Roman people

• 1. Introduction

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  The Roman people are the reason a Germanic word for 'foreigner' eventually gave English the word Welsh. That word, walhaz, was what Germanic tribes called their neighbours to the west, the people they knew simply as Romans. Centuries later, the same root produced the term Vlach, still used across parts of the Balkans. Behind that linguistic trail lies one of history's strangest questions: what did it actually mean to be Roman? At its height, Rome's citizenship stretched from the shores of North Africa to the frontiers of the Near East. It folded in Greeks, Gauls, Egyptians, and countless other peoples under one legal identity. Some of those peoples kept calling themselves Roman for centuries after the city of Rome itself had lost any real power over them. Others dropped the label the moment imperial armies withdrew. This is the story of who counted as Roman, and who decided that. The answer changed completely depending on where and when you asked it.

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• 2. What Romanness Meant

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  Cicero was a 'new man', the first in his family to sit in the Roman Senate, with no line of famous ancestors behind him. That personal fact shaped how he defined what made someone Roman: not bloodline, but loyalty to Roman tradition and service to the Roman state. Modern historians often reach for the word Romanitas to describe this idea, but ancient Romans themselves rarely used the term. Some Romans pointed to geography, language, and shared ancestry as the true markers of belonging. Others argued that citizenship, culture, and behaviour mattered more than who your grandparents were. Cicero fell firmly into the second camp. He still appealed to Rome's most noble families to live up to the 'greatness of their forefathers'. That appeal proves bloodline still carried weight, even among those who insisted it shouldn't. At the empire's height, this looser, behaviour-based version of Roman identity extended across nearly every subject of the emperors. It spanned an enormous range of regions and ethnicities. What individuals believed and did mattered more to being Roman than any inherited pedigree, at least according to the orators whose writings survive. That readiness to admit outsiders through behaviour rather than blood would soon collide with Rome's own foundation myths. Those myths told an even stranger story about where the first Romans had come from.

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• 3. A Mongrel Nation

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  Romulus, according to Roman legend, founded the city as something like a political sanctuary. It was a place where outsiders and fugitives could take refuge and become citizens. The same founding stories included the rape of the Sabine women. Romans read that myth as proof that different peoples had been mixing since the city's earliest days. Cicero and other Roman writers mocked the Athenians for priding themselves on pure, unmixed ancestry. Instead, they took pride in Rome's identity as a 'mongrel nation'. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian who lived under Roman rule, went even further. He wrote that Rome had welcomed countless immigrants, not just from Italy but from the entire world. Their cultures, he said, had merged into one.

  Tacitus and Suetonius, however, raised concerns in their writings about what they called Roman 'blood purity' as citizens from outside Roman Italy grew in number. Neither writer argued for stopping the flow of new citizens; they only wanted freed slaves and citizenship grants handed out less freely. Their anxiety had nothing to do with skin colour or physical appearance in the modern sense. Romans used a term, 'Aethiop', for black people, and it carried no social stigma of its own. According to the English historian Emma Dench, it was 'notoriously difficult to detect slaves by their appearance' in ancient Rome. Slaves came from every ethnic background rather than one. The real dividing lines in Roman society ran along class and rank, not physical features. There are no surviving records of bias against mixed relationships. That tolerance for mixed ancestry, though, stopped abruptly at Rome's frontier. A very different set of prejudices governed how Romans saw the people beyond it.

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• 4. Barbarians and the Jews

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  Roman coins frequently carried anti-barbarian imagery. The emperor, or the goddess Victoria, was shown stepping on or dragging defeated enemies from beyond the frontier. Many Roman writers in late antiquity summed up their attitude toward outsiders bluntly: 'the only good barbarian is a dead barbarian'. Cicero argued differently. What made someone a barbarian, he wrote, was not their language or ancestry but their customs and character. Romans saw themselves as superior to foreigners. That sense of superiority rested on lifestyle, though, not any claimed biological difference. 'Barbarian' functioned as a cultural label rather than a permanent one. A barbarian could become Roman, and the Roman state saw conquering and civilising such peoples as part of its purpose.

