I think it does, although Christianity forced slavers to further develop the idea of modern racism to justify having Christian slaves. I think the slavery done by Portugal and Spain of the West Africans holds the key to understanding this specific ideological development but because of poor record keeping and the records not being in English, many English speaking historians have neglected those primary sources.
i think you made a very salient point backed up by evidence that the Romans had a mixture of bigotry "complexes" that were based on cementing the power of the ingroup over the outgroup. the talk of greek cultural evils and 'servile blood' makes it pretty clear. Much like modern racism is an attempt by ingroups to use modern ideas of 'objective' science to ensure their dominance in an age of universal human rights, so too did the Roman ideas of servile blood, insiduous influence and ingroup-outgroup political struggles (arguable the Social War was an eruption of this too) serve to ensure that extra barriers were erected to keep whoever was in power in power and make it harder for others to have a share of those rights and powers. In the case of Rome- women and slaves were the largest, most socially-lynchpin and most economically 'vital' oppressed populations, so in a way the system did not need to invent most of what we see as modern racism to continue its political-social-economic cycle of extraction & exploitation. Yet the tools and strategies and 'political technologies' were already there- disenfrenchisement, legal barriers, propaganda, using the momentum of tradition, economic exploitation and dependency so people buy into it, and so forth so basically: the Romans weren't modern racist per se, but they had a whole host of bigotries, and had they come across the idea of modern racism, their elites would have used it.
@@TarpeianArchivesin the case of portugal it isn't a poor record keeping, it was an earthquake with a subsequent fire and tsunami. The records we have it's clear that it started as anti-moor bigotry and it developed from there. Something the moors also had - basicly everyone was kind of xenophobic.
Early on, even people from other latin cities were discriminated against; families like the Claudians who came over from other towns were remembered to be "foreign" for centuries, senators threatened violence if people from Latin towns were given full Roman rights. Later, the Latins seemed to be accepted but non-Latin Italian allies were discriminated against, in part leading to the social war. Then non-Italians were discriminated against - Claudius had to give speeches to justify letting the Gauls into Rome because he faced opposition to that even as emperor. Some regions never fully incorporated and always seem to have seen themselves and been seen by the Romans as other (Greeks and Hebrews) Even when they did allow 'full legal rights' (often they didn't, they had some lesser legal status) that does not mean they did not discriminate, No one would say ethnic minorities in the USA faced no discrimination the moment they had equal legal rights! The main reason the Romans weren't "racist" as we use the term today, is that they barely had any contact with other continental "races." They encountered Ethiopians and probably went south as far as lake Chad once or twice, but sub Saharan Africans were likely rarer in Rome than in Victorian England for the entire history of the empire. As for east Asians (beyond the Himalayas) I'm unsure if any actually got to Roman territory. If they had prolonged contact, I suspect discriminatory attitudes would have flared up the way they did with all those other groups - though they may have cooled over time, as they did when more modern Europeans had prolonged contact with non-Europeans (it'd probably have taken about as much time as it took for modern people, a few centuries)
Wild speculation. And definitions of racism are not restricted to people with black skin, although this is the only kind most Americans seem to know about. Try reading _The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity._ The Romans had racist ideas about people with black skin. But they also had racist ideas about Middle Easterners and Northern Germanic people. I suppose one reason Roman racism didn't developed into the full-blown anti-black racism that exists in the US is because the Romans thought they were superior to pretty much everybody, not just black people. Yet there were still Roman authors who wrote some quite racist commentary about black people.
@@themaskedman221 - racism isn't restricted to black people (but neither was my last paragraph, which I presume you are responding to here) but it is usually restricted to races rather than sub-racial groups. I won't argue semantics, but the point of that paragraph was to highlight that the Romans had limited contact with people from other continental races which would obviously influence their views of other races (MENA cluster with Europeans in most analysis) Discrimination against ethnic groups within the same race as you are (of the sort I detail in my first paragraph) are usually considered to be 'xenophobia' and not 'racism.' This is a semantic issue and doesn't really mean much, but I know a lot of (perhaps most) people DO restrict 'racism' to differences between races (and not sub-race ethnicity) so I added that last paragraph. My conclusion (regarding how Romans would have treated other races if they had more contact with them) IS speculation, but I don't think it's "wild" (ungrounded), as I based it on the way Romans treated all the sub-ethnic groups they encountered in the past (paragraph 1, a lot of the stuff in the video as well) and also on how later Europeans who DID have more contact with other races acted (which IMO point in the same direction).
In the time of Rome North Africa and the Middle East were all black or predominantly black . You are reasoning looking at the present day demographics not that in the Roman time .
@@fightback397 - I think you'll find they were all pure Germanic stock back then Nordicism makes a lot more sense than afrocentrism even if both are bunk
This is a complicated topic & respect to you willing to tackle it. I've repeatedly tried to explain this point to people. The modern definition of racism & general ideas of racial hierarchies didn't exist back then. Everyone wasn't holding hands & getting along. But people didn't think people weren't human, simply because they looked different.
@@jmgonzales7701Modern thought of racism IS based on culture, usually founded on the idea of darker skinned people as uncivilized and barbaric and therefore inferior and less human then lighter skinned, civilized Europeans (mostly Germanic peoples). Romans were conquerers but they allowed assimilated peoples to adapt to their rule (including North Africans)
@@ragnorzz Incorrect! Modern thoughts on racism have nothing to do with culture. It was literally based on created a racial identity to justify slavery. It had nothing to do with culture. During the enlightenment period, questions of the morality of slavery were being raised in intellectual circles. The modern idea of race based ideology & racial hierarchies was created to other certain groups to justify enslaving them.
@@ragnorzz yes but north africans to an extent can even pass as european, atleast south europe. The romans definetly saw groups of people as inferior due to their culture but just like some colonizers from the age of exploration they tend to assimilate. But nonetheless both the romans and modern colonizers thought of themselves as superior due to their culture. And alot of times cultures can be correlated to how you look.
it is a simple topic, once you know: "Gomes Eanes de Zurara" was the asshole, that made up racism in 1450, despite clear evidence to the opposite of all of his pro-racism-lies, mostly to work more slaves with a commercial-incentive on sugar-plantations. the term "race" is also made up, it is not a biological term, it does not exist in biology and it represents nothing, related to biology, but a commercial term, and as arbitrary nonsensical inhumane guesswork as almost all of financing is. Racism did not exist at all as a concept/behavior/label before 1400, for anyone on the planet, and because racism is a 100% made up lie (as we know the liar, why he lied, and that he lied back then, and the lie did not become a self fulfilling prophecy) , racism does not exist naturally, but racism is a non-essential arbitrarily-made-up emergent property of commercial exploitation.
The main problem with this sort of question is that Rome lasted for at least a thousand years. Attitudes on things like homosexuality have changed dramatically in just the 3 decades I've been alive, they must've changed, how much can they change over 1000 years? A period spanning the switch from monarchy to republic to monarchy again, plebs slowly gaining power, the rise of monotheism, etc, is bound to see different attitudes on this! Not to mention the variation that exists within any society on issues, which is bound to be larger as a society expands.
Indeed--very complicated questions to answer, and a some amount of generalizing is more or less required in the attempt. Hopefully this at least conveyed, to some extent, how enormously different the "average" late-Republican / early-Imperial Roman mindset would've been from a modern one, since they fundamentally didn't perceive the world to be constructed from the same basic social elements that we do. -Titus
Some of the problems that exist in regards to addressing this question is how movies, TV shows & docudramas depict the Roman population. The Roman population was extremely diverse. That diversity wasn't just the general population, but also included the ruling class. Whenever they depict the Senators, generals or legionnaires. They're always depicted as white northern Europeans. In reality you would've seen, white, olive skin, various shades of black, brown & a wide variety of what we'd define as mixed race people. Especially in the military, which specifically recruited auxiliaries from all over the empire for their specialities in warfare.
@@keitht24no, most of the people of the Roman Empire were Europeans, that goes for Greeks, Italio-Roman, Hispano-Romans, Gallo-Romans, Britanno-Romans, Thraco-Romans, Illyro-Romans, hellenized Anatolians and Rhaetians. The only non-white groups INSIDE the empire were Egyptian Copts, Judeans, Syriac (Arameans), Arabs and Berbers. Many of the elite was of Italian or Greco-Anatolian Stock (Byzantine Age). Sub-Saharan Africans were very rare and their lands were outside the empire. The closest one would get to Sub-Saharan Africans was the Kingdom of Axum and Kush.
Actually a very interesting and well researched take . Projecting structures onto societies which never developed them is a common fallacy and the Romans had a complex view of race and class which evolved massively through the republic and empire. This was a great deconstruction of the factors which held up roman slavery.
Interesting, the Romans thought being in the state of slavery or being free was merely determined by destiny or luck (this is seen in Grüner's "The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery, and Counter-Modernity" (2020) pp. 15-16.
I saw the name you gave to your channel (the Tribunate) and instantly knew I'd love your work. I was not wrong. This channel is a great argument against the meme that an interest in [Roman] history is somehow suspect. Subscribed and boosted. Thx!
