Peoples of Rome

“Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto”

“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”

-Roman playwright Terence

For thirty-eight centuries, a race known as the Early European Farmers (EEFs) ruled Italy. Their ancestors were mostly from Anatolia - the Asiatic part of what is now modern-day Turkey. However, some of their ancestors (about 5% prior to 4400 BC, and about 15% after) were Western Hunter-Gatherers - a swarthy and sometimes blue-eyed race which recolonized Europe from the Ice Age refugia in Italy and the Balkans as temperatures warmed. A relatively short, brown-haired, brown-eyed, and fair-skinned people, the EEFs lived, farmed, loved, and died in Italy from about 6000 to 2200 BC. The lives of the EEFs were hardly idyllic. Both the archaeological and genetic records provide evidence of at the very least periodic episodes of violence and oppression. The languages that they spoke are largely unknown, but the relatives of Etruscan were likely among them.

EEF rule in Italy was decisively interrupted in the 23rd century BC. A climate shock disrupted the old ways of life, and weakened the EEF societies of Italy to the point that they were unable to resist invaders. The ancestors of the Iapygians sailed across the Adriatic from the Balkans and established themselves as the new masters of Apulia. The Sicanians sailed from eastern Spain and conquered Sicily from their predecessors, who may have had ties to the peoples of Sardinia. Northern Italy was overrun by the first of many waves of invaders, perhaps speaking Indo-European languages related to poorly attested Ligurian, from what is now Austria and Germany. Large parts of the peninsula were depopulated in the chaos.

Italy’s population began to recover from the 23rd century BC collapse in the early 2nd millennium BC. Forests were felled, new settlements established, and technology advanced. Around 1700 BC there was another era of chaos and depopulation which within two centuries was followed by a renewed period of socio-political consolidation and population growth. That renewal, perhaps associated with the arrival of another wave of central European invaders speaking the ancestral Italic languages, lasted until the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC.

The Bronze Age Collapse in Italy featured both a major southwards migration of people from northern Italy to the south and east (notably the Sicels (an Italic people) and the Lemnians (who likely spoke a language similar to Etruscan)) as well as the arrival of a new wave of invaders from central Europe. Those new invaders, some of whom likely spoke Celtic languages, originated with the Urnfield Culture and evolved into the proto-Villanovan culture. While a substantial culture influence, they only replaced a small portion of the population of northern and central Italy. The previous invasions had a greater impact. Overall, between 50-80% of the population of northern and central Italy was replaced by invaders from central Europe between 2200 and 800 BC.

In the south of the peninsula and on Sicily, there had been longstanding contacts with the peoples of the Aegean - contacts which had begun in the early-to-mid 3rd millennium BC. Those contacts persisted through the Bronze Age, with apparent Mycenaean Greek settlements on Sicily and some fortified coastal settlements on Apulia. Those contacts were not limited to trade, and included the movements of people as well.

The chaos of the Bronze Age Collapse broke the threads of historical memory of the Italic peoples. While the Romans claimed descent from their war god Mars, the actual ancestors of Romans were primitive tribes. Their villages were small, and they had little mineral wealth. Ancient DNA from the early 1st millennium suggests that they were mildly heterogenous. The northern Italian element with close affinities to central Europe was predominant (and almost identical to that of the non-Latin speaking Etruscans), but some tribes near the Romans such as the Rutuli and Praenesti appear to have had at least partial southern origins and distant ancestral ties to the peoples of the Aegean.

The Roman Kingdom, and later the Roman Republic, were part of a broader alliance network. Internal affairs (including taxation) of alliance members was left alone, but troop contributions against external threats were obligatory. The Romans became the largest member of that alliance network in the 6th century, and gradually increased their authority within in.

The nature of that alliance network - particularly after the invasion of the deeply alien Celtic Gauls in the 4th century BC - as well as a trend towards democratization drove it towards militarism and territorial expansion. War alongside allies made friends and showed Italic comrades their similarities against alien Celtic, Greek, Iberian, German, or Semitic foes. Peace brought the usual disputes of law and wealth, with class set against class and ally against ally.

