[greenwich26]

The effort to paint ancient Rome as some sort of model 21st century, "diverse multicultural non-white non-European melting point" is always pretty funny. And Cleopatra was black, right?? Of course, it all falls apart the minute you look at the ancient sources. Subflavus.

P.S. I have been to Italy many times and I can report, for the benefit of all Americans, that *Italians are white*. Period.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewars, especially garden-variety racewar, which is particularly tedious. We're trying for curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for, because it destroys what this site exists for. Please see my explanation to another user in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27475945.

I'm not going to ban you, but if you keep doing this we're going to have to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[notahacker]

A historian specialising in Rome writes, with reference to relevant sources, that Rome was founded by tribes speaking languages from completely different language groups long before it became a multicontinent empire of peoples who mostly weren't native Latin speakers and were pretty obviously distinct groups and your critique of the article is "LOL I've seen the skin colour of modern Italians"?!

[imbnwa]

Seriously, TFA is basically a refutation of modern anti-immigrant sentiment in (essentially) post-Roman states, but let the triggered show themselves for what they're really thinking.

[greenwich26]

I was responding to his lengthy diversion on the commutabality of British and Italian actors, which seems to be rooted in the delusional American notion (dating back to the late 19th century, recently revived by lefties who deny the existence of white native European nations) that Italians aren't "white". In reality, Italian and British phenotype variation overlaps significantly.

[tovej]

What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It's clear that the Romans were an amalgamation of Indoeuropeans and Etruscans. Gauls, Celts, Goths, Greeks, Turks were all part of the Roman empire at some point.

Modern day Italians aren't one single ethnic group either. Italy is very diverse, and a unified Italy was one of the latest nation states to form on the continent.

There is also a bigger than thousand year gap in your connection of Romans to Italians. A weak argument on all counts.

[eru]

Compare https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

[dragandj]

At the time of ancient Rome, Turkic tribes lived somewhere around Mongolia. Gauls, Celts, Goths, and even Greeks were as white as any typical European is today, if not more white.

[greenwich26]

> What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It means that the second image, showing Roman senators played by a few dozen white Italian extras, is a perfectly likely depiction, and the caption about how real Roman senators were much more swarthy ("like modern Italians", he claims) is nonsense.

(Of course, the HBO show was filmed in Italy, and almost all the extras and background characters were Italians.)

Even if I am wrong, he is wrong too.

[Mordisquitos]

> Romans were white even more than current Italians.

What does "to be white" even mean, especially when applied to a culture in which the modern primarily-American understanding of the word was completely absent? To me it seems as pointless an argument as it would be for hypothetical time-travelling ancient Romans to argue whether 21st century Americans are Roman citizens or not.

[zozbot234]

> It’s one of the first Roman laws - noble cannot marry common.

This is more of a historical curiosity than anything else, since the right to intermarriage across the Roman ordines was restored in 445 BCE (i.e. still quite early in the Republican period).

[uniqueid]

I really don't want to know the sources of the claims in this comment. I am skeptical to put it mildly. If one uses a search engine to look up surviving murals and mosaics from Ancient Rome the faces that pop up bolster the claims in the essay, not this comment.

Edit: Come to think of it, also there were also a few Roman Emperors from North Africa!