  The Jews drew an unusually intense hostility among Rome's many non-Roman peoples. Most ordinary Romans detested Jews and Judaism, though attitudes among the elite varied more. Tacitus was hostile to them, while Cicero was merely coldly indifferent. Rome was not uniformly opposed to Jewish life. The city itself held a sizeable Jewish population and at least thirteen synagogues. The hostility that did exist was not about race. It grew from the fact that Jews, alone among conquered peoples, refused to abandon their own customs and religion even after repeated military defeats. That refusal fed several wars and massacres in Judea. That resistance to assimilation stood in sharp contrast to how Rome itself had begun. Its own myths insisted the city was built from a patchwork of migrants and refugees.

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• 5. Citizenship Made an Empire

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  Rome's traditional founding date, 753 BC, and the founding of the Republic in 509 BC, are both treated as historical facts. Ancient sources themselves called them uncertain and mythical. The city's origin stories combined several separate threads. One told of a king named Latinus ruling the earliest Latin people. Another credited Evander of Pallantium with bringing Greek culture to Italy. A third followed the Trojan hero Aeneas arriving from the east. Romulus, the figure most people associate with founding the city, only enters this tangle of stories many generations later. Most ancient authors agreed on one point despite their disagreements. Rome's civilisation, they believed, had been founded by a mix of migrants and fugitives, not a single unified people.

  The earliest actual Romans were Latin-speaking Italic people. They shared the region of Latium with other Latin communities such as Antemnae and Collatia. By the 6th century BC, Rome had conquered and destroyed those neighbouring settlements. It had also broken the leadership once held by the settlement of Alba Longa. From the middle of the 4th century BC, Rome kept winning wars. By 270 BC it controlled all of Italy south of the Po river. It then defeated Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms to the east. By the middle of the 2nd century BC, other nations recognised Rome as master of the Mediterranean.

  By the late 3rd century BC, about a third of the people living in Italy south of the Po had already become Roman citizens. This status obligated them to serve in the army. The rest were allies, frequently called on to fight in Roman wars. When the Roman government refused to extend citizenship to those allies, the result was the Social War. Afterward, citizenship was granted to everyone south of the Po. In 49 BC, Julius Caesar extended the same rights to the people of Cisalpine Gaul. Five separate paths could make someone a Roman citizen. Three came through the state directly: serving in the army, holding office in a Latin-rights city, or receiving a grant from the government. The other two came through community or status: a group given a block grant of citizenship, or a slave freed by a Roman citizen. Citizenship could also be lost, for example through corrupt practices or capture in an enemy raid. A captured Roman, though, regained the status upon returning home. By the time these wars of conquest ended, citizenship had already spread far beyond the single city that once contained it. A much larger question was waiting for the empire that followed.

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• 6. The Empire's Citizens

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  Four categories divided the population of the early Roman Empire. These were citizens, known as cives romani; provincials, called provinciales; foreigners, termed peregrini; and free non-citizens such as freed slaves. Citizens answered to Roman law. Provincials remained subject to whatever legal system had governed their territory before Rome annexed it. Over time, people were gradually 'siphoned' upward from less privileged categories into more privileged ones. This increased the overall share of the population recognised as Roman. Becoming Roman was, by the standards of the ancient world, remarkably easy. It was far simpler to become a Roman citizen than to gain citizenship in almost any other contemporary state.

  Emperor Claudius, who ruled from AD 41 to 54, made this point directly. The Senate was debating whether to admit Gauls into its ranks. Claudius warned that rigid exclusion of conquered peoples had proven fatal to Sparta and Athens despite their military strength. He praised Rome's founder Romulus for having fought and naturalised a people within a single day. From the Principate onward, barbarians who settled within Roman territory automatically gained certain legal rights. Those rights let them serve as auxiliary soldiers, a path that could lead to full citizenship. Thousands of former barbarians became Romans this way.

  That gradual process reached its endpoint in AD 212, when Emperor Caracalla issued the Antonine Constitution. It granted citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire. The grant caused a surge in people bearing the name Aurelius, the family name it conferred on new citizens. Long before that decree, colonisation had already spread huge numbers of Italians outward. Julius Caesar and Augustus alone settled between 500,000 and a million people from Italy into the provinces. By AD 14, somewhere between four and seven percent of the free population in the provinces already held Roman citizenship. According to the British jurist Tony Honoré, Caracalla's grant 'gave many millions, perhaps a majority of the empire's inhabitants... a new consciousness of being Roman'. That number, four to seven percent, tells us little about how those millions actually felt about the label they now carried. Their silence on the matter would only grow more pronounced as the empire moved deeper into late antiquity.

