A culturally and socially united roman empire

Let's say that the roman empire at it's infancy decides to unite all it's land after Augustas conquest. By granting citzenship to all the people in it's province, setting a comman lanuage used by every area in the empire.

By creating a rome that really includes people from every area, and people from all corners being able to call themselves roman, including the areas of Britian, spain, Cartage, Greece and etc, can the roman civilization last longer like the chinese?

The chinese civiliztion was believed that the reason it can last so long is because everyone in china considered themselves to be chinese first, their province second.

This way, no matter who conquered the roman lands, the next leader can be called the roman emperor no matter what. Because if most of western europe is basically rome...even if a barbarian invasion from other areas attacked Italy, the roman civilization can survive, and people will dream of reuniting the roman empire instead of trying to establish independence.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
You can set a common language but getting everyone to speak it is something else. The same thing applies to culture. I have to wonder at how much the Gauls, who suffered 1 million dead of 3 million total at Caesar's hand, would really want to be Roman.

OTOH one thing that would go a long way is to make sure the weights&measures are standardised.
 
Latinization did work pretty well in the Western Empire. The trouble was that the East was pretty solidly Hellenized and undermining that might be a bit of a hard task for Roman culture.
 
Aside from the fact that the not everyone even in core China speaks Chinese *today* - the whole idea is not practicable. The Roman Empire functioned on the basis of relationships between subject states, allies, and the Roman people, and if you change that you are going to destroy the Augustan state so thoroughly there won't be an Empire. Probably ever.

As to making it work - it did work. In the Western Empire, most people stopped speaking their old languages and took up Latin. The Gauls, despite the horrors of Caesar's campaign, really very much wanted to become Roman. Everybody did. The Roman identity dominated political discourse in Europe for a millennium after the reality of Empire ended for most inhabitants.

The big problem IMO is that the concept of emperorship was divorced from actual power and legitimation. A Chinese emperor was legitimated by the mandate of heaven which was evident in his success. A Roman emperor had a much harder time after the church was around. I'm convinced that had the West managed to meaningfully translate the idea of election by acclamation through the Senate and People, Roman emperorship could have retained a political function there, too.
 
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