Ursus

I don't think the Roman cultural ethos can be equated with fascism or any other totalitarian system. They believed in freedom in a sense, it just wasn't the liberal freedom of the modern West. It was a very qualified freedom that was inextricably tied to duty and identity with the community.

I really can't say since I wasn't there . .. but the Europeans of a century later would marvel at the size, beauty and cleanliness of Tenochitlian in comparison to their own dung filled cities.

His mama was so fat, that when her beeper went off, people thought she was backing up.

Gee, I was expecting this thread to be a big bang, but it just kind of farted and died out. So, maybe we can find different angles. And this stands out for me, too. The Romans didn't seem to have much of a use for individuals. When you did get a Roman with some individual eccentricities, like Caligula or Nero, it was usually for the worse. It seems to be the average Roman was locked into a network of overlapping duties and relationships -- to the household and gens, to his gods and ancestors, to his social patrons, and finally to his state and army. And if an individual sought glory and honor - which of course they did - it had to masked under glory and honor for the family, the gods, the state. It echoes what someone said said before of the central Roman trait being duty, and Roman concepts of freedom being submerged within this sense of duty. So it would seem to me that being Roman and adhering to Roman culture is knowing one's place within that social setting, acting accordingly, and advancing the interests and causes thereof. All concepts of dignity and honor and glory are granted by one's community according to one's function and standing within that community. To me that is what makes one "Roman" , and that's kind of the answer I was looking for. Now my question would be .... was this an admirable system? The modern West is a lot more individualistic and solipsistic these days. Some people regard this as critical for the furtherance of individual rights. Others regard it as a degeneration and the annhilation of common bonds. How did the Roman mentality compare to our own? Thoughts, anyone?

I don't know if it's an exact quote, but to paraphrase Gibbons off the top of my head on religion in the roman empire: .......All the various beliefs which prevailed in the Roman world were considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. .... I thought that was a pithy and highly accurate summary of ancient religion. :-)

I really beg to differ. There have been non stop protests and internal dissent since the war. There has even been talk of secession from United States by states that are heavily Democratic. I don't think this country has been so divided since Vietnam, and I look for it to become even more divided. .... It seems to me the main problem with all this is that people want to showcase their "tolerance" and their "social awareness" by declaring Islam a "religion of peace" and by proudly declaring that they do not hate Muslims. Fine. I don't hate Muslims either. It doesn't make me blind to the fact that an ever increasing segment of them is becoming fanatical. As as far as the religion of peace, Christianity was also supposed to be a religion of peace, and we all know what happened with that, don't we? And on that note, I see mass hatred of Bush and his Christian supporters because they are supposedly intolerant. They don't like other religions, they don't like gays, they don't like abortions, they don't like women who exist outside traditional familial structures, and they don't have much use for the environment. So they are declared EVIL. Ok, fine. But ... do not Muslims, whether Mainstream or Radical, believe in pretty much the same thing? But they are not evil. No, they are a religion of peace. Oh, ok. Nice double standards. The only way any of this makes sense is if some people secretely hate America/Capitalism/The White Male Hegemony so much they are willing to tolerate anything that might give it a bloody nose.

And the problem is that the "radical sect" keeps growing all the time, while the "mainstream" sect is infamously lax about speaking out against the "radical" sect.

I think Constantine was simply a man who saw the tides of history and decided to act upon them. Much like Caesar had done before him. The vibrancy of classical paganism had been in decline for some time, due to the decline of classical society in general. It was only a question of which of the colorful Oriental faiths would capture the hearts and minds of the citizenry. Christianity had as much as 10% of the population by then. It appealed to the poor and the desperate through a combination of earthly charity and heavenly afterlife. If Constantine made Christianity legal he would gain the hearts and minds of the proletarian masses disaffected by the decline of Roman society. And that's exactly what happened. It didn't honestly take much for his successors to dismantle traditional classical paganism because those faiths, as has been mentioned, had lost their hold on the imaginations of the population. But it took a lot longer to overcome the other Oriental gods in competition with Christ. The Cult of Isis, for instance, wasn't overcome so much as absorbed into the new Cult of Mary. I suppose Roman society at that point needed a new lease on life and a new direction. Was Constantine's answer the best one? I don't know. But I'm cynical about calling him a saint. I don't think he was any more of a sincere Christian than I am. If the social situation were a little different, he could just as easily have made Isis his new patron deity.

I've only read one book from Tom Holland, but honestly it was the most well written history book I ever read. More like a novel than an academic treatise. I much check out his other works.

I rather agree with Pentagathus. And the Romulus/Remus myth was based on an even older Indo-European theme that was grafted on to the Aeneas myth. So we have the Asia Minor/ greater Mediterreanean mingling with the Indo-European, and I think the pretty much describes the origins of Rome in a nutshell.

