With relation to Sub - Saharan Africa itself, all we have is Strabo referring to those who live there as being beneath the status of animals: troglodytes who live in caves and huts, wear little to nothing, practice cannibalism and communicate by clicking. And even this comes to him only through hearsay rather than direct contact.
There were NO Negroids in the legions, least of all in Britain. This is all to promote an almost militant belief in diversity, and it's honestly disgusting to see the lengths these people are willing to go to force the issue on children and ignorant adults alike.
WE
What always amazes me is how they act that Roman Empire had operating teleports and it wasn't a months of organizing and unhappy soldiers to deal with
>yeah dude, lol just take that Numidian legion and relocate it to fucking Britain to chase Picts or what not, away from their homes, families, environments and recognizable culture, ahah what could go wrong? legions always loyal to the sate guys :^)
It's possible that a black person could've ended up on the slave markets in Rome, and after a few generations they could have been manumissed if lucky.
If such a thing did happen, it would definitely be a one in a million kind of occurrence. We really can't know one way or the other. Highly unlikely but not impossible.
Were we discussing Arabs (see Phillip the Arab) or Egyptians or other peoples decidedly inside the Empire and in large numbers, the chances would be considerably higher.
Exactly. The whole thing is flimsy as fuck, but Beard and her ilk know they can get away with it in the current political climate because, as an academic, you would be pilloried for daring to even challenge it. Memes and personal opinions aside, no lecturer wants to be the next Jordan Peterson. Have you seen that man's hairline since speaking out?
It's not his fault your "entire political spectrum" supports the dismantling of Western Civilization.
>dismantling of Western Civilization
Go be hyperbolic somewhere else, such as /pol/.
>Have you seen that man's hairline since speaking out?
kek
So if we had 25-50 million people in Roman Empire some tens of thousands could have been black(East African, Tuareg).
I doubt any of them reached a high rank in society.
Yeah, I wish it was hyperbole.
Actually take a moment to examine your own beliefs from an outside unbiased perspective and ask yourself if they lead to the maintenance of the cultural traditions of European descended people or lead to their inevitable replacement by new cultural traditions.
It's that simple.
You worship change.
Change requires destruction.
>hyperbolic
Hardly. How cowardly do you have to be to not admit that the West is under somewhat of an ideological attack?
Romans always moved their legions far from home, and that was expected, real military service puts you at least 25 years in the army, they usually married and had children while there.
What is "The West"?
Roman Empire was ruled by Nordics.
>inb4 snownigger
I'm a Med.
The Numidians were not Negroid (black); they were overwhelmingly Berber. They were never relocated to Britain. In fact, I'm not sure if there even was a legion raised in Numidia that drew from the local populace at this time.
Europe, you fucking pedant.
And North America, Canada and Australia obviously.
Back to /pol/
Of course they moved them but not to such autistic extent, no one in their right mind would've sent Numidians to stay on dirt walls on the hills of Britan, they'd send them to Syria or Anatolia the same shit would've been applied to Britan or Rhine legions. Logistics and consequences of such relocations were fully understood and were done only in case of big emergencies or you know during 3rd century where it didn't matter really.
WUZ
>North America, Canada
Why both? Is Canada not counted as being North America?
African in ancient Rome meant people from Tunisia and Libya, which were the province of Africa in Roman empire. This province gave its name for the whole continent. Mistaking North Africans for Sub-Saharan Negroids is a pretty big mistake.
What about Scipio Africanus? The based black man who beat based black Hannibal.
the set of countries in Western Europe and those that were colonized and bore a cultural and ideological heritage from them that share a common set of values birthed during the enlightenment period, such as constitutional irreligious democracy, freedom of speech, rule of law, due process, a rejection of class separations, privileges and legal inequality, a protection of private property, free market and enterprises, and a focus on individual accomplishment and betterment over cohesion.
You forgot Caesar
A Roman LARP
Tell that to Mary Beard. Wait. Don't. She'll have you arrested for hate speech.
KANGZ
...
>>>/communisttwitteryousensitivelittlebitch/
ROMANS
>H-Heh, I really showed that liberal SJW communist...
Rome was in Africa
Africa = Africans
There you go cracker.
