Any info on whether Rome may have been a greek colony? -claim by Heraklides of Pontos

Kyriakos

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Ah, wiki. Always useful despite errors (philosophy articles there are always filled with falsehoods and often even on actual basic stuff like people and dates :) ), but it now allowed me to follow a link and read about Heraklides Pontikos, so i know what i will be examining next :D

wiki quote by Heraklides of Pontos said:
So nothing divine or happy belongs to humans apart from just that one thing worth taking seriously, as much insight and intelligence as is in us, for, of what’s ours, this alone seems to be immortal, and this alone divine. And by being able to share in such a capacity, our way of life, although by nature miserable and difficult, is yet so gracefully managed that, in comparison with the other animals, a human seems to be a god.

wiki note said:
He is best remembered for proposing that the earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours.[2] He is also frequently hailed as the originator of the heliocentric theory, although this is doubted.

Sounds very interesting, particularly the bizarre ideas of his that Pythagoras later returned to life as Pyrros of Epiros :)

He also claimed (in the 4rth century BC) that Rome was founded as a greek city, which is what prompted me to ask in the history forum :)
 
Well, the recent histories of Rome I've read make me doubt this, and in particular Tom Holland's Rubicon gives an account of Rome that contrasts the city's layout - disorderly, due to the fact that Roman magistrates held office for only a year and anyway lacked the power to engage in construction on a wide scale in the city (property rights of Roman citizens were an essential part of their liberty under the Republic) - with those of the Greek cities which tended to be well-planned with large public amenities and marble buildings.
It wasn't until the reign of Augustus that Rome began to look more like a Greek city.
 
Indeed. In fact, there's an episode in the historian Livy, imagined just before the Roman army went to Macedonia, which has the Macedonian court feeling confident that the Romans can't be the sort of great power that would pose a threat to them, because their cities are planned like those of barbarians. The 'Rome was a Greek city' is wishful thinking, but it does hit vaguely at something sensible - that early Rome was a great hodge-podge of all sorts of people and cultures, and it doesn't really make sense to say that being Roman was about not being anything else. It might be argued, perhaps ironically, that this ability to place Romanness on top of what came before and integrate new people was what set Rome apart, fundamentally, from Greek cities like Athens and Sparta.
 
Thank you both :)

Iirc it was theorised it might have been a settlement by Sparta. Sparta did found other cities besides Taras, eg (i think) Knydos and some failed attempts in Thessaly and (possibly) Libya.
 
Indeed. In fact, there's an episode in the historian Livy, imagined just before the Roman army went to Macedonia, which has the Macedonian court feeling confident that the Romans can't be the sort of great power that would pose a threat to them, because their cities are planned like those of barbarians. The 'Rome was a Greek city' is wishful thinking, but it does hit vaguely at something sensible - that early Rome was a great hodge-podge of all sorts of people and cultures, and it doesn't really make sense to say that being Roman was about not being anything else. It might be argued, perhaps ironically, that this ability to place Romanness on top of what came before and integrate new people was what set Rome apart, fundamentally, from Greek cities like Athens and Sparta.

Yep. Really, the Roman's view of their own ethnogenesis is striking in that they more or less admit they're a mongrel lot, refugees and immigrants from all over the place, who assimilated plenty of other peoples during the course of their expansion. The Aeneid, while of course it can't be taken seriously as a literal historical account, is a strong reflection of this theme.

That ultimately may be why Rome succeeded so spectacularly: because at bottom being Roman was just an idea, rather than tied to a specific bloodline or place, and they knew it. Thus their model for society was catholic and readily exportable.
 
Yep. Really, the Roman's view of their own ethnogenesis is striking in that they more or less admit they're a mongrel lot, refugees and immigrants from all over the place, who assimilated plenty of other peoples during the course of their expansion. The Aeneid, while of course it can't be taken seriously as a literal historical account, is a strong reflection of this theme.

That ultimately may be why Rome succeeded so spectacularly: because at bottom being Roman was just an idea, rather than tied to a specific bloodline or place, and they knew it. Thus their model for society was catholic and readily exportable.

Livy AUC I.8 said:
eo [Romam] ex finitimis populis turba omnis, sine discrimine liber an servus esset, avida novarum rerum perfugit, idque primum ad coeptam magnitudinem roboris fuit.

Spoiler :
Thither [to Rome] from all the neighboring peoples, went a rabble, indiscriminate between freedman and slave, eagerly pursuing new things [revolution?]. And it was this group which was the first advances towards greatness [That Romulus envisioned]


Or something like that.
 
Richard Miles makes a similar claim in his work on Carthage. He contends that there was a "Western Mediterranean" economic/cultural trade zone in which Punic/Etruscan/Greek, & native peoples all mixed together in a huge melting pot of commerce and population movements. Further, he claims that this zone is broken up by political, not socio-economic means.

