How 'Roman' was the Roman Empire?

[Knight of Heaven]

French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian all have significant Latin elements in their language even 2000 years after the empire, and many of Europe's greatest cities were founded by Romans

Well i will add the portuguese language, wich is the language with more latinisms in his gramar today. I will add also, catalan, and alot others. Even polish wich is a slavic language but still has latin influences.

If we talk about genetics i can say for sure the portuguese population, as well In spain. 80% of the genes come from people of the Paleolithic, the rest 20% is romans, sarmatians, Visigoths,Vandalls, Arabs, Moorish, berbers, alans, slavs, etc.Total. What i say is roman people didnt breed more then the others... lol some may have colonize other parts of the empire of course mainly veteran legionares and his families, on these new lands, but was a minority, the power of the empire was translated by its culture and and his legions not by is demographic entenicty. It never is in history. So yes we can see roman briges, romans roads, romans aquaducts etc, in all cornners of the empire.
As we all kown the roman citezenship was given to other peoples for instance on the course of the time.
I wouldnt call Romans helenistic celts. they werent that. The helenist influnces come alot after, if at all the romans have alot of Etruscans influences. Their culture, their art, the tradition of the triumphs... these were Etruscan traditions, not greek. Its interisting, becouse they absorve alot of cultures, in the course of time. Its a caraterictic in this warrior and militaristic society, who rely his survival on military expansion.
At the same time was expanding to survive, the same time was absorving other cultures, like the greeks, like the carthaginian cultures, and iberian cultures. this we can all view in EB, if you can take attention, on military reforms, as well on the naval descriptions. Example: The use of the falcata,the gladius the use of Iberian tactics etc etc. not to mention greek architecture, alphabet, etc.

So we can say for sure,and there is hard evidences all around that the roman empire was indeed roman in culture, and not in ethenicity.


Im sorry for my unperfect english..was on a hurry.

Also i cant see any problem of being a barbaroi. i kown the génesis of the word might not be ofensive, still why you people saying it? wish i kewn the word used by celts and such to describe others peoples. So i can use in this forum. Dont kown if manny people would like that though.

Like Alexander said, "for me every good barbarian is a greek , and every bad greek is a barbarian."