Romans and Greeks weren't the same thing

[tekken999]

Wrong. Macedonians took part in the Olympics so they were perfectly considered Greek, since only Greeks took part in the Olympics. There were some people in ancient Greece who had a political agenda against Macedonians and Macedonian rule over Greece that they said that Macedonians are not Greek. But that was rare.

Of course they were allowed to participate in the Olympics especially after they were conquered by Philip II, do you think they're going to say no to their new non-hellenic conqueror? All the Macedonian kings had to prove their greek lineage to the greeks in order to participate within the Olympics such as with Philip and there were of course objections from the ancient greek community at the time. The only people who claim Macedonians to be Greek are ancient Macedonians themselves and ironically modern greeks but not ancient greeks. Find me a ancient greek writer that says they are the same people.
Macedonians have always been considered a distinct nation by the hellenic people by various Roman and Greek writers, why do you think that is? Why aren't they referred in the group if they were of hellenic descent as well?
There are even modern scholars who have written about this.

From In The Shadow of Olympus written by Eugene Borza p. 112

"The theme of the Olympic and Plataea incidents are the same: "I am Alexander, a Greek" which seems to be the main point. The more credible accounts of Alexander at Tempe and at Athens do not pursue this theme; they state Alexander's activities without embellishment or appeal to prohellenism. Moreover, the insistence that Alexander is a Greek, and descendant from Greeks, rubs against the spirit of Herodotus 7.130, who speaks of the Thessalians as the first Greeks to come under Persian submission--a perfect opportunity for Herodotus to point out that the Macedonians were a non Greek race ruled over by Greek kings, something he nowhere mentions."

Classical Bearing p.157
"All Herodotus in fact says is that Alexander himself demonstrated his Argive ancestry (in itself a highly dubious genealogical claim), and was thus adjudged a Greek---against angry opposition, be it noted, from the stewards of the Games Even if, with professor N.G.L. Hammond, we accept this ethnic certification at face value, it tells us, as he makes plain, nothing whatsoever about Macedonians generally. Alexander's dynasty, if Greek, he writes, regarded itself as Macedonian only by right of rule, as a branch of the Hanoverian house has come to 'regard itself as English'. On top of which, Philip II's son Alexander had an Epirote mother, which compounds the problem from yet another ethnic angle."

Lastly an interesting question brought up by Borza

"Why is it that no Spartan or Athenian or Argive felt constrained to prove to the others that he and his family were Hellenes? But Macedonian kings seem hard put to argue in behalf of their Hellenic ancestry in the fifth century B.C., and that circumstance is telling. Even if one were to accept that all the Herodotian stories about Alexander were true, why did the Greeks, who normally were knowledgeable about matters of ethnic kinship, not already know that the Macedonian monarchy was Greek? But--following Herodotus--the stade- race competitors at Olympia thought the Macedonian was a foreigner (Hdt. 5.22: barbaros) Second, for his effort on behalf of the Greek cause against the Persians Alexander is known as "Philhellene". Now this is kind of odd to call a Greek a "friend of the Greeks". "This title", writes Borza, "is normally reserved for non-Greeks".

[wvwvw]

Romans didn't not see themselves as Greek at all and Greeks definitely did not see themselves as Romans. Greeks didn't even consider Macedonians to be part of the Hellenic race and they're closer genetically than Romans.

Of course they consider Macedonians of the same race.


Titus Livius, From the Foundation of the City 31
Speech of the Macedonian ambassador to the Aitolians:

"The Aitolians, the Akarnanians, the Macedonians, men of the same speech, are united or disunited by trivial causes that arise from time to time; with aliens, with barbarians, all Greeks wage and will wage eternal war; for they are enemies by the will of nature, which is eternal, and not from reasons that change from day to day."

Polybios 9.37.7-39.7
Speech of Lykiskos, the representative of Akarnania:

"In the past you rivalled the Achaians and the Macedonians, peoples of your own race, and Philip, their commander, for the hegemony and glory, but now that the freedom of the Hellenes is at stake at a war against an alien people Romans,

..And does it worth to ally with the barbarians, to take the field with them against the Epeirotans, the Achaians, the Akarnanians, the Boiotians, the Thessalians, in fact with almost all the Hellenes with the exception of the Aitolians who are a wicked nation...

...So Lakedaimonians it is good to remember your ancestors,... be afraid of the Romans... and DO ALLY yourselves with the Achaians and Macedonians. But if some the most powerful citizens are opposed to this policy at least stay neutral and do not side with the unjust."

[wvwvw]

When the Romans arrived Greeks were considerable Orientalized

There was no Orientalized East. It was the East that had a Hellenistic culture, retaining at the same time its own customs as Greek culture was based on multiculturalism, coexistance and tolerance for other customs.

Greece had no Oriental culture you dumbass, as it had never been colonized by non-Greeks, unlike Italy. Greek culture was the very definition of western culture.

If Greeks were Orientalized then you were Semitized and Negrofied. No wonder you still show traces of SSA.

The Romans completely adopted and copied stock and barrel that "Orientalized" Greek culture complexed piece of trash. So if Greeks were Orientalized that means Romans were too, and much more.