Not really, in all seriousness. In Rome it was the norm for each clan or guild to have a "patron" deity. The Julian Clan and Venus, for example.

I honestly think most religions do a fair job of keeping to themselves. In East Asia there are a variety of faiths and philosophies that have existed side by side for 2000 years or more, and people there are apt to practice bits and pieces of several faiths. The Tribal religions found throughout the world more or less claim the religion is for the particular tribe and no one else. The Jews were never interested in converting other people, though they do claim to have a special relationship with the alleged one true god of humanity. There are really ony two religions that have a mandate to convert the entire planet.

As long as you believe in the deity of Abraham. If you believe in gods other than than god of the Koran, then you are committing the greatest evil.

Comparing Islam to Christianity isn't very useful because Christianity has the benefit of being softened by an Industrial Revolution, a capitalist revolution, an Enlightenment and an Age of Democracy. Islam hasn't had these things. There are a lot of inherent doctrines in both Christianity and Islam I don't stomach. But the Chruch doesn't kill people anymore. It doesn't have the power or the stomach in the face of 500 years of cultural evolution. Islam, on the other hand, has large strains of itself willing to kill for such things. People can protest those as actions of fanatics all they want; the problem is that fanatics are growing in number and influence. The younger generation takes it faith extremely seriously and seems to meld this faith with a hatred of the West. Islam is fast becoming one large anti-western vehicle. If there is not some sort of internal movement within Islam to moderate that tendency, I suspect the Clash of Civilizations will only grow as Islam becomes the largest faith on earth. I'm not sure bombing Islamic countries back to the Stone Age is quite the answer, but on the other hand I think ignoring the potential for long term, wide spread cultural violence is rather naive. I'm sure the Romans of the first century didn't expect the Christian cult to one day take over the empire and smash all the temples ...

Not an expert in this field, but from what I've read Caesar was pretty close to the mark ... even if he did misinterpret some things from his own cultural perspective, and even allowing the fact he was trying to put a negative spin on a wartime enemy.

The ongoing problem with Wicca sites is precisely that the religion has not been around for 4000 years by any stretch of the imagination. As an organized religion, it's been around 50 or 60 years, though it does have roots in occult sects and romantic movements several generations before then. A new religion is not necessarily a bad one, but any claims to ancient lineage are pure fiction. That's why when you see Wiccans talk about ancient Celtic practices, you have to take it with a grain of salt. The specific site Favonius linked to seems more scholarly than most, but I'm still skeptical. On the subject of human sacrifice in the ancient British Isles, these would be the people to ask: http://www.clannada.org/docs/whtisclt2.html

I'd use a grain of salt for a Wiccan site and its views on anything Celt. Just saying.

I also like your answer. PP. And, really, I don't see a dichotomy between Caesar's personal ambitions and the glory of the Roman State. Individual ambition and public glory seem to dovetail nicely when you're a Roman.

Thanks, PP, for getting my point across. :-) So far I like Spuirius' answer the best.

Can I ask everyone in the forum an honest question , though? Why does it matter so much? I know most of you on here are good and reasonable people. But occasionally we get some types on here who seem to be in right wing racialist programs, who have a vested interest in proving the Romans were some version of their idealized Aryan race. Personally I don't care if the Romans had purple skin and green hair. They were who they were. :-)

Well, yes, but .... the point of the exercise is to define Roman culture. What are some ideals or worldviews which makes a Roman a Roman in a way that a Roman is not a Greek or Egyptian or Celt? For instance, one organization defines "The Roman Way" in a long list of "virtues" : http://www.novaroma.org/via_romana/virtues.html Perhaps a good start, but I'm trying to dig a little deeper and reduce this to something a little more pithy than a long list of nouns. Segestan's passage from Vergil is along the lines of possibilities I was looking at.

I wrote an article on this somewhere. While it was once thought that Mithraism was in competition to Christianity, this has been proven false. The cult was small and appealed to a narrow section of the population. It also infamously excluded women. Some of the outer working of the cult are known, but most of the inner workings are not. People initiated in mystery religions very rarely revealed the secrets therein. I hear the following study is good though I haven't read it myself. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books

Most of us would agree that "Roman" is a cultural rather than genetic designation. If that be so, how do we define those central cultural traits? What makes a Roman a Roman?

I'm glad to see people are seeing these discussions are not meant to be taken as a life and death situation. Nothing to get too worked up over. We even have occasional bouts of humor around here. Having said that, heated disagreement doesn't really bother me. The one thing that bothers me as a moderator is intentional stupidity like some of the less mature and/or more trollish types that we occasionally have to ban. On the subject of history, the biggest thing I learned in college is that most so-called scholars have an agenda. You have to determine what that agenda is before you can place a value on their work. Marxism per se is now a rare phenomenon, but virulent post modernism seems to be the new orthodoxy among the so-called intellectual class. They evangelize worse than militant Monotheists.