@@themaskedman221 What am I *even* talking about? Assuming you really are interested... There is a whatever-the-issue-I'm-a-centrist facebook meme/theme which casts any interest in Rome/ Nazi Germany/ Napoleonic France/ the Mongol Empire, etc. etc. as necessarily symptomatic of the reactionary wet-dreams of proto-fascists. These power worshipping people do exist, but the meme proposes that there's no such thing as a legitimate or critical interest in Rome, or in the other examples. For example there's one featuring Bojack Horseman and an owl, who (lol) says to Bojack - "you know, it's funny. When you look at someone through rose tinted glasses, thinking about the Roman Empire just looks like an interest in history." For the media literate this is a centrist dog-whistle implying any such interest as evidence of "extremism" or even fascism. The Bojack Horseman example generated a lot of discussion, but I particularly liked one commentators response - "'Thinking about history at all makes you a fascist' is saying the quiet part out loud for liberalism." That's what I'm even talking about.
@@themaskedman221 There's an "extremely centrist" meme/theme which can be found on facebook which implies that there is no such thing as a legitimate or critical interest in Roman history (or the history of fascism, Napoleonic France, the Mongol Empire, etc. etc.) but rather that any such interest is symptomatic of "extremism" or even fascism. The subtext is that there's no legit reason to be interested in history given that we are presently enjoying /s the "end of history" (see Francis Fukoyama "The End of History and the Last Man" 1992). Or as one commentator put it, "'Thinking about history at all makes you a fascist' is saying the quiet part out loud for liberalism."
@@matthewmann8969 Not at all. It just so happens that Germanics were the barbarian boogeyman of the later Empire. But during the Republic that role fell to other Peoples, like Carthage and the Celtics themselves (who sacked Rome before it was cool)
Bread was a relatively expensive mass-produced staple-food in ancient Rome, expensive compared to vegetables, cheap compared to cloth/sandals/rope (in terms of daily investment) Bread and flour also had a varying quality. Ancient bread-commercials make perfect sense.
This was extremely well made I think it quite almost perfectly describes Roman slavery and view on race. I think more detail could be added to explain some aspects of our modern system of morals and there foundation and more detail on how the Roman world and its moral system changed our understanding of equality and justice today but still super well done.
Thank you - You're 100% right and I wish we had had more time and space to go into these very important questions. The differences in concepts of morality is endlessly fascinating to us and it animates a lot of the topics that we choose, however we'll certainly do video at a later time specifically on this subject.
I’m sorry but what do you base on that Romans categorised by language rather than race? They saw ‘the Germans’ and described them physically, linguistically and culturally. Romans were no different than we are, they categorized people groups and had stereotypes. That’s because it’s inherently human to do this.
Another great video! It's interesting to have the 'rug' sort of pulled out under our feet about projecting some of our modern frameworks & concepts onto ancient or even medieval societies. Crossing the sheer gap between our psychology and theirs (and not just some caricature or self-projection) is something more contemporary academic historians are definitely improving on
Thanks, really glad you liked it! The differences in how they approached concepts that we really take for granted makes those who lived in the past endlessly fascinating to me as it illuminates that our set of values isn't "final" we need to work to defend the best aspects of our more humanitarian set of cultural norms while at the same time still pushing further to improve things for future generations.
Romans believed in the superiority of Romans over non-Romans, the Senatorial families over the plebs, and old established familes over New Men, but there was nothing racial (in the modern sense) about those beliefs.
race, as we use the term today, did not yet exist, so romans had to resort to other distinctions people use to dehumanize one another to justify their systems of exploitation
@@tribunateSPQROkay but they were at least Sub Racist since Romans And Greeks and other Mediterannean peoples that are Western Eurasian had lots of sub racist thoughts towards White People again both are Caucasoid but they are not the same sub race and both at the time especially The Mediteranneans saw themselves as better then White People be it Germanics, Nordics, Celts, Alpines, Slavs, Baltics, And Western Caucasus Hillers yeah.
thank you for your amazing work, i find this subject to be really interesting! do you have any other source about how they viewed black (subsharian) people?
i like to think that people in the forum would roll their eyes when the praeco would drone off the same advert they had heard hundreds of times, kind of like we do during a youtube ad break
The romans were racist. Racism has existed for a long time and will continue to do so. Thou the criteria to which people will be racst to evolves. Romans compared to modern day humans didnt care about the color of ur skin. They cared about ethnicity, culture or wether you are a roman.
A slight note here, the idea of the racial hierarchy didn't come from The Enlightenment with semi-scientific taxonomy, and even less-scientific taxonomic naming of "races". The Enlightenment picked from the Spanish New World racial hierarchy system, because it had been take from Spain to the other side of the Hapsburg Empire. There, just before the Enlightenment, it was re-worked by Austrians who wanted some sort of "science" to use as political propaganda to back their bid for unification of German states through controlling the crown of the HRE. These were little fringe, nothing movements in their infancy, until picked up in The Enlightenment. Even still, they were...largely scoffed at until the Prussians. The Prussians were BIG on German unity (and succeeded of course), and one of their new pieces of propaganda was based on the Austrian mentioned above. Rather than a hierarchy built like a pyramid, it was more like a web of groups and super-groups. The super-group of "white" included Germans, the "purest", and other "lesser" forms of white, like Turks, Slavs, Celts, and Mediterraneans. These were themselves in a hierarchy based on how "pure" European they were...this is all based on nonsense of course. Turks and Mediterraneans were viewed as "mixed". The image you showed "principal varieties of mankind" shows this, and some of the other groups. The more "mixed" white groups were lower on the pyramid, beneath the English and Germans etc. This included Italians in the US. This was the belief system largely adopted throughout "Germanic" Europe, including some of Latin Europe that has some Germanic roots. Thus it also went to the States, Canada, Aus, NZ. And because of the supposedly-Celtic people had been largely conquered by Germanic, they were largely seen as lesser than Germanic as well.
@@jmgonzales7701 Because of the Arabs and Moors, and Turks to a degree. Arabs controlled Sicily, and briefly southern Italy. For many centuries, Arabs, and sometimes Moors, controlled Sicily. Also Spain. Until 1492, there were Arabs and Moors controlling part of Spain, from the 8th century on. So they viewed them as intermixed with Arabs and Moors. And it is...ok so we have to get into the old beliefs of the "Aryans" to really explain it. The Aryans were a people that came out of Central Asia late in the Bronze Age, and moved into what is now Anatolia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, then on to Persia and eventually into India. They were lighter skinned than the people they conquered. They spoke an Indo-European language, from which many of our languages derive, as well as Sanskrit and most European languages, and most Indian languages in the northern half of the sub-continent. At least, that was the old belief. Now we know it was more like migrations over a century or more, and cultural diffusion, definitely some conquest too, but it wasn't just...light-skinned Indo-Europeans conquered all the brown people like the Prussians, and Nazis, believed. And THEN the Turks moved in to Anatolia, which until that point had been controlled by Greeks, and the Galatians, and people from the Caucasus. Galatians were people from..maybe modern Hungary or so, who migrated to Greece, ransacked it in a war, then went over to central Anatolia and settled in the Steppe there. When the Turks came along, they were massively outnumbered by European people. But the Seljuk, the Ottoman cultures took over. The Turks intermixed with a largely Greek, some Slavic, some Caucasian, some Galatian populace. At least in Anatolia, and Europe.
@@jmgonzales7701 Ugh, I am sorry, I tried to answer your question in depth, but YT deleted it. Essentially it comes down to an old misunderstand of the "Aryans", who came out of the Asian steppe, who the people of the Enlightenment to the 20th century believed conquered the Middl East and India. Also, the Turks took over Anatolia, which was mostly Greeks, Galatians, Caucasians (particularly Armenians in Cilicia), and intermixed with those European people as they created the Seljuk then Ottoman Empires. So the Turks they would count as white would be from modern Turkey or the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, and mixed Central Asian and Greek or Slavic or Caucasian or Galatian or even a bit of Venetian, Frankish, Norman stock.
@@Nick-hi9gx from what i understand the areas of constaninople were more white european but as it went further east bordering middle east the population group changes to resemble more of west asia and central asia.
@@jmgonzales7701 This is largely true, with the exception of a few places in Anatolia. Cilicia and around Trebizond had a lot more Greeks, and Cilicia many Armenians, because they had long been Greek outposts. But, for the most part, yes that is correct. I had a couple friends who were Turks on their dad's side, and would definitely be considered white, as would their dad. Their older brother was mistaken for Greek, Italian and Spanish, but my friends and their dad all looked like Germans or English or Dutch. Saadet had lovely blue eyes.
Hi, Roman historian here. Long and short Yes, extremely racist. To most Romans, all non-Romans were lesser-than. Socii and Latins were close to Roman, and later the conquered peoples would count as Roman after a century or so of being controlled and gaining citizenship. But skin color mattered a whole lot less, didn't define races (except a few exceptions). Race was more about cultural group, with morphological characteristics attributed to certain groups, and behaviors or personalities along with them. Sometimes skin color mattered. Mostly it seems to have been a pretty minor thing for most Romans. Race was more about how "civilized" they were, and if they were civilized, how Greek-like or Roman-like their civilization was. There ARE some exceptions. Nativism is close to correct, Nationalism as well. But not in the current meanings of either, because they very strongly believed in the same diffusion of culture turning conquered people into *true* Romans, it just took generations. Where Nationalism tends to be more in-or-out, there isn't that grey area of "not yet In-Group, but In-Group-ifying". And Nativism generally believes that people can't join the collective unless born into the heart of they group, they don't believe in...cultural federalism, let's call it, within a large polity.
