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Notes -
On Rome, I think an interesting note here is that Rome's mythological origin is that of a mongrel combination of nationalities - refugees and ruffians from all over Italy were offered sanctuary by Romulus, and he welded them into a nation through heroic effort, including at one point just kidnapping wives for them.
Moreover, Livy directly attributes Rome's future greatness to this mixture of ethnicities:
While Livy might have attributed it thus, this doesn't really reflect the reality on the ground.
The obvious criticism is that Romulus is almost certainly a myth. The legend of the founding of Rome as well as early events like the Rape of the Sabine women might have shreds of truth but are largely made up.
By the time that we have historical records, Romans were very reluctant to grant citizenship to others. When Drusus proposed enfranchising Rome's Latin allies in 91 BC, he was accused to trying to make those new citizens his clients. Drusus was assassinated shortly thereafter, leading to the Social War of Rome against its Italian allies which lasted 4 years and saw 50,000 military deaths on each side. Only then were some wealthy citizens among the erstwhile "Allies" granted Roman citizenship although there was much consternation on how they would affect voting.
It would take another 300 years before all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire were made citizens. This happened in 212 AD under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla who did so only to increase tax revenues.
At this point, of course, Rome was already in decline. The next 250 years would see Rome have increasing reliance on outsiders to fill its military ranks until those outsiders finally did away with the Western Roman empire entirely.
I for one am extremely skeptical of any "diversity is our strength" arguments about ancient Rome.
They've found post-holes of about the right age in the spot where late-Republican Romans claimed Romulus' hut was preserved.
In kind of the same way China went through its Doubting Antiquity phase in the early 20th century, it's fashionable to assume myths and mythical history are just made up in the West, but it may be we go through something like the Chinese did where, whoops, turns out the Shang really did exist and here's the archeological evidence with writing and who knows when the Xia turn up in the archeological record but we shouldn't be surprised if they do.
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I'm not making an argument about Rome's actual founding - we don't know what happened in 753 with any reliability, and archaeological evidence suggests the city already existed at that point anyway. I think Livy is most interesting as a window into what Livy thought and how he conceived of Rome's greatness, rather than historical causation. Livy's narration of the history of Rome tells us about Livy's values and about what could be safely expressed in elite Roman society in his day.
I bring it up, then, mainly as a single point against the equally-imaginary idea of some sort of ethnically pure Rome free of outside influence. As far as I'm aware, the Romans themselves knew that their city was not the result of a pure bloodline stretching back into the distant past, but rather was a hybrid of many influences.
This doesn't seem like an argument that diversity is our strength - if nothing else, if we all adapted Livian or Romulan policies for a modern nation, we'd do a lot of very un-progressive things. But the hybrid character of Rome does seem evident to me.
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