• Tonava@sopuli.xyz
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    22 hours ago

    They were a great people but they were great because their excess was built on the subjugation of nations and enslaving entire people in order to get what they wanted.

    Not only on that though, they were great at adopting what was working the best in those subjugated nations, and whatever trade bought to them; not only practical things, but cultural and religious things as well. Just subjugating people doesn’t do much unless you use whatever they have and actually somehow include them in your empire instead - you just can’t hold an empire of that size together by simply trying to genocide all the different people.

    Even slavery back then wasn’t necessarily a forever thing, it was more of a circumstance. People regularly freed their well-served slaves, and those freed slaves could attain citizenship and all that. This doesn’t make slavery good mind you, it’s just that it was unlike the slavery in USA which deemed you and your future children all slaves forever, which is the type of slavery people these days think of when talking about the subject.

    Now notice how much all this goes against what nazis and magas seem to want; adapting other cultures and their inventions, allowing citizenship to people from different places, freeing slaves and including them too into your nation… These racist, white-supremacist idiots know jackshit about history and understand nothing about why Rome was able to stay in power for so long.

    • PugJesus@piefed.social
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      14 hours ago

      What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered? Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day. Strangers have reigned over us. That freedmen’s sons should be intrusted with public offices is not, as many wrongly think, a sudden innovation, but was a common practice in the old commonwealth. But, it will be said, we have fought with the Senones. I suppose then that the Volsci and Aequi never stood in array against us. Our city was taken by the Gauls. Well, we also gave hostages to the Etruscans, and passed under the yoke of the Samnites. On the whole, if you review all our wars, never has one been finished in a shorter time than that with the Gauls. Thenceforth they have preserved an unbroken and loyal peace. United as they now are with us by manners, education, and intermarriage, let them bring us their gold and their wealth rather than enjoy it in isolation. Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity, was once new. Plebeian magistrates came after patrician; Latin magistrates after plebeian; magistrates of other Italian peoples after Latin. This practice too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.

      The Roman Emperor Claudius, who was also a scholar of history (his writings are sadly lost)