Modern racism is founded upon the idea of ranking groups of people based upon how advanced and civilized they are (usually darker skinned peoples being viewed as barbaric and uncivilized), but in the case of the Romans they didn’t associate certain tones of skin with barbarity, unlike the racism of the colonial era. Like you stated, they considered any other groups of people outside of their empire as barbarians, which included the Germanic tribes whom were of a similar skin tone.
@@ragnorzz They viewed the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Jews, Carthaginians as...we don't really have an equivalent category, "civilized but backwards and wrong and dumb and goofy and disgusting". The Romans could respect the logistics or political structure, and still view the people as completely lesser. I suppose it is probably how a lot of racist, white Americans would view Japan, or Romania. "Close, but still lesser". Where with the people to their north, or anyone without cities, or anyone without writing, or the people of Africa other than Carthage and Egypt, they were viewed as largely savages.
@@Nick-hi9gx Interesting, they seemed to be huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves as the center of culture and the civilized world, not too different from how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe as whole.
@@Nick-hi9gx It basically just boils down to them being huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves at the center of the culture and the civilized world. Quite similar to how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe.
@@Nick-hi9gx Very interesting. It basically just boils down to them being huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves at the center of the culture and the civilized world. Quite similar to how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe.
@@quentinsummers2531 No, you said “race and nation ... the same thing”. That presupposes the Romans had both a concept of nation and a concept of race - both of which they didn't have.
I think there is a point to be made about racism beeing something different than bigotry or xenophobia, when analysing the origins and exact makeup of the ideology that is generally referred to as racism, but in my opinion, but in general modern discourse, most people understand racism to be something along the lines of "making judgements about a person based on their ethnicity" And by that definition the romans were absolutely racist I think theres even an argument to be made that they were racist in the sense of creating a pseudo scientific theory like modern race theory. I dont know that much on the topic and correct me if im wrong, but as far as i know, romans believed in humors and different people posessing different quantities of humors. The africans beeing more dry and the germans beeing more wet than the romans for example. And by my book, having a theory that ascribes qualities to individuals based on their ethnicity is pretty cleatly racist.
Xenophobic yes.Classist yes. Not racist by the modern definition. It seeme like typical ingroup/outgroup issues. If you are from a low status and come from lands /cultures that are alien and/or considered inferior then that seems to be what would get you judged
What's fascinating is that latin people (not just hispanics but french and italians) still have that exact same type of bigotry to this day. Not as much as a focus race and more having to do with culture and religion.
12:52 It worth to remember that Octavian fought Mark Anthony, a roman who "married" a asian queen (Cleopatra) and had offpring with her. This problably wheithed his thought of roman mingling with other races as bad.
@@tribunateSPQR Good! Your Pax Romana video is still VERY bad & irresponsible history (and it would be the perfect one for you change your mind about if you read the archaeological data) but it’s honestly the exception. Normally I’m a huge fan and I am here.
I think it was more like insiders (latins, greeks) and outsiders (uneducated barbarians). Nothing new even nowadays. We just need to find a middle ground for better world for everyones views.
The guy who played Marcus Antonius in the HBO "Rome" series said in an interview of the ancient Romans that their dress looks familiar, their architecture identical, they may look just like us, but thought & feeling-wise "they were a different animal, unintelligible to us."
Almost everybody was "racist" in the ancient world. Different peoples lived separately, and that was considered as normal, good and healthy. St. Paul has written something about equality in his letters, and that was meant for the baptised christians. On the basis of baptism they should treat each other as equals, and not as Greek, Roman, Jew etc. anymore. Later this was turned into a universal principle by French philosophers, who were opposed to the Church. They said that it should not apply to christians only, on the basis of their baptism, but to all humans indiscriminately. Westerners are discussing racism, as something unwanted and evil, but in the Far East Japan, it is quite normal. It is considered the natural principle on the basis of which the different peoples and races protect their identity, and their culture.
@@bwocpowers5314 They would have seen skin color as being on a continuum, and would not have categorized humans as either black or white. And they would not have assigned moral or other qualities on people based on skin color. If a blond meets a red-head, they notice differences. But they don't categorize other people by hair color. Race has become so entrenched in the modern conception of humans, that it's hard to imagine a time when it did not exist.
6:28 - well yeah, you're proto-Italians in proto-Italy, you're gonna come up with a system making Italians on top and everyone else Other who is lesser. Happens everywhere.
A white person and a black person have a child. We say the child is black, or mixed, but not white. The child inherits "being black" from one parent, but not "being white" from the other. Why? There is no scientific reason why the child should be considered black and not white, since they have equal parts DNA. This shows that race is a social construct. Why the child is considered black becomes clearer in the context in which modern racism arose: that of slavery in the post-columbian Americas. A child with one white parent and one black one, in that context, would almost certainly have a black mother and have her master as a father. The child would inherit not just their mother's blackness, but her status as a slave. On the other side of the world, it is ambiguous where whiteness ends. Many Iranians will insist they are white, largely due to their language, but racists in the US would typically disagree. In the context of American slavery, there was no status for these people, who lived on the other side of the world, hence the confusion.
@fightback397Galton and Herbert Spencer is the greatest preparator then Galton creater the idea of a perfect human. A Masterace which h1ler later used
Yes, I totally agree🙏It's so sad to see how society is tearing apart just because someone has a different skin color. These trivial matters still haunt us on this day. Except for that, deep inside, everyone knows that in terms of biology and psychology there are no differences between the so called "races". Scientifically spoken, there are not even races. So I don't really get how in these modern times this still is a big influential topic or even a debate. Only because back then the whites portrayed themselves as superior, this evil and unfair mindset still gets adapted today but no one actually acknowledges the essential key behind the success and achievements of the "whites". Mostly constructed on the slave's back. Just further proof that we should regroup as a human species and work together in order to make this world a better place yet not under these unfair conditions but rather with fair treatment and equality. Culture and race traits should also get shared and mixed so this concept of race eventually dies out that even some 70 IQ racists don't have anything to complain about 🤩
Without having watched the video yet, I would say: A Greek slave would have been considered more valuable than an Germanic slave. But they didn't really made an ideology around that. I mean the whole race-theory wasn't invented back then.
sure they were racist, everyone is racist towards their enemy cultures but they were racist to the Germanics and other northerners rather than the Africans and Easterners who they considered overall better people from intelligence to way of life
american enslavers preached god and his message to love thy neighbor but also owned slaves, people taken from their lands deemed as inferior and to be their property
The problem I have is you are asking the wrong question. Racism itself is just a sub set of bigotry. Asking if Romans were racist, pushes the discussion away from what it should be talked about. Were Romans bigots who believed themselves and their culture to be better than others. And the answer is a pretty solid yes on that. Tying it down to race just creates meaningless debate on what is the definiton of race is and if it existed back then. None of that matters when the point of the question "Were Romans Racists?" is "Were Romans bigots".
great vid, is it ok to still hope for you guys analysis on the lost legions and/or maybe a Metatron collab? lol, maybe the later is too much, but i want to see what you say about the lost legions. The concept has interested me since i heard about it being referenced in WH40k.
Romans were brutal,imperialistic, nationalistic and invented colonialism. Like I don't think it would be difficult to introduce the modern concept of race to them as long as you focused them as the master race.
There is no difference between “racism” and bigotry they are the exact same concept in the same way “race” is the exact same thing as ethnicity. Were the Roman’s “racist”? YES all humans are “racist” to claim otherwise is insane.
Yes but not in the modern sense. They were ethnic racist, which is cooler. Also, like all ancient cultures, they saw any ethnicity too different from them as almost supernatural beings.
This story has been thoroughly discredited. It's sourced from the historia Augusta I believe. Even without it being debunked, common sense would make the story obviously untrue. Severus himself was depicted as a darker skinned man in his mosaics. Which has led to so saying he was black or mixed race. Putting the question of his race aside. He also grew up in North Africa. So he obviously would've seen black people on a regular basis. North Africa was also his power base when he first came to power. So a significant number of his soldiers would've been black men. So that story 🙀 s obviously purely nonsense.
@@sirarthurfiggisHe said they weren’t racist in the way we see it. Because they had a different morality, they were more brutal. Racism came about as an excuse that we all weren’t made equal. Rome believed no one was made equal. The strongest ruled. In that sense there was no racism because no one had natural rights to take away from. Even though I would argue that everyone had natural rights in Rome just because Rome didn’t proclaim it this doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. In that since Rome is the epitome of racism because no had human rights except the elite.
Thank you! Writing this one took longer than most as we felt there might be controversy around specific terminology, but I’m really happy with the positive response. Looks like the only people who missed our point are the ones who were determined to miss it
I sense some Marxist leanings in this video. Please correct me if I'm wrong though. Just for some context, I don't believe in Western ideologies such as Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, or progress. I'm a Muslim and believe that God created and owns everything including us, and that our ultimate purpose is to worship Him and Him alone. And since God created this world as a testing ground for His slaves then it stands to reason that this world has inherent problems. As one imam put it, this world is a mixture between hell and heaven. Societal hierarchy is inevitable but must be based on an individual's actions and beliefs. In the Islamic conception, the word for it is dīn (دين) which is often translated as "religion" or "faith". So in Islam, liberalism, Marxism, and the like are all dīns, and you can judge people by those standards. As a result, anybody can change their dīn and chose and is not tied to the dīn they were born into.
