Even their legionaries were of diverse roots if i remember correctly. There emperors as well at times.
I heard someone compared the Roman identity to the modern American identity, do you think that's accurate?
Even the foundational slave-economy part is similar if you even deep it.
National idealism never blurred the lines between its distinct "racial" identifications that homogenized the populations into separate groupings in the US. Such a defined rule set shaped the genetic history of America on a relational basis that is very alien to Roman history.
To illustrate the intricate mixture: Imperial Rome (started from the Republic) was more like Brazil if the bulk was a multilayer convolution of highly sub-structured "Pardos" (consisting of sub-components that have to increase by several orders) of proportionally heterogenous signatures. Then removing the "Blacks" and "Whites" (such distinct poles never existed during the imperial period), integrate complexities and gene flow from the broader region. Rome was a nexus drawing in many people like a magnet, with the internal being a constant fluid convulsive mixture - within regions, between regions, and with all that in macro-interactions with already adjacent Eastern Mediterranean, including distinct variations that don't even conform to that heterogeneity with random Northern European, Balkan, Anatolian, Iberian, and MENA. All this breaks modern norms of the national ethnohistory of America. The dynamic population change constantly overturned the fixture of stabilization. Extant Italy is stable on a regional gradient basis. Rome had no such thing despite what people think.
So I look at people strangely when they try to ground Imperial Rome as some European-specific historical process, even more ridiculously, "White".
This is the so-called Eastern Mediterranean cluster, characteristic of its complex layers of proportional correlative mixture. Those ancients did not subscribe or demographically conform to the prevailing liberal ethno-theory facilitated by exclusionary national adherence. As such it would be nothing short of ideology to project a modern European perspective of population conceptualization around identity formation towards the ancient period if one thought a parallel sufficiently addressed the realities of the globalized Mediterranean. You have to remove the in-group/out-group-based fractionization, and then expand upon an identity that is value-based at its core.
The Roman senators definitely were mixed as any Roman and most of them were Eastern Mediterranean looking like what existed in Anatolia, a people with a strong Middle Eastern history.
Imperial Romans from Italy were closer to Anatolians before and during Byzantine than the pre-imperial Romans of Italy, showing how they resembled Asia Minor which was an amalgamation of Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean mixture.
We have major studies that underscore what I have stated here:
"We sought to identify the geographic sources of these Imperial-era Romans by coanalyzing the data from Italy with data from the Southern Arc. Unexpectedly, the ancestry of the sample of people whose genomes were analyzed who lived around Rome in the Imperial period was almost identical to that of Roman and Byzantine individuals from Anatolia in both their mean (Fig. 3A) and pattern of variation (Fig. 3B), whereas Italians before the Imperial period had a very different distribution (28, 29). We clustered diverse Roman, Byzantine, and medieval individuals and their immediate predecessors without any knowledge of their population labels and found that the Italian and Anatolian individuals clustered together with those of preRoman Anatolia, whereas pre-Imperial people around the city of Rome were systematically different (Fig. 3C). This suggests that the Roman Empire in both its shorter-lived western part and the longer-lasting eastern centered on Anatolia had a diverse but similar population plausibly drawn, to a substantial extent, from Anatolian pre-Imperial sources. In an irony of history, although the Roman Republic prevailed in its existential militaary struggle against the Anatolians rallied by Mithridates VI of Pontus during the first century BCE, the final incorporation of Anatolia into the Roman Empire and the increased connectivity that ensued may have set the stage for the very same Anatolians to become the demographic engine of Imperial Rome itself. This recreated, in historical time, the mythical journey of Aeneas and his Trojan exiles from Anatolia to the shores of Italy."
"Anatolia exhibited extraordinary continuity down to the Roman and Byzantine periods, with its people serving as the demographic core of much of the Roman Empire, including the city of Rome itself."
When one reads about how Romans defined themselves, what stood in the idealist center was a qualitative effort (according to them) to express superior virtues, cultural embodiment, political and religious inclusion, etc., all were very non-ethno-centric. So it was about culture, morality, and institutional and political philosophical adherence. This sounds lofty but really only elites "fully" could afford these qualities of
humanities. That was a Roman. Then there were Barbarians. These had lower qualities, lower cultures, and irrational ways. Although Romans knew civilization existed outside them, Barbarians represented uncultivated people rather than the inherent genetic exclusion that modern imperial Europe expressed based on a theory of social Darwinian essentialism: culture was a mere reflection of genetic qualities. Such thinking was extremely alien to the ancients.
Although one cannot underestimate the demographic impact of slavery, the core Eastern Mediterranean ancestry defined loosely above, came through the expansion of the Roman influence and migration of a globalized region. Slavery I don't think made up the general size of non-local influence; although it had some level of impact. Sea-born Agean-Anatolian ancestry shaped a significant baseline during post-Roman acculturation in an expansionary empiric projection, one cannot ignore the stochastic nature of the independent migration of free traders, skilled workers, etc., by the more distal North Africans, Levantines, and Iberians, etc.
Without sounding too drastic, to call the imperial Romans the same as the Iron Age central Italy would be the same as calling Islamic Age Muslim Egyptians the same as Bronze Age Upper Egyptians.
It's important to interpret this as a form of affinity rather than pure derivative modelling.
Here is an abstract from a new study stating keen observations:
To simplify. Magna Graecia (Southern Italy) had a similar mixture before the imperial period. You had the Anatolian region that already had an Eastern Mediterranean but stronger Near Eastern shifted robust demography. Lesser but noticeable variable frequency would have potentially entered during the late Republic era (upon reading more, I notice that the complexity could not have happened in the Imperial period; one of those Pompeii samples I modeled, including the abstract above reveals earlier presence). The mixture of all these, including a migration of free MENA individuals throughout the periods was what accumulated into what it became. Italy during the imperial period became the average of all of that. Then we have to include sporadic European elements.
For example, the fully foreign individual on the sample turned out to be a wealthy person, not a slave. One woman in Viminiacium turned out to be fully Levantine and she was buried in a sarcophagus (not slave). Many Near Easterners came to the region without slavery. Wars during the Republic Era most likely sourced most slaves, in tandem with a period where rapid Romanization took place, likely make up the most influence of when slavery was potentially most relevant in the Near Eastern shift despite probably not being the big portion. It's good and reasonable to acknowledge it as a source, but certainly many people overemphasize slave dynamics because they want people to play social discrepancy on racial lines as a form of presentism which is unfounded.
So in the grand scheme of things, the Pompeii Romans I posted above are very much representative of what drove ancestry bulk - calling them outliers is unfounded, given we will see a more heterogenous Eastern Mediterraneanterenean/Near Eastern population-dense south move to a more sparse north before the empire (not to repeat myself).
There is a problem among Italian researchers who are very dejected from the reality of the mixture of the Roman empire, while international scholars are very reluctant to lean on the truth that the samples they consider "outliers" became the main components later. It's a Western cope.
Although drawing parallels can reveal usefulness, issues arise when one does it without qualifying, which, in this case, uncritical or vague comparisons are not applicable because the racial element was not present, and slavery itself was very different. I'm an enjoyer in using Rome as an inspiration for the debauched eventualities of the Western world too. But that is less about science or backed by scholarly pursuits and mostly reflects moral trends, lol.
