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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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But the most successful large tribes - including the Roman Empire and Christian Church, and therefore Western Civilisation, were based on fictive kinship through a shared mythopoetic father-figure, not realish kinship determined by ethnicity.

They’re not mutually exclusive. Romulus, notably, was both a mythical father figure of the Romans and the Latins were a real ethnicity.

They’re not mutually exclusive. Romulus, notably, was both a mythical father figure of the Romans and the Latins were a real ethnicity.

I was thinking of the period when the Roman Empire was explicitly multiethnic, during which the deified Emperor was the mythopoetic father figure. The growth of the Roman empire (small 'e' as the process begins under the late Republic) involves a series of extensions of increasing levels of political inclusion (socii, then Latini, then full cives Romani) to people who were increasingly obviously not ethnic Latins.

I mean, if you're going to bring up the Romans, you can't get away from the collapse of the Roman empire, and it's eventual failure to keep "Romanizing" the people it ruled, eventually collapsing into a bunch of basically ethnic nations. Debates about how much the Huns, Franks, assorted Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were distinct ethnicities, or banner bearers for tribal confederations aside.

Rome succeded in Romanizing the people it ruled beyond the wildest expectation, Gauls and Hispanics speak Latin to this very day. Goths, Vandals, Saxons etc were never ruled by Rome.

Never successfully. But they were invited into the Empire with the full expectation they would be Romanized like the Gauls, Hispanics, North African peoples, Celts, etc. The Emperor would declare them friends of Rome, and expect them to cultivate the lands and pay the taxes, often of areas thoroughly depopulated by civil wars, disease and famine. They expected to be able to levy troops from these peoples. This was largely a fiction since the Empire lacked the manpower or resolve to really keep them out, so they would just decree that these tribes were being made Roman subjects. Some, like the Goths, took this pledge maybe halfway seriously?

It's just that by that point, either the Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Franks etc were a unique challenge, or the empire had lost whatever mojo it had that got the people it ruled to Romanize.

And 1500 years later, the leading Saxon polity is ruled by a Senate that meets on Capitol Hill in a building decorated in the Corinthian Order. I don't think the Saxons are entirely un-Romanized.

Fair, but insofar as the republic’s expansion over the Italian peninsula is known about, Romulus as father figure to ethnic Latins dominating the peninsula is a major part of the process.

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