Bret Devereaux

I hope this series has also served to demonstrate both the almost absurd disconnect between the popular imagination of who the Romans were and also the power of popular culture in shaping perceptions of the past.

You have this folk-historical theory, occasionally advanced by real historians (albeit mercifully not real *ancient* historians) that Rome was this homogeneous entity which expanded, thus becoming diverse and then collapsed because of diversity.

It is a theory that cannot survive even momentary contact with any of the actual sources for Roman history. It's a vision of Rome that can't get out of book 1 of Livy - literally the *first* thing you might read - alive.

But it thrives because the public imagines Rome not through the sources, but through BBC and Hollywood productions where Rome is inhabited by a seamless cast of white British actors.

Try to show the Romans looking like they actually did - covering most of the range of human colors, including - yes! - black Romans (for which we have abundant evidence, some detailed in this series) and people get mad and claim you are 'revising' history.

But it is the movie-makers who are the revisionists! I can't stress enough, the evidence is not ambiguous or uncertain here. Rome was a diverse, Mediterranean polity from its foundation to its collapse in the West.