Sicily is a prime example ..
The ancient Romans on race
- Thread starter JadeB
- Start date
The Moors invading Sicily was after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They were probably Black people unconnected to the Moors in Sicily during the height of the Empire, however.
The Midwest "rust belt" has drank ate breathed lead forever.. why they all fukked up with cancers ugly and diseases
No source needed. Just google, look up where some of the emperors were born. You can see it through the fact that by the third century in particular they had emperors coming from all over the place. Where in the first century the emperors were all proper Romans, born and raised in the city itself from families that had been there forever (to be Roman meant to be from the city and nowhere else; Italy was conquered land no different to any other place and Italians weren't worth shyt: see everything that happened after 133 BCE with the efforts of the Gracchi, Saturninus and Glaucia, and Drusus to try and get Italians some political rights - each of them got assassinated for trying to do that because the Romans did not want to share their citizenship with Italians or give them political rights), by the third century they had dudes coming from Arabia like Philip the Arab, from Africa like the Severan dynasty, and even from the barbarian eastern European tribes like Maximinus Thrax.
Prior to the end of the civil wars they had still relied very heavily on foreigners in the army, largely because the Romans were poor at horsemanship and lacked cavalry, and they also lacked missiles. Roman citizens would provide most of the heavy infantry and all of the artillery corps in a standard legion of 5280 men. But you can't win very many battles with no missiles and no cavalry, they're fukking more important than the heavy infantry. So they would pick up several hundred archers and slingers, all of whom were foreigners - archers from Crete or Numidia, slingers from the Balearic islands or Rhodes - and a few thousand cavalry, usually from Gaul or Numidia such as Caesar's famed Gallic cavalry or Scipio Africanus' Numidian cavalry.
But all these foreigners were basically just mercenaries, very well paid to ensure their loyalty (not to mention drafted from places the Romans ruled over), and no more than that. There was no thought of Romanizing them because their non-Romanness was essential to their military effectiveness. Like I said, the Romans were absolutely terrible at horsemanship and at firing handheld missile weapons. They needed foreign cultures to provide that expertise in order to cover up the huge weaknesses in their military system. You needed their home culture to not be Roman, otherwise they would lose that expertise.
After the civil wars ended Augustus decided to give those foreign mercenaries a pathway into Roman citizenship, he created the rule that if you put up 15 years service then you're in, you're a citizen. You wouldn't have been born a citizen, so you would have still had your cultural upbringing which made you an effective horseman or archer, but once you got it you could live wherever you liked and your descendants would all be citizens too.
About 250 years later Caracalla created a law that all free born men within the empire were automatically citizens, military service or not.
I can give you a source for the claims I made about Rome being one of the leading centres of world trade and therefore a place that would have attracted people from all over the world. It's an ancient source written by a Greco-Egyptian sea captain, a guy who participated in the Indian Ocean trade network. His route covered from Alexandria in Egypt - that was the drop off point, goods he left there would presumably make their way to Rome eventually by some other guy in the Mediterranean trade route - down to Ethiopia and Somalia and Kenya, over to all parts of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian gulf, and across the sea to all parts of India.
This book is called Periplous of the Erythraean Sea. The sea captain's name was Periplous, and Erytheaen Sea is what the Greeks called the Red Sea. He wrote a very detailed geography of all the places I mentioned because he went there to buy and sell stuff. He wrote down where the cities were, how to sail to them, what kind of things could be sold and bought there, what the local customs and laws were, what the local form of government was, and all these types of useful information designed to help other people involved in the Indian Ocean trade network.
We know he didn't make any of this shyt up because the physical evidence supports his claims. Wherever he said there was a city, it was actually there. For example there was a big discovery made in a town on the south-eastern tip of India a few decades ago. A hoard of Roman aureii, solid gold coins, to wit, over 4,000 of them, all of them bearing the face of Augustus and all of them in excellent condition. What this discovery tells us is that the trade between Rome and the rest of the world was roaring centuries before Periplous was even born to write about it. 4,000 gold coins was a fukking fortune, the equivalent of making a transaction today worth millions of dollars. On the face value of the gold alone, it's worth near $3m today, that's before you figure in inflation so we might be talking about a value 10 times that amount for back then. It's by far the largest hoard of Augustan-era gold coins found anywhere in the world. And it was all found all in one place, probably where the house of an important merchant in that Indian town used to be. Somebody prominent in the elephant trade, or maybe he owned a steel mill or many acres of spice-cultivating farmland.
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ReturnOfJudah
Veteran
America is an extension of the Roman empire. Aint shyt changed
So its end is near?