Roman expansion throughout Italy and even into Sicily was at first largely into areas ruled by closely related and usually Italic-speaking peoples. Indeed the Punic Wars had elements of national struggle. The Roman intervention in Sicily which sparked the First Punic War was due to Roman support for the Mamertines - an Oscan Italic group which had migrated only recently before to Sicily. Later, the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily would rally behind Carthage in an attempt to win back their freedom from their Roman occupiers.

The Roman victory in the Second Punic War won the republic an overseas empire, but at great cost. Staggering battlefield losses as well as Hannibal’s devastation of Italy permanently altered the makeup of the republic. Slave agriculture began to replace the old socioeconomic model of small freeholders. Formerly developed fields were converted to less productive pastures, and the productivity of the new overseas territories further weakened the economic position of ordinary Roman laborers. Polybius and Cato both agreed that Italy’s population even half a century after the end of the Second Punic War was smaller than it had been before the start of the conflict. It is possible that the spread of contraceptive use decreased the Roman birth rate and impeded Rome’s recovery.

Sicily in particular was changed by the mass import of slaves. Roman victories in Greece brough numerous slaves to the island, and pirates from Crete and Cilicia sold Levantine captives openly. Those bonded masses were treated cruelly by overseers who adopted the methods of the Carthaginians - including the chain gang. Despite brutal Roman suppressions of slave rebellions, the pre-Roman population of Sicily was largely replaced by imported slaves. Even today, Sicilians largely descend from North Africans and Levantines rather than their predecessors.

Roman advances in the eastern Mediterranean in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC brought even more slaves and immigrants to Italy. While freeholding farmers were not totally displaced by slave-worked latifundias (large agricultural operations), the slaves were an obvious target for both poor Romans and those like the Gracchi brothers who worried about rural depopulation. Freeholding farmers were the bulk of the republic’s infantry formations and the reason that it could endure the burdens of unending warfare.

In the end, the republic proved unable to cope with its role as the Mediterranean hegemon. Its republican political model of mass participation in government was replaced in the mid-to-late 1st century BC by an imperial model of elite collaboration against a deracinated population. It was an inevitability. The military of freeholding citizens had been replaced by professional soldiers loyal to charismatic generals. Foreign troops - such as Caesar’s German and Gaulish auxiliaries - became a considerable part of the Roman military and eventually of its political structure.

The integration of foreign elites into the Roman people was part of a trend that went back centuries. First the Romans had conquered and integrated the people of Latium, then the other Italic peoples of Italy. Under the empire they became a universal people - indeed even under the republic statements such as the North African Terence’s “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me” had been greeted with applause by Roman audiences. To some that was reason for celebration. For others, it was a reason for despair:

That race most acceptable now to our wealthy Romans,

That race I principally wish to flee, I’ll swiftly reveal,

And without embarrassment. My friends, I can’t stand

A Rome full of Greeks, yet few of the dregs are Greek!

For the Syrian Orontes has long since polluted the Tiber,

Bringing its language and customs, pipes and harp-strings,

And even their native timbrels are dragged along too,

And the girls forced to offer themselves in the Circus.

Go there, if your taste’s a barbarous whore in a painted veil.

See, Romulus, those rustics of yours wearing Greek slippers,

Greek ointments, Greek prize medallions round their necks.

He’s from the heights of Sicyon, and he’s from Amydon,

From Andros, Samos, they come, from Tralles or Alabanda,

Seeking the Esquiline and the Viminal, named from its willows.

To become both the innards and masters of our great houses.

Quick witted, of shamelessly audacity, ready of speech, more

Lip than Isaeus, the rhetorician. Just say what you want them

To be. They’ll bring you, in one person, whatever you need:

The teacher of languages, orator, painter, geometer, trainer,

Augur, rope-dancer, physician, magician, they know it all,

Your hungry Greeks: tell them to buzz off to heaven, they’ll go.

