Bret Devereaux

As someone who spends quite a lot of time on Roman weapons, I wish I could be mostly irritated by this guy's (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/race-war-murder-hate-crime/ …) garbage replica. Instead, I am outraged that yet another vile, murderous idiot has weaponized the memory of Rome for crime and hate. 1/12

Rome was hardly a perfect society. It was deeply unequal and often needlessly cruel - both on purpose and by neglect. The Romans could be terribly violent. But it was also a diverse society, from the very beginning. 2/12

Rome's own mythology begins with stories of intermarriage and community-fusion, from Aeneas and Lavinia to the Sabines, in cases where the fusion of those societies resolved a violence-soaked recent past (to gloss over some decidedly disquieting parts of these stories). 3/12

Archaeology from Rome itself in the early period confirms Rome's self-conception of itself as a fusion-society. The city was born not out of one people, but a mix of Etruscans, Latins, etc., with settlements on different hills forging a community around a common forum. 4/12

Of course it did not stop there. Rome's institution of citizenship was radically expansionary compared to almost any other ancient state. More and more people, to borrow Greg Woolf's phrase, became Roman. That did not mean they stopped being Gauls or Egyptians, etc... 5/12

But that they became Roman besides. I love to show my students pictures of some of the Mummy Portraits in the British Museum (e.g. https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=119830&partId=1&object=21468&page=1 …). The figures are often clearly Egyptian or African, yet they also wear the purple stripe...6/12

...the stripe that screams ROMANUS CIVIS SUM - I am a Roman Citizen! - as loud as a portrait can. That man in that portrait, with his curly black hair and dark skin and adorable mustache is more Roman than any modern hate-monger. And that was the secret to Roman success! 7/12

And once more for the people in the back: the secret to Roman success was how the Romans - unintentionally, in most cases - embraced diversity. It unlocked vast reserves of resources and manpower outside of the narrow ager Romanus... 8/12