As for Rome, Miles asserts that it was founded as a "hub" within this zone with Punics, Greeks, and Etruscans all moving to the region. Supposedly this explains why Rome always felt "different" than the other Latin cities. Accordingly, Rome and Roman as a concept only became ingrained as a result of the growth of the power and ambitions of Rome, who sought to craft for themselves a distinct culture from those around them. Please insert reference here comparing Livy to 19th century nationalists writers.

For the record, I think the idea is interesting, particularly that of early inter-connectivity in the Western Med. However, I think Miles takes this idea waaaaaaaay too far.
 
Richard Miles makes a similar claim in his work on Carthage. He contends that there was a "Western Mediterranean" economic/cultural trade zone in which Punic/Etruscan/Greek, & native peoples all mixed together in a huge melting pot of commerce and population movements. Further, he claims that this zone is broken up by political, not socio-economic means.

As for Rome, Miles asserts that it was founded as a "hub" within this zone with Punics, Greeks, and Etruscans all moving to the region. Supposedly this explains why Rome always felt "different" than the other Latin cities. Accordingly, Rome and Roman as a concept only became ingrained as a result of the growth of the power and ambitions of Rome, who sought to craft for themselves a distinct culture from those around them. Please insert reference here comparing Livy to 19th century nationalists writers.

For the record, I think the idea is interesting, particularly that of early inter-connectivity in the Western Med. However, I think Miles takes this idea waaaaaaaay too far.

I like that idea - and have seen quite a lot of recent work (The Making of the Middle Sea on the Mediterranean and The Edge of the World on the North Sea spring to mind) making largely the same point: that we tend to mentally divide people up nowadays by landmasses, because we're used to seeing maps of the world where the land has different colours and the sea is all blue, but that for most of history, people have been much more connected than divided by water, and that if you want to understand (for example) prehistoric Morocco, you're often better looking for connections in Spain than to the south. I'd question whether it was uniquely Roman - there are a couple of tombs in various Etruscan cities which include the names of the people buried there, and it's not unusual to find Greek and Latin ones - and, of course, the overwhelming majority of 'Greek' pottery was in fact found in those tombs, and it took a good few years for anyone to realise that it wasn't actually Etruscan.

I'm also not convinced that 'Roman' identity was ever unimportant - if you were a citizen of Rome, it probably mattered a great deal: your citizenship mattered wherever you were in the ancient world. It's certainly true, though (and I expect that this is really where he's going) that the position and 'value' of that Roman identity did change over time. For example, in the early Republic, there was such a thing as 'Latin colonisation' - the idea being that, when the city grew too large or for whatever other reason, the magistrates would take a party of colonists out into the territory and they would found a new city. If you did this as a colony of Roman citizens, you kept all of your civil rights, though you had to physically go to Rome to exercise most of them. However, if you did it as a colony of Latins - that is, the non-citizens from around Rome, who spoke the same language - you did not have any citizen rights (and so there was much less of a limit on how far away such a colony could be), but the state would give you twice as much land. Roman citizens were allowed to give up their citizenship in order to join Latin colonies, and in the early period quite a lot of them did. By the 2nd century BC, however, things changed: being counted as 'Roman' now carried quite a lot of pride and benefits, because Rome was now quite clearly dominant in a way that it hadn't been three centuries before. So they ended up with a severe shortage of people willing to (effectively) sell that identity for more land, with the result that Latin colonisation died out after about 120 BC.

What you also see is a changing sense of where being 'Latin' and 'Italian' stand in relation to being 'Roman'. As I mentioned, the clear point of Latin colonisation is that you are either a 'Latin' or a 'Roman', and 'Italy' was at that point (at best) a geographic term, and perhaps the majority of people who lived in it would not have called themselves 'Romans', as most of their states were, at most, allied to but supposedly independent of Rome. Again, when you go forward a few centuries, that changes: 'Latin' and 'Roman' become interchangeable terms, all Latins are given Roman citizenship, and people give up that insistence that their local identity has to 'trump' Roman identity, because they quite like having the benefits and status of being Roman. By the time you get to Augustus, you have a huge state project designed around creating this idea of 'Italy' which is nothing if not 'Roman' - you can read the Aeneid and see the poet use 'Italians' and 'Romans' completely and deliberately interchangeably, which might have raised objections even a hundred years before. I think that's where I'd put in Livy alongside nationalist writers - nationalism is all about creating an image of 'the nation' that includes all of the people you want to include, and at some point that has to be invented. For the most obvious example, you have German national anthem, whose first verse draws you a nice mental map of who the 'Germans' are supposed to be:

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt,
Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze
Brüderlich zusammenhält.
Von der Maas bis an die Memel,
Von der Etsch bis an den Belt,

Germany, Germany above all else,
Above all else in the world,
when, for protection and defense,
it always stands brotherly together.
From the Meuse to the Memel,
From the Adige to the Belt

It's worth pointing out that not everyone is likely to have automatically or initially agreed with these ideas of 'the nation' - the German one, for example, includes a fair bit of what is now Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.
 
