AHC: Get Rome to remain as a nation and people for as long as possible.

Euphemios

Euphemios

NotAMyth said:
All exclusivity will get you is a nesting loop of smaller and smaller groups of people who claim they are the only true members of their exclusive group. At the end of this chain, you'll find maybe 5 guys whose credentials no one in the world can question. Does that mean that no one is part of that group apart from these people? Of course not. That just means that the Roman Identity gets wider with the "More Roman" groups like Italians getting subgrouped, like the WASPS in the USA.
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If everyone is Roman, then no one is. As was proven by Rome, as in the nation of Latins from the aptly named Latium, utterly ceasing to exist once it was shattered in the 5th century.
 

Fabius Maximus

NotAMyth said:
Man no disrespect, but this argument is always nuts, and somehow has been ongoing since antiquity to modern nation-states. All exclusivity will get you is a nesting loop of smaller and smaller groups of people who claim they are the only true members of their exclusive group. At the end of this chain, you'll find maybe 5 guys whose credentials no one in the world can question. Does that mean that no one is part of that group apart from these people? Of course not. That just means that the Roman Identity gets wider with the "More Roman" groups like Italians getting subgrouped, like the WASPS in the USA.
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Simply as a matter of observation, plenty of societies have managed to demarcate their culture from others' without falling into the sort of purity spiral you refer to. Regardless, though, my point isn't that the one view is better than the other, but simply that "People of any culture could have Roman citizenship, therefore people of any culture could be Roman" is an oversimplification and needs to be qualified more than it usually is in these sorts of discussions.
NotAMyth said:
Even if we discount the Greek-speaking Sicily and Southern Italy, there is numerous evidence that educated citizens of the empire were commonly trilingual even in the 4th C, learning Greek, Latin, and the language of the region they were from. Greek was held to be the premier language of Education and Medicine, and absolutely necessary if you had to deal with eastern merchants (which any merchant worth his salt would have to). You have the example of Ausonius, who lived in Aquitaine from 310-395 and wrote that his father could speak better Greek than Latin.
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You also have the example of Ambrose of Milan, who became one of the leading Western theologians in large part because he was one of the few Latin churchmen who could read Greek well enough to introduce the Greek Fathers' thought to a Western audience. And on at least one occasion in the fifth century, correspondence between Pope Leo and the Patriarch of Constantinople was held up because Leo needed to find somebody who could translate the Patriarch's letters into Latin.
 
SlyDessertFox

SlyDessertFox

NotAMyth said:
Man no disrespect, but this argument is always nuts, and somehow has been ongoing since antiquity to modern nation-states. All exclusivity will get you is a nesting loop of smaller and smaller groups of people who claim they are the only true members of their exclusive group. At the end of this chain, you'll find maybe 5 guys whose credentials no one in the world can question. Does that mean that no one is part of that group apart from these people? Of course not. That just means that the Roman Identity gets wider with the "More Roman" groups like Italians getting subgrouped, like the WASPS in the USA.

Not to mention there is documented evidence of most contemporary Romans agreeing with this viewpoint. It is true that Roman identity became more exclusionary or conservative in the late imperial era than in earlier times, but that happens to all identities that feel themselves in crisis, or under attack. And even in this era, you have the example of a no lesser personage than St. Augustine supporting this point of view.
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Also re: Stilicho that was a very obvious propaganda cudgel latched on to by his enemies after he achieved pretty much the highest levels of power possible. Being half Vandal did not stop his rise to become one of Theodosius's most trusted lieutenants, and then the official regent for the western emperor. It was only at that point that his ancestry appears to ever get brought up. The same applies to Arbogast, btw who had an even clearer barbarian ancestry. His un-Romanness suddenly gets emphasized when he became an enemy of Theodosius.

Euphemios said:
If everyone is Roman, then no one is.
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This is nonsense, but even so it doesn't even work. There were prerequisites to being Roman. Those were being a citizen of the Roman Empire. Not everyone in the world was Roman, only those who had official ROman citizenship. What was not a pre-requisite was being a fluent speaker of latin.
 

Elfwine

SlyDessertFox said:
This is nonsense, but even so it doesn't even work. There were prerequisites to being Roman. Those were being a citizen of the Roman Empire. Not everyone in the world was Roman, only those who had official ROman citizenship. What was not a pre-requisite was being a fluent speaker of latin.
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The entire history of the so-called Byzantine Empire comes to mind. They insisted they were Romans long after the drifting apart of West and East meant some writers insisted Latin was a tongue of barbarians from the West, not the "Real Language" of the empire/its people.

Even if the state with its capital in Constantinople doesn't count for purposes of the AHC, that ought to be relevant to how any surviving Roman nation exists, shouldn't it?
 

Nivek

I wonder if Marxist Historical Materialism could be the answer for his...Rome was just an elite structure for some landowners and once ceased to be useful was used on a minor scale by others...so rome was just a term for the establishment them
 
Maeglin

Maeglin

NotAMyth said:
tl;dr the house of cards carefully built by Augustus had started collapsing after the Crisis of the Third Century. The east survived because unlike in the west, imperial legitimacy was as much associated (perhaps more) with possession of Constantinople as it was with the support of the armies. I think the path of least resistance for a surviving WRE has Rome as its capital and one of the primary sources of imperial legitimacy. Anything less is merely addressing the symptoms imo.
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Rome the city was obsolete - both administratively and economically - by the third century. The whole point was that the Roman Empire moved past Rome.
 

NotAMyth

Maeglin said:
Rome the city was obsolete - both administratively and economically - by the third century. The whole point was that the Roman Empire moved past Rome.
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I think the history attests to the inherent instability brought by the empire moving beyond Rome. Sure you escaped the Praetorians and the Senate plots, but now instead of a faction of people at Rome you have armies being decimated in regular succession wars.

And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this. Literally any army can raise their commander to the imperium. How unstable is that? It's a miracle that the empire survived so long after. Basically any legion can throw a wrench into the waterworks every now and then by either raising or assassinating emperors. And the constant campaigning means there are so many opportunities to do so.

For a stable arrangement, you need a non-military primary source of legitimacy for emperorship. For the feudal Kingdoms it was a combination of election and primogeniture backed by the Church apparatus. And for modern Nation states it's direct affirmation of support by the majority of the electorate. But these solutions don't work for the Empire. And so I suggest the People and the Senate of Rome as an alternative font of acclamation.
 
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