Wow very egalitarian, almost makes us forget that Islam is an oppressive religion that allows nay demands extremely horrible treatments of women and other undesirables
Racism is not an ideology, it’s an inherent reaction present in every human being. We like familiarity, odd or distant things make us feel uncomfortable. It’s not a thought, it’s a feeling.
that's not entirely true. naturally we tend to feel animosity towards anything that's different from us, but the race theory pushed by anthropologists in the 19th century (just an example) is not fear or a feeling of any kind...
@@likeabumblebee What ever you want to call them. "Races" or "nations" of people are naturally averted to each other. We even smell different to each other.
i believe you dont understand what racism is its having a perception of another race as inherently negative. not as different, or foreign, but downright bad. it generally relies on having a solid knowledge of the different races that exist and enough interaction between the races for dynamics between them to develop in the first place. basically we're talking about hate here, not about having a reaction to something new. no society until the 1500s ever had laws that placed a specific race beneath their own. ancient egypt for example was a melting pot of cultures and peoples that had really dark sub-saharans and nubians coexisting with lighter skinned berbers and levantines, and never has it been mentioned that there were racial tensions between them.
Di sicuro non baserò la mia opinione sugli antichi romani su quello che dicono gli americani su qualsiasi cosa li riguardi. Ancora di meno riguardo il razzismo
"the modern definition of racism"; so many thing today are defined as racism that the word is meaningless. The Romans would have fulfilled many of these definitions.
It wasnt just Romans but other Mediterannean Olive peoples had a sort of superiority complexity against Non Medders from Northern, North Western, Central, And Eastern Europe and people from The Caucasus Mountains and people from Sub Saharan Africa And The Indian Subcontient the Central And Southern parts yeah.
In _The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity,_ it is argued that a sort of proto-racism existed among Romans and that later European authors would draw on those ideas. During the so-called 'Renaissance" (a problematic term) and Age of "Discovery", debates about the humanity of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans centered on their distance from Rome; the further you were from Rome, the less civilized you were perceived. As early as the 14th Century, Petrarch was calling for a rebirth of classical Rome -which to him meant a high culture -and seemed to believe that the rise of the Ottoman Empire had something to do with this "loss" of Roman civilization in Europe. At some point these ideas developed into the fully fledged racism we're familiar with.
This is what i have been saying. Raciam in antiquity has always been about difference in culture and beliefs. Skin color barely matters but yes the way you look can be tied to ur culture. So yes looks still matter
@@jmgonzales7701 The Romans definitely recorded the physical appearances of the people they encountered and some authors did link physical traits to geography and culture. It was different than how we understand racism, but still technically a type of early racism.
You're wrong on several things though, especially with your excessive use of scare quotes. -I agree that the Renaissance is a problematic term but not for the reasons you believe. The Renaissance is said to have started in the 15th century, but I's argue that it started in the 12th century (in Western Europe atleast) as the middle ages weren't this "dark age" of Christian fanaticism and civilzational collapse. It was a period of decentralization, preservation of ancient knowledge and religious culture. From this time on, Europe became very prosperous which led to the age of discovery. -Age of Discovery: You seem to have some sort of grudge against European historiography. Aside from atrocites committed (nothing unique to Europeans) during the age of colonialism, discoveries of far away lands were still made and Europeans have not been bested by any other civilization in seafaring. So you have no reason to call that into question. -The rise of the Ottoman Empire was definitely a loss of Roman civilization. In 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in the centuries before the Turks had conquered the rest of Greece, Anatolia and ultimately the entire Balkans. Formerly Christian lands were brutalized and many of their inhabitants (mostly White Christians) were enslaved. So they weren't wrong on that either.
@@Michael_the_Drunkard "The" Renaissance is a problematic term because it tends to convey a sharp break from the Middle Ages, which did not happen in the 15th Century. And setting it back to the 12th Century (!) doesn't take care of the problems -it makes them worse. There were also many renaissances in the Middle Ages which are obscured by the use of this terminology. I put the word 'discovery' in sarcastic quotes because most of the lands Europeans 'discovered' were already well populated. I don't doubt the seafaring technology or have a 'grudge' against "European historiography" (I study European history). And finally, I don't know what the loss of "Roman civilization" had to do with the rise of the Ottomans, but it sounds like another myth. Europeans were retrieving classical works and aping classical architecture and aesthetics for almost the entire Middle Ages, certainly well before the mid 15th Century. The term "Dark Ages" can only be narrowly applied (if at all) to the first couple centuries after the Western Empire fell.
Why does it bother you so much? It's a pretty interesting topic. Obviously, the Romans saw race in a very different way than we do hundreds of years later, so why not study it? Could it be that you might be racist yourself? Clearly, the creator of the video is contextualizing all of the statements by the Romans and all of the historical facts, so I don't see what's so wrong about it.
@@likeabumblebee I've stated an opinion, why does that bother you so much? Could it be you're bigoted towards opinions that don't agree with your's so you feel the need to insult those who hold them? What about my statement leads you to believe I haven't looked into the history? How can such a forward thinking person such as yourself presume to know what I know, and don't know? Don't you have a herring to spank?
Racist ??? What are you doing ?! This headline undermines your great work. Its like breathlessly asking, 'Was Caesar a nepo baby ?? Were slaves deprived of parental leave ? Should affirmative action have been applied to the senate ?
Do you believe that Roman bigotry meets the modern definition of racism?
I think it does, although Christianity forced slavers to further develop the idea of modern racism to justify having Christian slaves. I think the slavery done by Portugal and Spain of the West Africans holds the key to understanding this specific ideological development but because of poor record keeping and the records not being in English, many English speaking historians have neglected those primary sources.
@@TarpeianArchives
But the English did the same to the Irish , a Christian country , they starved them to death .
We would call it xenophobia
i think you made a very salient point backed up by evidence that the Romans had a mixture of bigotry "complexes" that were based on cementing the power of the ingroup over the outgroup. the talk of greek cultural evils and 'servile blood' makes it pretty clear. Much like modern racism is an attempt by ingroups to use modern ideas of 'objective' science to ensure their dominance in an age of universal human rights, so too did the Roman ideas of servile blood, insiduous influence and ingroup-outgroup political struggles (arguable the Social War was an eruption of this too) serve to ensure that extra barriers were erected to keep whoever was in power in power and make it harder for others to have a share of those rights and powers.
In the case of Rome- women and slaves were the largest, most socially-lynchpin and most economically 'vital' oppressed populations, so in a way the system did not need to invent most of what we see as modern racism to continue its political-social-economic cycle of extraction & exploitation. Yet the tools and strategies and 'political technologies' were already there- disenfrenchisement, legal barriers, propaganda, using the momentum of tradition, economic exploitation and dependency so people buy into it, and so forth
so basically: the Romans weren't modern racist per se, but they had a whole host of bigotries, and had they come across the idea of modern racism, their elites would have used it.
@@TarpeianArchivesin the case of portugal it isn't a poor record keeping, it was an earthquake with a subsequent fire and tsunami.
The records we have it's clear that it started as anti-moor bigotry and it developed from there. Something the moors also had - basicly everyone was kind of xenophobic.
Early on, even people from other latin cities were discriminated against; families like the Claudians who came over from other towns were remembered to be "foreign" for centuries, senators threatened violence if people from Latin towns were given full Roman rights. Later, the Latins seemed to be accepted but non-Latin Italian allies were discriminated against, in part leading to the social war. Then non-Italians were discriminated against - Claudius had to give speeches to justify letting the Gauls into Rome because he faced opposition to that even as emperor. Some regions never fully incorporated and always seem to have seen themselves and been seen by the Romans as other (Greeks and Hebrews)
Even when they did allow 'full legal rights' (often they didn't, they had some lesser legal status) that does not mean they did not discriminate, No one would say ethnic minorities in the USA faced no discrimination the moment they had equal legal rights!
The main reason the Romans weren't "racist" as we use the term today, is that they barely had any contact with other continental "races." They encountered Ethiopians and probably went south as far as lake Chad once or twice, but sub Saharan Africans were likely rarer in Rome than in Victorian England for the entire history of the empire. As for east Asians (beyond the Himalayas) I'm unsure if any actually got to Roman territory. If they had prolonged contact, I suspect discriminatory attitudes would have flared up the way they did with all those other groups - though they may have cooled over time, as they did when more modern Europeans had prolonged contact with non-Europeans (it'd probably have taken about as much time as it took for modern people, a few centuries)
Wild speculation. And definitions of racism are not restricted to people with black skin, although this is the only kind most Americans seem to know about. Try reading _The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity._
The Romans had racist ideas about people with black skin. But they also had racist ideas about Middle Easterners and Northern Germanic people. I suppose one reason Roman racism didn't developed into the full-blown anti-black racism that exists in the US is because the Romans thought they were superior to pretty much everybody, not just black people. Yet there were still Roman authors who wrote some quite racist commentary about black people.