I like that idea - and have seen quite a lot of recent work (The Making of the Middle Sea on the Mediterranean and The Edge of the World on the North Sea spring to mind) making largely the same point: that we tend to mentally divide people up nowadays by landmasses, because we're used to seeing maps of the world where the land has different colours and the sea is all blue, but that for most of history, people have been much more connected than divided by water, and that if you want to understand (for example) prehistoric Morocco, you're often better looking for connections in Spain than to the south. I'd question whether it was uniquely Roman - there are a couple of tombs in various Etruscan cities which include the names of the people buried there, and it's not unusual to find Greek and Latin ones - and, of course, the overwhelming majority of 'Greek' pottery was in fact found in those tombs, and it took a good few years for anyone to realise that it wasn't actually Etruscan.

I know its oft-topic, but this is similar to a lot of excellent work on the interconnectivity of the North Sea area in the Early Medieval Period, perhaps shown most effectively with the Empire of Knut.

Knut placed English-born clergy to important positions in the churches of Denmark and Norway, mostly done to prevent the investiture of “foreign” Germans. Furthermore, by the second half of his reign, Knut’s armies were made up of Anglo-Saxon fyrd and Norse karls and it was not considered unnatural to find an Anglo-Saxon queen exercising political power in Norway or a Norse warrior attaining landed office in England.

Indeed it seems to have been 1066 which served to sever this connection and instead yoke the socio-economic future of England to Northern France. And even then, it took some time for this to sink in, as seen in Svend II of Denmark 1074 invasion or the existence of the Kingdom of the Isles.



I'm also not convinced that 'Roman' identity was ever unimportant - if you were a citizen of Rome, it probably mattered a great deal: your citizenship mattered wherever you were in the ancient world. It's certainly true, though (and I expect that this is really where he's going) that the position and 'value' of that Roman identity did change over time. For example, in the early Republic, there was such a thing as 'Latin colonisation' - the idea being that, when the city grew too large or for whatever other reason, the magistrates would take a party of colonists out into the territory and they would found a new city. If you did this as a colony of Roman citizens, you kept all of your civil rights, though you had to physically go to Rome to exercise most of them. However, if you did it as a colony of Latins - that is, the non-citizens from around Rome, who spoke the same language - you did not have any citizen rights (and so there was much less of a limit on how far away such a colony could be), but the state would give you twice as much land. Roman citizens were allowed to give up their citizenship in order to join Latin colonies, and in the early period quite a lot of them did. By the 2nd century BC, however, things changed: being counted as 'Roman' now carried quite a lot of pride and benefits, because Rome was now quite clearly dominant in a way that it hadn't been three centuries before. So they ended up with a severe shortage of people willing to (effectively) sell that identity for more land, with the result that Latin colonisation died out after about 120 BC.



What you also see is a changing sense of where being 'Latin' and 'Italian' stand in relation to being 'Roman'. As I mentioned, the clear point of Latin colonisation is that you are either a 'Latin' or a 'Roman', and 'Italy' was at that point (at best) a geographic term, and perhaps the majority of people who lived in it would not have called themselves 'Romans', as most of their states were, at most, allied to but supposedly independent of Rome. Again, when you go forward a few centuries, that changes: 'Latin' and 'Roman' become interchangeable terms, all Latins are given Roman citizenship, and people give up that insistence that their local identity has to 'trump' Roman identity, because they quite like having the benefits and status of being Roman. By the time you get to Augustus, you have a huge state project designed around creating this idea of 'Italy' which is nothing if not 'Roman' - you can read the Aeneid and see the poet use 'Italians' and 'Romans' completely and deliberately interchangeably, which might have raised objections even a hundred years before. I think that's where I'd put in Livy alongside nationalist writers - nationalism is all about creating an image of 'the nation' that includes all of the people you want to include, and at some point that has to be invented. For the most obvious example, you have German national anthem, whose first verse draws you a nice mental map of who the 'Germans' are supposed to be:

Later Roman Republican history itself shows how even though the definition of “Roman” had moving goalposts, to identify oneself as “Roman” was far more of a cultural identity than an ethnic one. Quite a few of the noble families in the Republic acknowledged their Etruscan background. Pompey the Great’s family hailed from Picenum, rising to prominence in Rome during the Social War (and there is more than a decent chance that ancestors of Pompey had fought for Hannibal during the Second Punic War). There’s also evidence that there were branches of Augustus’ Octavia family that had connections to the Samnites.



It's worth pointing out that not everyone is likely to have automatically or initially agreed with these ideas of 'the nation' - the German one, for example, includes a fair bit of what is now Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.

If memory serves, there were a few nationalists who thought that all of Jutland ought to be included into the German state.
 
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