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• 7. The Silent Roman

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  The 4th-century soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a Greek-speaking Roman, described the city of Rome almost like a foreign place. He dwelled on its corruption and impurity. By his time, the city that had once defined Romanness had lost its practical importance. Several emperors ruled from cities closer to the frontier instead. Few inscriptions from this period bothered to explicitly label someone a 'Roman citizen'. Before the Antonine Constitution, that label had been a mark of distinction worth stating. Afterward, Roman status simply went without saying. The prevailing Roman view held that the populus Romanus was a 'people by constitution', in contrast to barbarian gentes, or 'peoples by descent'.

  As the label became near-universal, local identities within the empire grew more prominent. People identified by region, such as Africa, Britannia, Gaul, or Hispania, alongside their status as Roman citizens. The Roman army underwent its own transformation in the 4th century, a shift some historians call 'barbarisation'. Its large, meritocratic structure let barbarian recruits rise through the ranks purely on skill. The army began adopting customs once considered un-Roman. These included the barritus, a Germanic-derived battle cry, and the Schilderhebung, the practice of raising a newly elected emperor up on a shield.

  Quintus Aurelius Symmachus was a Roman statesman who lived from around 345 to 402. He argued that true Romans were those who kept to the empire's old pagan religion. Religion had always marked out who counted as Roman. As Christianity became the empire's only legal faith, the aristocracy had to reshape its identity in Christian terms. Ambrose, the Archbishop of Mediolanum, launched fierce attacks on Symmachus and the pagan elite he represented. Rome's greatness, Ambrose insisted, now rested on its Christian present rather than its pagan past. Christian faith gradually became the accepted definition of Romanness, and the emperors and their courts came to be seen as the Romans par excellence. Not long after this argument played out, the western half of the empire that had produced it would collapse entirely. The question of who was Roman would be settled very differently in the lands it left behind.

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• 8. Fading West, Enduring East

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  In the early 6th century, Odoacer and then Theoderic the Great ruled Italy as, legally, viceroys of the eastern emperor. They kept the old Roman government running underneath a new barbarian military. The Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy preserved the Roman Senate, which continued to dominate the city's politics for decades. That balance shattered during the wars of Emperor Justinian I (533-555), fought to reconquer the empire's lost western provinces. Eastern writers, once the wars began, rewrote the recent past. They described the west as already 'lost' to barbarian invasion rather than a Roman world worth reintegrating. By the end of the fighting, the Senate had vanished from Rome. Its surviving members scattered to Constantinople, and Roman identity in Gaul, Spain, and Britain went into permanent decline.

  The Vandal Kingdom in North Africa never pretended loyalty to the Roman Empire, unlike its neighbours. Its Roman-descended population largely stopped calling themselves Roman at all, even while keeping Roman naming customs and the Latin literary tradition alive. Instead, the kingdom promoted the pre-Roman legacy of Carthage, minting coins inscribed 'Felix Karthago', fortunate Carthage. By the time the eastern empire invaded during the Vandalic War, the local Romance population identified instead as Libyans or Punic people. The eastern historian Procopius used those terms to describe Romans whose identity had simply drifted too far from the rest of the empire's.

  In the Greek-speaking east, the term Rhomaioi slowly hardened from a political label into an ethnic one. By the late 11th century, writers described people as 'Rhomaios by birth'. In 1204, Latin crusaders of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople. The exiled Byzantine government at Nicaea responded by leaning harder on Greek heritage to justify its own Roman legitimacy. Emperors John III (1222-1254) and Theodore II (1254-1258) went so far as to declare the Rhomaioi descendants of the ancient Greeks. They still insisted they alone were the true Roman emperors. That fused Roman-Hellenic identity outlasted the empire's final fall in 1453. It endured among Christian Greeks under Ottoman rule. Some kept alive the myth that the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, would one day rise from the dead to retake the city.

  That hope survived in Greek folklore all the way to the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829). Many fighters in that war still called themselves Romioi rather than Hellenes. Elsewhere, the name proved just as stubborn in unexpected places. The Romansh people of Switzerland, descended from Romanised Rhaetians who resisted assimilation by incoming Germanic tribes, still call their language rumantsch today. The Romanians take their name from the Latin Romani. One theory traces their origin to Daco-Romans, descendants of Roman colonists after Trajan conquered Dacia (AD 98-117). Rome itself never stopped answering to its oldest name either. The city has revived Republic-style government four separate times since antiquity. Most recently, this took the form of the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849, built around a triumvirate modelled on ancient Rome's own.

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