Were Romans from Rome proper racist torwards "Romans" from other provinces?
Everyone in the ancient world was racist as fuck. It was pretty great. Cicero was basically a /pol/tard kek
>>18760358>civilization famous for calling non-Italians/Greeks useless, backwards, "barbarians"What do you think?
>>18760358I wouldn't call it racism in the modern sense but yes.Cato the Elder was seen as a quasi-foreigner because he was born in a settlement outside rome. A settlement that was so close to Rome that I'm pretty sure it is part of Rome today.
>>18760358Yes. Juvenal even complained Latin wasn't even heard in Rome anymore. But there also were others. Caesar, for example, actively invited talanted Greeks, Syrians, Gauls, and Spaniards to serve him. The Senate opposition criticised him for that.
this >>18760399They were like niglynching klansmen to anyone they wouldn't invite to their daughter's wedding.
>>18760358Looked down on as rustic provincials, similar to how the English view the Scots and Welsh
No, but they were prejudiced. There are other types of prejudice besides "racism" which is specifically predicated on race, Romans were culturally elitist. Back when Rome was still the core of everything, the only "TRVE ROMANS" were the ones born in Rome. Everybody else was just varying degrees of barbarians and were sneered at as inferiors. The Romans were so notoriously arrogant and condescending toward non-Romans that even their own allies found them insufferable.
The modern idea of race and racism didn't exist at the time. The Romans were tribalists, but they used a mode of discriminating against other tribes that was culturally effusive and practiced in Europe for millennia. Namely: Romans believed only they were civilized. Everyone else? Stupid barbarians, utterly inferior in every way, who desperately need Roman civilization to improve their lives even if they will always be inferior to real Romans. Over the centuries, who was a "true Roman" changed as citizenship laws changed. Originally only people who lived in the actual city of Rome were civilized, everyone else were barbarians. Even other Italian city states were barbarians. Even dependent villages and towns in Rome's immediate surroundings were barbarians. Unless you were born inside Rome's sacred boundary you were forever tainted as inferior, and at best Rome's elite would look at you like a "civilized barbarian".Over time, though, Italy got extended full citizenship, and Rome ceased to be the political and cultural center of the Empire, and citizenship even expanded outside Italy. Of course, the people who lived in Italy, in the old great cities of the Empire, still believed themselves superior to those living in the provinces. Italians were considered the prime stock, the truly civilized people, and the provinces were backwards, uncivilized places.
>>18760525>Romans believed only they were civilized. Everyone else? Stupid barbariansDidn't they view the Greeks as fellow "civilized" people? But with the caveat that they had become soft, efette, and decadent?
>>18760536Nope. They straight up considered Greeks barbarians. Romans had endlessly cultural myth to justify the similarity between their own religion and military tradition and the older Greek traditions which still somehow put the Greeks beneath Romans.Obviously, this changed when political, military, and economic power shifted east. But even when Constantinople became the new capital, the Romans who migrated to live there looked down on the locals in the Achaea, Macedonia, and Thracia, as inferiors. After all, they utterly crushed the Greeks in their conquest of the region, and nothing inspires Roman contempt more than poor performance in War. In fact, being good at war is basically the only way barbarians can get any grudging respect from Rome.
>>18760546Not entirely true. Horace wrote about how Rome owed it's cultural heritage to the Greeks, and Cato the Elder distinguished them from the rest of the "barbarians".
>>18760551They admitted it, then would go on to explain how the Roman tradition is the "real one" and the Greek barbarians somehow lost or corrupted it, and what they practice now is not original way. They never considered Greeks to be their equal, or worthy of special rights. They might be "different" from other barbarians, but at the end of the day, they are still barbarians, subject to scorn from the Roman elite. At least until the Romans had lived there for a couple centuries.
>>18760546not at all. the Romans were completely overawed by Greek civilization and felt conscious of their own inferiority.