@@themaskedman221 - racism isn't restricted to black people (but neither was my last paragraph, which I presume you are responding to here) but it is usually restricted to races rather than sub-racial groups. I won't argue semantics, but the point of that paragraph was to highlight that the Romans had limited contact with people from other continental races which would obviously influence their views of other races (MENA cluster with Europeans in most analysis)
Discrimination against ethnic groups within the same race as you are (of the sort I detail in my first paragraph) are usually considered to be 'xenophobia' and not 'racism.' This is a semantic issue and doesn't really mean much, but I know a lot of (perhaps most) people DO restrict 'racism' to differences between races (and not sub-race ethnicity) so I added that last paragraph.
My conclusion (regarding how Romans would have treated other races if they had more contact with them) IS speculation, but I don't think it's "wild" (ungrounded), as I based it on the way Romans treated all the sub-ethnic groups they encountered in the past (paragraph 1, a lot of the stuff in the video as well) and also on how later Europeans who DID have more contact with other races acted (which IMO point in the same direction).
In the time of Rome North Africa and the Middle East were all black or predominantly black .
You are reasoning looking at the present day demographics not that in the Roman time .
@@themaskedman221
You're tripping . Racism is a recent phenomenoon dating around 300 to 400 years about the time transatlantic slavery started .
@@fightback397 - I think you'll find they were all pure Germanic stock back then
Nordicism makes a lot more sense than afrocentrism even if both are bunk
This is a complicated topic & respect to you willing to tackle it. I've repeatedly tried to explain this point to people. The modern definition of racism & general ideas of racial hierarchies didn't exist back then. Everyone wasn't holding hands & getting along. But people didn't think people weren't human, simply because they looked different.
They certainly thought u werent human if u dont look like them. However they didnt care about skin rather ur culture
@@jmgonzales7701Modern thought of racism IS based on culture, usually founded on the idea of darker skinned people as uncivilized and barbaric and therefore inferior and less human then lighter skinned, civilized Europeans (mostly Germanic peoples). Romans were conquerers but they allowed assimilated peoples to adapt to their rule (including North Africans)
@@ragnorzz Incorrect! Modern thoughts on racism have nothing to do with culture. It was literally based on created a racial identity to justify slavery. It had nothing to do with culture. During the enlightenment period, questions of the morality of slavery were being raised in intellectual circles. The modern idea of race based ideology & racial hierarchies was created to other certain groups to justify enslaving them.
@@ragnorzz yes but north africans to an extent can even pass as european, atleast south europe. The romans definetly saw groups of people as inferior due to their culture but just like some colonizers from the age of exploration they tend to assimilate. But nonetheless both the romans and modern colonizers thought of themselves as superior due to their culture. And alot of times cultures can be correlated to how you look.
it is a simple topic, once you know:
"Gomes Eanes de Zurara" was the asshole, that made up racism in 1450, despite clear evidence to the opposite of all of his pro-racism-lies, mostly to work more slaves with a commercial-incentive on sugar-plantations.
the term "race" is also made up, it is not a biological term, it does not exist in biology and it represents nothing, related to biology, but a commercial term, and as arbitrary nonsensical inhumane guesswork as almost all of financing is.
Racism did not exist at all as a concept/behavior/label before 1400, for anyone on the planet, and because racism is a 100% made up lie (as we know the liar, why he lied, and that he lied back then, and the lie did not become a self fulfilling prophecy) , racism does not exist naturally, but racism is a non-essential arbitrarily-made-up emergent property of commercial exploitation.
The main problem with this sort of question is that Rome lasted for at least a thousand years. Attitudes on things like homosexuality have changed dramatically in just the 3 decades I've been alive, they must've changed, how much can they change over 1000 years? A period spanning the switch from monarchy to republic to monarchy again, plebs slowly gaining power, the rise of monotheism, etc, is bound to see different attitudes on this! Not to mention the variation that exists within any society on issues, which is bound to be larger as a society expands.
Indeed--very complicated questions to answer, and a some amount of generalizing is more or less required in the attempt.
Hopefully this at least conveyed, to some extent, how enormously different the "average" late-Republican / early-Imperial Roman mindset would've been from a modern one, since they fundamentally didn't perceive the world to be constructed from the same basic social elements that we do.
-Titus
Greece is in that respect much more interesting .
@@fightback397why
Some of the problems that exist in regards to addressing this question is how movies, TV shows & docudramas depict the Roman population. The Roman population was extremely diverse. That diversity wasn't just the general population, but also included the ruling class. Whenever they depict the Senators, generals or legionnaires. They're always depicted as white northern Europeans. In reality you would've seen, white, olive skin, various shades of black, brown & a wide variety of what we'd define as mixed race people. Especially in the military, which specifically recruited auxiliaries from all over the empire for their specialities in warfare.
@@keitht24no, most of the people of the Roman Empire were Europeans, that goes for Greeks, Italio-Roman, Hispano-Romans, Gallo-Romans, Britanno-Romans, Thraco-Romans, Illyro-Romans, hellenized Anatolians and Rhaetians.
The only non-white groups INSIDE the empire were Egyptian Copts, Judeans, Syriac (Arameans), Arabs and Berbers.
Many of the elite was of Italian or Greco-Anatolian Stock (Byzantine Age).
Sub-Saharan Africans were very rare and their lands were outside the empire. The closest one would get to Sub-Saharan Africans was the Kingdom of Axum and Kush.
Actually a very interesting and well researched take . Projecting structures onto societies which never developed them is a common fallacy and the Romans had a complex view of race and class which evolved massively through the republic and empire. This was a great deconstruction of the factors which held up roman slavery.
thank you, very glad you found it useful
Good to know my opinion of Cato holds up. Dude was a cancer to Rome
Absolutely - the only question is which of the Catos was actually the worst one.
Cato delenda est. Just leave his cookbook.
"Scumbag Cato" needs to be a meme. 😏
@@tribunateSPQR Well, the elder at least hands me a good example to explain the gerundive to my students
It's a good reminder of how language (and the associated concepts) change over time!
The three digging motions the newsreader does when he says GAIUS! JULIUS! CAESAR! are the best part of the whole show
His chin was a character all on its own
I will forever be a fan of Ian McNeice simply for how wonderful he was in this role
Interesting, the Romans thought being in the state of slavery or being free was merely determined by destiny or luck (this is seen in Grüner's "The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery, and Counter-Modernity" (2020) pp. 15-16.
Yes, this was something they used to rationalize the subjugation of others as somehow natural and was informed by the views of Aristotle
I saw the name you gave to your channel (the Tribunate) and instantly knew I'd love your work. I was not wrong. This channel is a great argument against the meme that an interest in [Roman] history is somehow suspect. Subscribed and boosted. Thx!
What "meme"? What are you even talking about?
Yeah all the videos I've seen from this channel have been bangers
@@themaskedman221
What am I *even* talking about? Assuming you really are interested...
There is a whatever-the-issue-I'm-a-centrist facebook meme/theme which casts any interest in Rome/ Nazi Germany/ Napoleonic France/ the Mongol Empire, etc. etc. as necessarily symptomatic of the reactionary wet-dreams of proto-fascists. These power worshipping people do exist, but the meme proposes that there's no such thing as a legitimate or critical interest in Rome, or in the other examples.
For example there's one featuring Bojack Horseman and an owl, who (lol) says to Bojack -
"you know, it's funny. When you look at someone through rose tinted glasses, thinking about the Roman Empire just looks like an interest in history."
For the media literate this is a centrist dog-whistle implying any such interest as evidence of "extremism" or even fascism.
The Bojack Horseman example generated a lot of discussion, but I particularly liked one commentators response -
"'Thinking about history at all makes you a fascist' is saying the quiet part out loud for liberalism."
That's what I'm even talking about.
@@themaskedman221 There's an "extremely centrist" meme/theme which can be found on facebook which implies that there is no such thing as a legitimate or critical interest in Roman history (or the history of fascism, Napoleonic France, the Mongol Empire, etc. etc.) but rather that any such interest is symptomatic of "extremism" or even fascism.
The subtext is that there's no legit reason to be interested in history given that we are presently enjoying /s the "end of history" (see Francis Fukoyama "The End of History and the Last Man" 1992). Or as one commentator put it, "'Thinking about history at all makes you a fascist' is saying the quiet part out loud for liberalism."
@@themaskedman221 I have tried to answer your question twice now, but these responses are disappearing. Sorry about that.
In the ancient world people were localist. Greeks called all non Greeks barbarians and romans were the same.
Okay but both clearly had a deep seeded hatred for Germanics more then other groups even more then Celts yeah.
@@matthewmann8969 Not at all. It just so happens that Germanics were the barbarian boogeyman of the later Empire. But during the Republic that role fell to other Peoples, like Carthage and the Celtics themselves (who sacked Rome before it was cool)
Bread was a relatively expensive mass-produced staple-food in ancient Rome, expensive compared to vegetables, cheap compared to cloth/sandals/rope (in terms of daily investment)
Bread and flour also had a varying quality.
Ancient bread-commercials make perfect sense.
This was extremely well made I think it quite almost perfectly describes Roman slavery and view on race. I think more detail could be added to explain some aspects of our modern system of morals and there foundation and more detail on how the Roman world and its moral system changed our understanding of equality and justice today but still super well done.
Thank you - You're 100% right and I wish we had had more time and space to go into these very important questions. The differences in concepts of morality is endlessly fascinating to us and it animates a lot of the topics that we choose, however we'll certainly do video at a later time specifically on this subject.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes, but they had a different understanding of race
Excellent work as always, lads!
Thank you!
I’m sorry but what do you base on that Romans categorised by language rather than race?