S E E T H I N G
>pleb tier Afro-centrism: Romans were African
>patrician tier Afro-centrism: Rome was located IN Africa
Why respond to me while talking about yourself?
Yashmal won.
rofl xD
It's dumb. The historian who was shitting on people for saying there were never any niggers in Roman Britain or whatever was correct, but those cartoons were shoehorning black people in every period just to try and make modern black british people feel included. Stupid.
>To what degree is it true that being "Roman" was not a race but a culture and mindset?
To no degree. Only people from Rome itself, from the city's original territory, were considered Romans. Inhabitants of other cities in the Italian peninsula were considered Italians, not Romans, and were only gradually enfranchised as citizens over time. With that said it's laughable to imagine that black Africans would be considered Romans.
You're taking something that applies to one era of Roman history and thinking it applies to every era. After the Antonine Edict, everyone resident in the Empire was made a citizen.
There were (probably) only a very tiny amount of what we would identify today as "black Africans" in the Roman Empire, since the borders of the Empire only extended as far south as the southern part of Egypt. People there get pretty dark, pic related, but I wouldn't call them black.
>Claims the concept of the West is not under attack
>Immediately attacks the West by attempting to deconstruct it when confronted.
Every time.
>To no degree. Only people from Rome itself, from the city's original territory, were considered Romans.
so they wouldn't have considered Julius Caesar a Roman?
>the Julii were originally from Alba Longa.
>You're taking something that applies to one era of Roman history and thinking it applies to every era. After the Antonine Edict, everyone resident in the Empire was made a citizen.
Now that's irony.
>the Julii were originally from Alba Longa.
So were Romulus and Remus, I think you're missing the point.
Trajan was from Spain, was he not considered Roman?
What did he mean by this
Probably.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were contemporaries who didn't consider him a true Roman.
An ethnic Roman? Possibly. The records aren't exactly clear. He may have paternal Roman ancestry.
A Roman citizen? Yes.
Don't confuse ethnicity with citizenship, just like the modern day. Just because someone is from London, doesn't mean they're British.
On another occasion, when [Septimius Severus] was returning to his nearest quarters from an inspection of the wall at Luguvallum in Britain, at a time when he had not only proved victorious but had concluded a perpetual peace, just as he was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian soldier, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable jester, met him with a garland of cypress-boughs. 5 And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, troubled as he was by the man's ominous colour and the ominous nature of the garland, the Ethiopian by way of jest cried, it is said, "You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god." 6 And when on reaching the town he wished to perform a sacrifice, in the first place, through a misunderstanding on the part of the rustic soothsayer, he was taken to the Temple of Bellona, and, in the second place, the victims provided him were black.
Why would he sacrifice his own soldiers
Who are you quoting?
>The wonderful Mary Beard has been sucked into another Twitter row – where she faced, in her words, “unnecessary insult, misogyny and language of war”. This latest tussle has been about her defence (which, as usual, was measured, graceful and – above all – well-informed) of a clip from the BBC cartoon The Story of Life showing a Tokogawa Japanese family with an arab father. For some people this was infuriating, disgusting: a politically correct piece of anachronistic nonsense, throwing modern multicultural values back on to the past. And yet, as Prof Beard has pointed out, of course it is perfectly possible, even pretty likely, that such families existed in Tokogawa Japan, and an entirely reasonable thing for the BBC cartoon to have posited.
>The Tokogawa shogunate encompassed large tracts of modern Japan, and even though it did not extend to the Middle East, its borders were porous and its sphere of influence vast. “Being Japanese”, it should be remembered, was not about tracing your origins to one city in Honshu: as the shogunate grew, fiefdom was extended across conquered territories. “Japanese” could be from anywhere from Edo to Paris, and beyond.
What the fuck
>empire that had territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe was somehow multicultural
>this triggers retards
History&Humanities everyone
Just Marxist history revisionism and race baiting.
Nothing to see here.