>>18760525>The modern idea of race and racism didn't exist at the time.The Romans did believe in the concept of race. In fact they mention it multiple times, that they and other Central Italians belonged to the 'Italian Race'. It was one of the rallying points of the Gracchi, that they would help uplift the Italian race from the deprivations of great estates and a flood of slaves. It was an idea was mass popular appeal and was accepted by Roman elites and plebs alike. Despite that, the Romans at the end of the day were Roman supremacists. It was easy to integrate the peoples of Central Italy into this identity since they already believed they shared a race, and they had an essentially identical culture and political organisation by the start of the Middle Republic. >Unless you were born inside Rome's sacred boundary you were forever tainted as inferior, and at best Rome's elite would look at you like a "civilized barbarian"The reality of anything like that stopped existing sometime during the Early Republic when the transitory nature of Patrician clans and city membership ended (which also in a way hardened these requirements, as permanent association with a city by a Patrician clan was unusual up until that point). Basically all supremacy when it came to actually being from the city of Rome was a dick measuring competition between Patricians and everybody else. It was not so much based in popular opinion as it was a tiny class of the Patricians.
>>18760553The early/mid Republic era was characterized by the Greeks calling the Romans barbarians, ironically enough.
Really makes me fucking wonder why anyone not 100% Italian would idolize and LARP as a Roman.
The provinces gained importance after Carcalla granted all free Romans citizenship.
>>18760578Late Rome was a completely different civilization from Republican or even kingdom Rome. Late Rome was more like the proto United States internet larpers think of. Everyone in the ancient world was racist. Even the classical Greeks saw each other as “foreigners”
>>18760587the other thing was that the army was increasingly non-Italians with time
>>18760591> Late Rome was more like the proto United States internet larpers think of.Nuh-uh! Paxtube said Rome wasn't a melting pot.
>>18760595All Roman provinces were required to supply troops for the army, but during the imperial period the legions were mostly all stationed on the frontiers and most of the empire rarely saw a legion.
>>18760511I think people just mean prejudice when they say racism nowadays. It’s like the “racism” term has taken over even when it doesn’t make sense. How can a white person be racist towards another? They belong to the same “race” which isn’t even real anyway. It’s possibly why so many people assume Ancient Greeks were “racist” like in this case but no, they were just oldschool xenophobia. A black Ancient Greek born and raised in Athens would be considered civilised compared to a Latin barbarian.
>>18760681Don’t make me post the Juvenal quote about niggers. They knew what Africa was. They weren’t post modern civnats…
Yes, that's why (caracalla) chimped out and gave everyone citizenship, thus dooming the greatest empire of all time
>>18760699he needed to expand his tax base
>>18760687Ah yes, the satirist who /pol/tards like you take at face value because you are incapable of understanding satire and let alone the concept of Roman gens. It’s like a future archaeologist deducing what people in 2008 thought by taking posts written on /b/ seriously
>>18760687>They weren’t post modern civnats…If a person from Gaul or Dacia with 100% Latin ancestry could be a citizen then yes they were.
>>18760725>>18760730Dilate
>>18760358Oh yeah. During the Dominate period their was definitely a strong sense that foreigners could become Romans, but this idea was likely much weaker in B.C. times, and I'm sure that not everyone from Italy ever fully accepted it. If political parties existed there definitely would've been Know-Nothings. After the fall of the western Empire Roman identity hardened into something less civic and more ethnic once again, but there was still always some room for bringing new blood into the fold.
>>18760732Was I wrong though?A non-Latin person could be a citizen.
not a single source in this entire thread btwdiscourse below the level of a highschool student
>>18760358No, that was their problem. They weren't racist enough.
>>18760875Why would we need sources, it's Rome. We all know what happened. They were wholesome Augustinian tolerant universalists, they let Syrians and Libyans and Egyptians and Arabs become emperor, universal citizenship was granted, the patricians were swamped, the wheels came off the wagon, the Goths arrived to put it out of its misery
>>18760511>There are other types of prejudice besides "racism" which is specifically predicated on racePrejudice on the basis of culture, especially in the ethnic sense, is racism full stop. Don't know why you're trying to split this hair, stop acting retarded.
>>18760708Sacrificed long term stability for short term profit.