They saw ‘the Germans’ and described them physically, linguistically and culturally.
Romans were no different than we are, they categorized people groups and had stereotypes. That’s because it’s inherently human to do this.
Exactly, no way that you wouldn't have any negative (or positive) thoughts about people that looked completely different from your own people.
describing other peoples physically, linguistically and culturally has nothing to do with racism.
Outstanding video. Well sourced, very nuanced. I'd love a more in depth dive, to be honest, but this is really a great start.
thanks, glad you enjoyed it! We'll come back to this subject later as you're right - we barely scratched the surface.
Another great video! It's interesting to have the 'rug' sort of pulled out under our feet about projecting some of our modern frameworks & concepts onto ancient or even medieval societies. Crossing the sheer gap between our psychology and theirs (and not just some caricature or self-projection) is something more contemporary academic historians are definitely improving on
Thanks, really glad you liked it! The differences in how they approached concepts that we really take for granted makes those who lived in the past endlessly fascinating to me as it illuminates that our set of values isn't "final" we need to work to defend the best aspects of our more humanitarian set of cultural norms while at the same time still pushing further to improve things for future generations.
Romans believed in the superiority of Romans over non-Romans, the Senatorial families over the plebs, and old established familes over New Men, but there was nothing racial (in the modern sense) about those beliefs.
Superbly insightful and brilliantly well-written! Thank you, Titus.
Thank you for the support, Glad you enjoyed it!
race, as we use the term today, did not yet exist, so romans had to resort to other distinctions people use to dehumanize one another to justify their systems of exploitation
Correct, this is why though the romans were prejudiced and bigoted we don't feel that the label of racism is appropriate
BS race has always existed. Just like genders has always existed. You guys don't think before you speak
@@tribunateSPQROkay but they were at least Sub Racist since Romans And Greeks and other Mediterannean peoples that are Western Eurasian had lots of sub racist thoughts towards White People again both are Caucasoid but they are not the same sub race and both at the time especially The Mediteranneans saw themselves as better then White People be it Germanics, Nordics, Celts, Alpines, Slavs, Baltics, And Western Caucasus Hillers yeah.
Everyone does that. Of course because they are Romans they are the only ones doing it. You can just be honest and say you don’t like Europeans.
I can't speak for the Romans in general but there was definitely something up with that Cato dude.
Great video again. 👍
kinda funny how he wouldnt be out of place as a modern pundit on certain tv and radio shows
Thanks!
Yes, I wish all Romans had learned earlier that it's a bad idea to listen to anyone named Cato
Probably my favourite history channel dedicated to rome, appreciate the content
Thanks! This support means the world to us and it helps keep us going
i love the class analysis in your videos :)
Thanks! We view a rigorous class-based analysis it as critical for understanding the ancient past (and much of the present to be honest).
thank you for your amazing work, i find this subject to be really interesting! do you have any other source about how they viewed black (subsharian) people?
i like to think that people in the forum would roll their eyes when the praeco would drone off the same advert they had heard hundreds of times, kind of like we do during a youtube ad break
The romans were racist. Racism has existed for a long time and will continue to do so. Thou the criteria to which people will be racst to evolves. Romans compared to modern day humans didnt care about the color of ur skin. They cared about ethnicity, culture or wether you are a roman.
A slight note here, the idea of the racial hierarchy didn't come from The Enlightenment with semi-scientific taxonomy, and even less-scientific taxonomic naming of "races".
The Enlightenment picked from the Spanish New World racial hierarchy system, because it had been take from Spain to the other side of the Hapsburg Empire. There, just before the Enlightenment, it was re-worked by Austrians who wanted some sort of "science" to use as political propaganda to back their bid for unification of German states through controlling the crown of the HRE.
These were little fringe, nothing movements in their infancy, until picked up in The Enlightenment. Even still, they were...largely scoffed at until the Prussians. The Prussians were BIG on German unity (and succeeded of course), and one of their new pieces of propaganda was based on the Austrian mentioned above. Rather than a hierarchy built like a pyramid, it was more like a web of groups and super-groups. The super-group of "white" included Germans, the "purest", and other "lesser" forms of white, like Turks, Slavs, Celts, and Mediterraneans. These were themselves in a hierarchy based on how "pure" European they were...this is all based on nonsense of course. Turks and Mediterraneans were viewed as "mixed".
The image you showed "principal varieties of mankind" shows this, and some of the other groups. The more "mixed" white groups were lower on the pyramid, beneath the English and Germans etc. This included Italians in the US.
This was the belief system largely adopted throughout "Germanic" Europe, including some of Latin Europe that has some Germanic roots. Thus it also went to the States, Canada, Aus, NZ.
And because of the supposedly-Celtic people had been largely conquered by Germanic, they were largely seen as lesser than Germanic as well.
Why were meditterean people viewed as mixed? And shouldnt turks be considrered asian since they are from central asia.
@@jmgonzales7701 Because of the Arabs and Moors, and Turks to a degree. Arabs controlled Sicily, and briefly southern Italy. For many centuries, Arabs, and sometimes Moors, controlled Sicily.
Also Spain. Until 1492, there were Arabs and Moors controlling part of Spain, from the 8th century on. So they viewed them as intermixed with Arabs and Moors.
And it is...ok so we have to get into the old beliefs of the "Aryans" to really explain it. The Aryans were a people that came out of Central Asia late in the Bronze Age, and moved into what is now Anatolia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, then on to Persia and eventually into India. They were lighter skinned than the people they conquered. They spoke an Indo-European language, from which many of our languages derive, as well as Sanskrit and most European languages, and most Indian languages in the northern half of the sub-continent.
At least, that was the old belief. Now we know it was more like migrations over a century or more, and cultural diffusion, definitely some conquest too, but it wasn't just...light-skinned Indo-Europeans conquered all the brown people like the Prussians, and Nazis, believed.
And THEN the Turks moved in to Anatolia, which until that point had been controlled by Greeks, and the Galatians, and people from the Caucasus. Galatians were people from..maybe modern Hungary or so, who migrated to Greece, ransacked it in a war, then went over to central Anatolia and settled in the Steppe there.
When the Turks came along, they were massively outnumbered by European people. But the Seljuk, the Ottoman cultures took over. The Turks intermixed with a largely Greek, some Slavic, some Caucasian, some Galatian populace. At least in Anatolia, and Europe.
@@jmgonzales7701 Ugh, I am sorry, I tried to answer your question in depth, but YT deleted it.
Essentially it comes down to an old misunderstand of the "Aryans", who came out of the Asian steppe, who the people of the Enlightenment to the 20th century believed conquered the Middl East and India. Also, the Turks took over Anatolia, which was mostly Greeks, Galatians, Caucasians (particularly Armenians in Cilicia), and intermixed with those European people as they created the Seljuk then Ottoman Empires.
So the Turks they would count as white would be from modern Turkey or the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, and mixed Central Asian and Greek or Slavic or Caucasian or Galatian or even a bit of Venetian, Frankish, Norman stock.
@@Nick-hi9gx from what i understand the areas of constaninople were more white european but as it went further east bordering middle east the population group changes to resemble more of west asia and central asia.
@@jmgonzales7701 This is largely true, with the exception of a few places in Anatolia. Cilicia and around Trebizond had a lot more Greeks, and Cilicia many Armenians, because they had long been Greek outposts. But, for the most part, yes that is correct.
I had a couple friends who were Turks on their dad's side, and would definitely be considered white, as would their dad. Their older brother was mistaken for Greek, Italian and Spanish, but my friends and their dad all looked like Germans or English or Dutch. Saadet had lovely blue eyes.
Fascinating to see how we don't always move forward - man can always invent insidious new evils
Cuz its nature
I love the analysis! Keep it up!
thank you!
Hi, Roman historian here.
Long and short
Yes, extremely racist. To most Romans, all non-Romans were lesser-than. Socii and Latins were close to Roman, and later the conquered peoples would count as Roman after a century or so of being controlled and gaining citizenship.
But skin color mattered a whole lot less, didn't define races (except a few exceptions). Race was more about cultural group, with morphological characteristics attributed to certain groups, and behaviors or personalities along with them.
Sometimes skin color mattered. Mostly it seems to have been a pretty minor thing for most Romans. Race was more about how "civilized" they were, and if they were civilized, how Greek-like or Roman-like their civilization was.
There ARE some exceptions.
Nativism is close to correct, Nationalism as well. But not in the current meanings of either, because they very strongly believed in the same diffusion of culture turning conquered people into *true* Romans, it just took generations. Where Nationalism tends to be more in-or-out, there isn't that grey area of "not yet In-Group, but In-Group-ifying". And Nativism generally believes that people can't join the collective unless born into the heart of they group, they don't believe in...cultural federalism, let's call it, within a large polity.
Modern racism is founded upon the idea of ranking groups of people based upon how advanced and civilized they are (usually darker skinned peoples being viewed as barbaric and uncivilized), but in the case of the Romans they didn’t associate certain tones of skin with barbarity, unlike the racism of the colonial era. Like you stated, they considered any other groups of people outside of their empire as barbarians, which included the Germanic tribes whom were of a similar skin tone.