Juvenal’s character Umbricius was not imagining things when he complained of Greeks and Greek speakers from the Levant and Anatolia overrunning Rome in the 1st century AD. Migration - both free and slave - from the eastern Mediterranean to Italy continued in the Imperial period. DNA finds from Rome, Etruria, and Moesia all suggest that Roman urban populations in the 1st through 3rd centuries AD were largely of Anatolian and Levantine origin - though with minorities from northern Europe, northwestern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. In spite of the Mithridatic Wars, the eastern Mediterranean was apparently more populous than the western, and thus generated more migrants. The western Mediterranean had been devastated by Rome’s civil wars, the Jugurthine War, the brutal taming of Iberia, and Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.

The diverse empire needed new stories to unite its people. One such story was the Aeneid, whose 1st century BC author Virgil altered the story of Rome’s origins to be Anatolian rather than Latin. In a way, it was comparable to the United States’ adoption of Christopher Columbus as a founder through its Columbus Day holiday at a time of mass Italian immigration to the United States. The change in the demographics of a state led to a change in its origin story to include new peoples.

The demographic transformation within the Roman Empire was not limited to urban areas. Northwest Africa was a very diverse place in the Classical Age with highly distinctive populations. Those populations as well as their languages were leveled under the Romans, creating the ancestors of the Berbers. The Romans and their Sassanid Persian enemies both aligned Arab tribes with them, laying the foundation for future Arab states - including that of the Umayyads.

The Crisis of the Third Century was part of a broader global phenomenon that also afflicted at least Iran, China, and Japan. Plague and famine slaughtered millions and caused terrible political instability. The diverse urban populations of the empire suffered disproportionately, and those living in the periphery - the descendants of those like Umbricius who fled the cities for the countryside - comprised a greater share of the population afterwards. The Roman Empire was successfully restored for a time, but it fell into terminal decline towards the end of the 4th century.

The Fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD was apocalyptic. Large swaths of land were depopulated, cities were destroyed, trade collapsed, and technology regressed. Those reliant upon the endurance of long-distance trade routes or maintenance of complex social or physical infrastructure, such as the diverse urban populations, died off to varying degrees. In Britain and the northern Balkans they were extinguished in entirety - those who were fortunate enough to not starve to death were killed by barbarian invaders. In Italy, Iberia, and the southern Balkans; some of the partly-eastern Mediterranean people survived and were absorbed into succeeding populations. In general, it was the peripheral peoples such as the Bretons, the Albanians, the Basques, and the rural Italians whose societies were materially poor but politically and economically robust rather than sophisticated who endured the barbarian invasions. They and the German or Slav barbarian conquerors, rather than those descended from Roman-era migrants, formed the predominant element of succeeding generations (though it barely predominated in southern Italy, where the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean elements remained strong). The meek inherited the earth.

Greco-Roman civilization was succeeded by two new civilizations - the House of Islam and Christendom. The latter held Italy, and ensured that its subsequent dominant influences - genetic and cultural - would be from the north rather than east and south. The northern invaders such as the Goths, Lombards, and Normans all left their genetic impacts to varying degrees across Italy. In turn, the blood of the medieval Italians diffused north across the Alps into that of the peoples of Germany, whom Tacitus had (accurately, as we know now from DNA research) described as preserving their pure blood as late as the 1st century AD. Christendom had made a new world that transcended some of the borders of the old even as it made new borders across once undivided lands. The eastern Mediterranean was to be largely outside of Christendom, but Germany was to be entirely part of it.

Like other Europeans peoples, the Italian peoples were largely formed by the Middle Ages. Even the worst events of the last thousand years - the Black Death and the Little Ice Age - were not sufficient to allow for the kind of violent population replacements that characterized the peninsula at multiple points in the Bronze Age. Similarly, diplomatic intrigues and Catholic collaboration prevented Italy from falling under a regional hegemon whose size would allow for substantial migration of alien peoples to the peninsula until the 21st century.