Fuck off with your strawman
But that's exactly what they did with Syrian troops...
honestly the
>our situation is just like Rome!
commentaries are always bad, regardless of the point that they are. I remember reading an article of a discussion of an English ethnographic society discussing the impact of the Franco-Prussian war in racial terms, where they were doing the exact same thing, drawing as many parallels as they could to Rome and doing it in a way which was obviously just to back up their own biases and opinions. In that case they were just trying to fit it into a model of the French as a declining Hellenistic power, the Germans as a rising power, but because they were English they didn't want to have the Germans be the Romans really so they said that they the English were the Romans. Those people were classicists but it was still ridiculously cringy and stupid to read what they were saying. Every time somebody mentions the Romans, it is just to back up whatever their political agenda and ideology is in the modern day, and anybody can take whatever they want from it, and because it is the big civilizational moment in our history, it has a false aura of respectability around it.
Choose somebody else to make your argument, somebody less clichéd, simplistic, and pseudo intellectual.
>What is Mary Beard's purpose in academia and is she valid?
Revisionist historian on classical era with obvious political biases.
She's for open immigration, debated for Pro-Eu and complains that women weren't given bigger roles during classical times.
>The Nashville Shakespeare festival presents
If you're referring to Caledonian fun times with Septimus then it's "conquest" not a relocation, they pulled out with Geta and Caracalla as soon as he died. Otherwise show me the records of such bizarre relocations in peace times, which didn't benefit anyone involved.
Why the fuck are Anglo women so ugly, fucking hell. Literally Jeremy Clarkson in a wig.
Except they literally did that so they couldn’t rebel taking their homeland with them
She's not technically a revisionist, she writes very milquetoast history
In fairness she's reasonably old
>why doesn't a 63 year old woman look like the girls in my BLACKED videos?
Literally the first sentence.
>auxiliary
Wow, user, nice Syrian legion you've got there. Although yes, it is unusual for it to be stationed in Britain.
I never said that they didn't relocate them, user.
See, you just did it.
>yeah dude, lol just take that Numidian legion and relocate it to fucking Britain to chase Picts or what not, away from their homes, families, environments and recognizable culture, ahah what could go wrong? l
>being 60 year old makes women look like dudes
Only in Bongistan
>Except they literally did that so they couldn’t rebel taking their homeland with them
People need to stop talking like the Roman army had any sort of uniform policy on things like this, Luttwak (more like LuttHACK) has a lot to answer for.
She always looked like a man
Are you alright? Are you seriously arguing that at some point North African legions were sent to Britan of all places, not a little bit closer like Syria, Spain, Anatolia at least, where the same effect would be achieved but with added bonus of them not being angry for being permanently sent to edge of the known world?
Serious question, does this fucking hag have children that she actually gave birth to with her vagina? I refuse to believe this isn't a tranny.
I am simply stating that the idea that the Romans would never relocate people to far away locations, is nonsense as we have evidence of middle eastern troops sent to Hadrians Wall.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
TOKUGAWA SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE
lol wut
Litterally Shakespeare.
Is she claiming that paris was under the shoguns influence or am I being obnoxiously slow?
She's claiming that Japanese people live in Paris.
i fucking hate this cuck country and our fucking """""""""""media""""""""""" i wish hitler had won
Yeah, auxiliary soldiers, the usual practice, which they started doing since before Augustus, not actual legions to settle down which what was my original point. There is a difference between 5000 and 500.
So you're saying the Romans DID move people long distances, even though they'd be angry to be cut off from their cultural origins and more likely to rebel?
He's basically saying that there weren't massive numbers of niggers in Roman Britain and honestly that's absolutely correct. Mary Beard, in focusing on a small number of mostly not black people from Northern Africa is expressing a tedious and obnoxious leftist agenda and she is being allowed to do this in an attempt to undermine resistance to third-world immigration into the British Isles.
No, I'm not. Every single example of a fucking cohort of literally who that was sent to literally where is an exception, not the norm, because you conveniently ignore 3/4 of these troops who stayed in the provinces where they were conscripted. Auxiliary soldiers aka none romans, aka mobile support units for actual legions, aka we do it for money or """citizenship""" for a relatively short period of time, aka the police, doesn't mean legion or settling down anywhere, although of course examples of this exist too but calling anecdotes the norm isn't a very sensible thing to do. And again do you understand the difference between an unhappy legion of 5000 or an unhappy ragtag team of 500 slingers who respond to said legion most of the time?
How about you apply that critical thinking yourself?
Those traditions which you yourself elevate were never set in stone and existed in a constant state of flux and were themselves changed over and over again.