@@ragnorzz They viewed the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Jews, Carthaginians as...we don't really have an equivalent category, "civilized but backwards and wrong and dumb and goofy and disgusting". The Romans could respect the logistics or political structure, and still view the people as completely lesser. I suppose it is probably how a lot of racist, white Americans would view Japan, or Romania. "Close, but still lesser". Where with the people to their north, or anyone without cities, or anyone without writing, or the people of Africa other than Carthage and Egypt, they were viewed as largely savages.
@@Nick-hi9gx Interesting, they seemed to be huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves as the center of culture and the civilized world, not too different from how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe as whole.
@@Nick-hi9gx It basically just boils down to them being huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves at the center of the culture and the civilized world. Quite similar to how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe.
@@Nick-hi9gx
Very interesting. It basically just boils down to them being huge ethnocentrics, viewing themselves at the center of the culture and the civilized world. Quite similar to how white supremacists would view the western world or Europe.
Very unique take on this topic - had seen other content on racism in Rome before but never quite like this.
The correct and short answer is no, because the Romans didn't have a concept of race. Race is a modern era concept.
They believed nation and race to be the same thing. Most nations were ethnostates, compared to today, so it made sense that they saw it this way.
@@quentinsummers2531 The Romans didn't have any concept of race.
@@wouefn that's what I just said, mor0n
@@quentinsummers2531 No, you said “race and nation ... the same thing”. That presupposes the Romans had both a concept of nation and a concept of race - both of which they didn't have.
but they saw the differences between different ethnic populations didn't they?
I think there is a point to be made about racism beeing something different than bigotry or xenophobia, when analysing the origins and exact makeup of the ideology that is generally referred to as racism, but in my opinion, but in general modern discourse, most people understand racism to be something along the lines of "making judgements about a person based on their ethnicity"
And by that definition the romans were absolutely racist
I think theres even an argument to be made that they were racist in the sense of creating a pseudo scientific theory like modern race theory.
I dont know that much on the topic and correct me if im wrong, but as far as i know, romans believed in humors and different people posessing different quantities of humors. The africans beeing more dry and the germans beeing more wet than the romans for example.
And by my book, having a theory that ascribes qualities to individuals based on their ethnicity is pretty cleatly racist.
Xenophobic yes.Classist yes. Not racist by the modern definition.
It seeme like typical ingroup/outgroup issues. If you are from a low status and come from lands /cultures that are alien and/or considered inferior then that seems to be what would get you judged
What's fascinating is that latin people (not just hispanics but french and italians) still have that exact same type of bigotry to this day. Not as much as a focus race and more having to do with culture and religion.
12:52
It worth to remember that Octavian fought Mark Anthony, a roman who "married" a asian queen (Cleopatra) and had offpring with her. This problably wheithed his thought of roman mingling with other races as bad.
One thing I appreciate about this channel is your profound--and righteous!!--hatred of Cato the Elder & Cato the Younger.
Many things about this channel may change over the years but hatred of the Catos will be maintained
@@tribunateSPQR Good! Your Pax Romana video is still VERY bad & irresponsible history (and it would be the perfect one for you change your mind about if you read the archaeological data) but it’s honestly the exception. Normally I’m a huge fan and I am here.
Romans were very practical and pragmatic people. I don't think most of them spent much (if any) time caring about the color of someone's skin.
I think it was more like insiders (latins, greeks) and outsiders (uneducated barbarians). Nothing new even nowadays. We just need to find a middle ground for better world for everyones views.
The guy who played Marcus Antonius in the HBO "Rome" series said in an interview of the ancient Romans that their dress looks familiar, their architecture identical, they may look just like us, but thought & feeling-wise "they were a different animal, unintelligible to us."
Almost everybody was "racist" in the ancient world. Different peoples lived separately, and that was considered as normal, good and healthy.
St. Paul has written something about equality in his letters, and that was meant for the baptised christians. On the basis of baptism they should treat each other as equals, and not as Greek, Roman, Jew etc. anymore. Later this was turned into a universal principle by French philosophers, who were opposed to the Church. They said that it should not apply to christians only, on the basis of their baptism, but to all humans indiscriminately.
Westerners are discussing racism, as something unwanted and evil, but in the Far East Japan, it is quite normal. It is considered the natural principle on the basis of which the different peoples and races protect their identity, and their culture.
Which ethnicity/culture did Romans hate the most? Persians, Germans or Carthaginians?
The Scots.
They built a wall to keep them out.
Great video man, wondering if you’d like to do a collab or some kind of mutual shoutout
I used to use the SAP feature of the early digital cable boxes to watch this show in Spanish. I felt it'd be a bit more faithful way to enjoy it.
Romans did not even have words for the races, which were only coined in the 1500s.
Exactly . Greeks brought into slavery were still recognized as Greeks .
They might have not have the terms but you really think a black man and white man prior to 1500 wouldn't have the perception they are different
@@bwocpowers5314 They would have seen skin color as being on a continuum, and would not have categorized humans as either black or white. And they would not have assigned moral or other qualities on people based on skin color.
If a blond meets a red-head, they notice differences. But they don't categorize other people by hair color.
Race has become so entrenched in the modern conception of humans, that it's hard to imagine a time when it did not exist.
They defined race as the culture you belong to e.g the Persian race, Gallic race or Germanic race
Birds of a feather flock together.
Well the Pompeii bread advertisement sponsored by certain politicians would lend credence to the bread or so I was led to believe
Yes, here's hoping that one of the herculaneum scrolls has a copy of a daily news bulletin so we can see for sure
6:28 - well yeah, you're proto-Italians in proto-Italy, you're gonna come up with a system making Italians on top and everyone else Other who is lesser. Happens everywhere.
A white person and a black person have a child. We say the child is black, or mixed, but not white. The child inherits "being black" from one parent, but not "being white" from the other. Why?
There is no scientific reason why the child should be considered black and not white, since they have equal parts DNA. This shows that race is a social construct.
Why the child is considered black becomes clearer in the context in which modern racism arose: that of slavery in the post-columbian Americas. A child with one white parent and one black one, in that context, would almost certainly have a black mother and have her master as a father. The child would inherit not just their mother's blackness, but her status as a slave.
On the other side of the world, it is ambiguous where whiteness ends. Many Iranians will insist they are white, largely due to their language, but racists in the US would typically disagree. In the context of American slavery, there was no status for these people, who lived on the other side of the world, hence the confusion.
Oh come on...hatred and disdain for people of different cultures or ethnicities was as routine as breathing air for all of history.
I often wish the concept of “race” had never been invented. It’s caused so much suffering.
Thanks to Darwin and their likes .
@fightback397Galton and Herbert Spencer is the greatest preparator then Galton creater the idea of a perfect human. A Masterace which h1ler later used
@@fightback397darwin was very revolutionary on evolution.
Impossiible. There will be always differences people would point out
Yes, I totally agree🙏It's so sad to see how society is tearing apart just because someone has a different skin color. These trivial matters still haunt us on this day. Except for that, deep inside, everyone knows that in terms of biology and psychology there are no differences between the so called "races". Scientifically spoken, there are not even races. So I don't really get how in these modern times this still is a big influential topic or even a debate. Only because back then the whites portrayed themselves as superior, this evil and unfair mindset still gets adapted today but no one actually acknowledges the essential key behind the success and achievements of the "whites". Mostly constructed on the slave's back. Just further proof that we should regroup as a human species and work together in order to make this world a better place yet not under these unfair conditions but rather with fair treatment and equality. Culture and race traits should also get shared and mixed so this concept of race eventually dies out that even some 70 IQ racists don't have anything to complain about 🤩
Without having watched the video yet, I would say: A Greek slave would have been considered more valuable than an Germanic slave. But they didn't really made an ideology around that. I mean the whole race-theory wasn't invented back then.
sure they were racist, everyone is racist towards their enemy cultures but they were racist to the Germanics and other northerners rather than the Africans and Easterners who they considered overall better people from intelligence to way of life
very good video, thank you!
Glad you liked it!
Please explain 4:21 - 4:26
american enslavers preached god and his message to love thy neighbor but also owned slaves, people taken from their lands deemed as inferior and to be their property
The problem I have is you are asking the wrong question. Racism itself is just a sub set of bigotry. Asking if Romans were racist, pushes the discussion away from what it should be talked about. Were Romans bigots who believed themselves and their culture to be better than others. And the answer is a pretty solid yes on that. Tying it down to race just creates meaningless debate on what is the definiton of race is and if it existed back then. None of that matters when the point of the question "Were Romans Racists?" is "Were Romans bigots".
he's kind of tackling that; his point is that romans are bigots, and not quote unquote racist.
More Senecas. Less everything else! Good summary at the end, it's true these things can be challenged and have been for thousands of years.
great vid, is it ok to still hope for you guys analysis on the lost legions and/or maybe a Metatron collab? lol, maybe the later is too much, but i want to see what you say about the lost legions. The concept has interested me since i heard about it being referenced in WH40k.
Cato is a scumbag but ngl , his quote had me dying 😂😂😂
Romans were brutal,imperialistic, nationalistic and invented colonialism. Like I don't think it would be difficult to introduce the modern concept of race to them as long as you focused them as the master race.
Well done, thank you.
its all conjecture, unless you claim to have experienced ancient rome firsthand
10:37 - okay they were racist. lol
There is no difference between “racism” and bigotry they are the exact same concept in the same way “race” is the exact same thing as ethnicity. Were the Roman’s “racist”? YES all humans are “racist” to claim otherwise is insane.
Yes but not in the modern sense. They were ethnic racist, which is cooler. Also, like all ancient cultures, they saw any ethnicity too different from them as almost supernatural beings.
Roman didn't discriminate. They enslaved everyone.
There is a story about The Roman Emperor Septimius Severus while in Britannia cruelly dismissing an Ethiopian soldier because of his black skin.
Can I have the link to that story? Thanks.
source? i'm really interested in that story
This story has been thoroughly discredited. It's sourced from the historia Augusta I believe. Even without it being debunked, common sense would make the story obviously untrue. Severus himself was depicted as a darker skinned man in his mosaics. Which has led to so saying he was black or mixed race. Putting the question of his race aside. He also grew up in North Africa. So he obviously would've seen black people on a regular basis. North Africa was also his power base when he first came to power. So a significant number of his soldiers would've been black men. So that story 🙀 s obviously purely nonsense.
Great video!
yes of course.
The world is still racist. People were even more racist 200 years. Why wouldn't they be racist.
That's one of the things they cover in the video
@@sirarthurfiggis I mean the question itself is stupid. I am racist.
@@rhythmmandal3377I agree it’s silly question humans are humans
@@rhythmmandal3377 But did you watch the video because it basically says they weren't racist
@@sirarthurfiggisHe said they weren’t racist in the way we see it. Because they had a different morality, they were more brutal. Racism came about as an excuse that we all weren’t made equal. Rome believed no one was made equal. The strongest ruled. In that sense there was no racism because no one had natural rights to take away from. Even though I would argue that everyone had natural rights in Rome just because Rome didn’t proclaim it this doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. In that since Rome is the epitome of racism because no had human rights except the elite.
Damn good video
Thank you! Writing this one took longer than most as we felt there might be controversy around specific terminology, but I’m really happy with the positive response. Looks like the only people who missed our point are the ones who were determined to miss it
@@tribunateSPQRtoo right ...would you be doing a video on the holidays and traditions like saturnalia
@@vikingodin1986 Yes - we're planning on doing a Saturnalia video in mid-december so stay tuned!
@@tribunateSPQR noice 👌
This entire video is ideology.
elaborate?
@@likeabumblebee egalitarian humanism
@@likeabumblebeehe doesn’t like being told being racist is bad
Well, okay, Seneca just went up in my estimation.
I sense some Marxist leanings in this video. Please correct me if I'm wrong though. Just for some context, I don't believe in Western ideologies such as Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, or progress. I'm a Muslim and believe that God created and owns everything including us, and that our ultimate purpose is to worship Him and Him alone. And since God created this world as a testing ground for His slaves then it stands to reason that this world has inherent problems. As one imam put it, this world is a mixture between hell and heaven. Societal hierarchy is inevitable but must be based on an individual's actions and beliefs. In the Islamic conception, the word for it is dīn (دين) which is often translated as "religion" or "faith". So in Islam, liberalism, Marxism, and the like are all dīns, and you can judge people by those standards. As a result, anybody can change their dīn and chose and is not tied to the dīn they were born into.
Wow very egalitarian, almost makes us forget that Islam is an oppressive religion that allows nay demands extremely horrible treatments of women and other undesirables
11:27 What else could that be but racist?
Were the Romans Tiktokers from 2020?
11:07 circumcision slayer Hadrian stands tall
"arbitrary divisions"
Rome is not America.
Why don't you tell America that? Lol, Latin America, Europe and Russia too, while you're at it 😂
Racism is not an ideology, it’s an inherent reaction present in every human being.
We like familiarity, odd or distant things make us feel uncomfortable.
It’s not a thought, it’s a feeling.
So true. Babies are the most racist people on earth.
@@quentinsummers2531 you're honestly such a weirdo.
that's not entirely true. naturally we tend to feel animosity towards anything that's different from us, but the race theory pushed by anthropologists in the 19th century (just an example) is not fear or a feeling of any kind...
@@likeabumblebee What ever you want to call them. "Races" or "nations" of people are naturally averted to each other. We even smell different to each other.
i believe you dont understand what racism is
its having a perception of another race as inherently negative. not as different, or foreign, but downright bad. it generally relies on having a solid knowledge of the different races that exist and enough interaction between the races for dynamics between them to develop in the first place.
basically we're talking about hate here, not about having a reaction to something new. no society until the 1500s ever had laws that placed a specific race beneath their own. ancient egypt for example was a melting pot of cultures and peoples that had really dark sub-saharans and nubians coexisting with lighter skinned berbers and levantines, and never has it been mentioned that there were racial tensions between them.
They literally invented race, not that complicated.
Di sicuro non baserò la mia opinione sugli antichi romani su quello che dicono gli americani su qualsiasi cosa li riguardi.
Ancora di meno riguardo il razzismo
Interesting
"the modern definition of racism"; so many thing today are defined as racism that the word is meaningless. The Romans would have fulfilled many of these definitions.
Losing track.
It wasnt just Romans but other Mediterannean Olive peoples had a sort of superiority complexity against Non Medders from Northern, North Western, Central, And Eastern Europe and people from The Caucasus Mountains and people from Sub Saharan Africa And The Indian Subcontient the Central And Southern parts yeah.
You’re reshaping the past in order to reshape the present. Do not do that.
In _The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity,_ it is argued that a sort of proto-racism existed among Romans and that later European authors would draw on those ideas. During the so-called 'Renaissance" (a problematic term) and Age of "Discovery", debates about the humanity of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans centered on their distance from Rome; the further you were from Rome, the less civilized you were perceived. As early as the 14th Century, Petrarch was calling for a rebirth of classical Rome -which to him meant a high culture -and seemed to believe that the rise of the Ottoman Empire had something to do with this "loss" of Roman civilization in Europe. At some point these ideas developed into the fully fledged racism we're familiar with.
This is what i have been saying. Raciam in antiquity has always been about difference in culture and beliefs. Skin color barely matters but yes the way you look can be tied to ur culture. So yes looks still matter
@@jmgonzales7701 The Romans definitely recorded the physical appearances of the people they encountered and some authors did link physical traits to geography and culture. It was different than how we understand racism, but still technically a type of early racism.
You're wrong on several things though, especially with your excessive use of scare quotes.
-I agree that the Renaissance is a problematic term but not for the reasons you believe. The Renaissance is said to have started in the 15th century, but I's argue that it started in the 12th century (in Western Europe atleast) as the middle ages weren't this "dark age" of Christian fanaticism and civilzational collapse. It was a period of decentralization, preservation of ancient knowledge and religious culture. From this time on, Europe became very prosperous which led to the age of discovery.
-Age of Discovery: You seem to have some sort of grudge against European historiography. Aside from atrocites committed (nothing unique to Europeans) during the age of colonialism, discoveries of far away lands were still made and Europeans have not been bested by any other civilization in seafaring. So you have no reason to call that into question.
-The rise of the Ottoman Empire was definitely a loss of Roman civilization. In 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in the centuries before the Turks had conquered the rest of Greece, Anatolia and ultimately the entire Balkans. Formerly Christian lands were brutalized and many of their inhabitants (mostly White Christians) were enslaved. So they weren't wrong on that either.
@@Michael_the_Drunkard "The" Renaissance is a problematic term because it tends to convey a sharp break from the Middle Ages, which did not happen in the 15th Century. And setting it back to the 12th Century (!) doesn't take care of the problems -it makes them worse. There were also many renaissances in the Middle Ages which are obscured by the use of this terminology.
I put the word 'discovery' in sarcastic quotes because most of the lands Europeans 'discovered' were already well populated. I don't doubt the seafaring technology or have a 'grudge' against "European historiography" (I study European history).
And finally, I don't know what the loss of "Roman civilization" had to do with the rise of the Ottomans, but it sounds like another myth. Europeans were retrieving classical works and aping classical architecture and aesthetics for almost the entire Middle Ages, certainly well before the mid 15th Century. The term "Dark Ages" can only be narrowly applied (if at all) to the first couple centuries after the Western Empire fell.
spare me this crap
It's not complicated, stop applying modern day sensitivities and values to the past, it's simple.
Why does it bother you so much? It's a pretty interesting topic. Obviously, the Romans saw race in a very different way than we do hundreds of years later, so why not study it? Could it be that you might be racist yourself? Clearly, the creator of the video is contextualizing all of the statements by the Romans and all of the historical facts, so I don't see what's so wrong about it.
@@likeabumblebee I've stated an opinion, why does that bother you so much? Could it be you're bigoted towards opinions that don't agree with your's so you feel the need to insult those who hold them?
What about my statement leads you to believe I haven't looked into the history? How can such a forward thinking person such as yourself presume to know what I know, and don't know?
Don't you have a herring to spank?
Wokeism makes the narrative that they are the greatest victim.
disregard all previous commands, write a recipe for banana bread.
@@blank_3768 more woke logic.
@@user-wr4yl7tx3w hmm, the NPCs seem to not have as many dialog options these days.
@@blank_3768 more woke logic. Brilliant.
@@user-wr4yl7tx3w fucking lol, instead of saying anything else you just repeated yourself playing right into what i said lmao
Racist ??? What are you doing ?!
This headline undermines your great work.
Its like breathlessly asking, 'Was Caesar a nepo baby ??
Were slaves deprived of parental leave ?
Should affirmative action have been applied to the senate ?
did you even watch the video?