[wvwvw]

It was Romans who imported en masse African slaves and Levantines and Jews into Italy and that is reflected in your genetics. Greeks score less Near East, 0 South Asian and African unlike Italians. Maybe it was the slaves that caused the downfall of Rome after all. Greeks lasted 1000 years more and dwarf the Roman existance. It is you who have been Semiticized, Orientalized, and Africanized. It was the Romans who indulged in Oriental style hedonistic orgy parties and acted like savages by feeding human beings to the lions.

[tekken999]

Of course they consider Macedonians of the same race.


Titus Livius, From the Foundation of the City 31
Speech of the Macedonian ambassador to the Aitolians:

"The Aitolians, the Akarnanians, the Macedonians, men of the same speech, are united or disunited by trivial causes that arise from time to time; with aliens, with barbarians, all Greeks wage and will wage eternal war; for they are enemies by the will of nature, which is eternal, and not from reasons that change from day to day."

Polybios 9.37.7-39.7
Speech of Lykiskos, the representative of Akarnania:

"In the past you rivalled the Achaians and the Macedonians, peoples of your own race, and Philip, their commander, for the hegemony and glory, but now that the freedom of the Hellenes is at stake at a war against an alien people Romans,

..And does it worth to ally with the barbarians, to take the field with them against the Epeirotans, the Achaians, the Akarnanians, the Boiotians, the Thessalians, in fact with almost all the Hellenes with the exception of the Aitolians who are a wicked nation...

...So Lakedaimonians it is good to remember your ancestors,... be afraid of the Romans... and DO ALLY yourselves with the Achaians and Macedonians. But if some the most powerful citizens are opposed to this policy at least stay neutral and do not side with the unjust."

I looked up Polybios 9.37.7-39.7 and every source says quotes the exact same thing without the "peoples of your own race". Care to explain?

At any rate, aside from missing that part, the quote says that the Macedonians should be praised for protecting Greece from the barbarian attacks and there is nothing strange in that. Since Greece was conquered by Macedonia (so that the Macedonian garrisons were able to established to ensure the conquest), obviously the Macedonians would try to protect every inch not only of their land Macedonia, but also of every land that they had conquered (Egypt, Asia, and Greece included).

Btw Polybios now that you bring him up, also reports on a speech made by Agelaus of Naupactus at the first conference in the presence of the King Philip V and his allies. From Polybios book 5.104

From a part of the speech given:
"Wherefore, I beseech you all to be on your guard against the danger of the crisis, and above all you, O King. You will do this, if you abandon the policy of weakening the Greeks, and thus rendering them an easy prey to the invader; and consult on the contrary for their good as you would for your own person, and have a care for all parts of Greece alike, as part and parcel of your own domains. If you act in this spirit, the Greeks will be your warm friends and faithful coadjutors in all your undertakings; while foreigners will be less ready to form designs against you, seeing with dismay the firm loyalty of the Greeks."

A obvious distinction made between Greece to protect every single province of Greece and Macedonia (as you would if it were a part of your own dominions). In addition, as you see, the Macedonians were still wearing down the Greeks even into the times of Philip V.

[JMack]

It doesn't help, as neither Romans nor Greeks ended up asiatized or feminine. The fact that they cared about a few more things than "war" and "honor", such as science, philosophy or culture and entertainment (which is what you call femininity) shows that they were mentally healthy, and had a reason to exist, unlike the "austere" Germans that are shown as full of complexes and anxiety in every single study

Without these aspects Greeks would not be more important than gauls or pannonians

I think you missed my point. I don't disagree that culture is an important thing, this is the aim of the discussion after all.

My point is to talk about WHICH cultures are vital, energic and sane for natural human beings. At the end of the Empire, Romans were practicing thousands of mystery religions, semitic derived forms of prostitution and the same philosophical bullshits Greeks were doing before them (the so called ''hellenistic'' philosophies, not good philosophy like Plato ot Aristotle). This sums up ''Greco-Roman'' world.

Ancient Greeks and Romans started as vital peoples and ended totally destroyed by barbarism, feminility and degeneracy. It's a process that happens in all societies in all times, as Oswald Spengler explains. My point is to challenge the assumptions of modern liberal historiography that equated degenerative things with ''progress''.

I'm not even going to respond Raine's points because she totally missed the argument of the thread and only knows how to span insults, false informations and bullshit. She should read more.

[Sikeliot]

South Italy was Greek land and had seen Phoenician influence so they too aren't comparable to Romans to answer someone else's question.

[JMack]

South Italy was Greek land and had seen Phoenician influence so they too aren't comparable to Romans to answer someone else's question.

Parts of South Italy have been colonized by Greeks, but they were easily conquered by the Romans anyway and became Romans with time. Many native peoples of South Italy were linguistically and culturally Italic.

Also, I don't want this thread to turn into thousands of useless discussions about genetic components and who score more or less some things.

[wvwvw]

The first Romans wrote in Greek, why?

Note about the name Latin. The Romans gave the name Latin to those Italian tribes who revolted demanding Roman citizenship. Instead they were given the Latin name in 85 BC. The name Latin had belonged to the ancient Greek-speaking
Latins who had been absorbed into the Roman nation along with the Greek-speaking Sabines. The Italian Latins of 85 BC were given the Roman name in 212. Finally various Germano-Frankish tribes took or were given the name Latin. We use the name Franco-Latins for these Germano-Frankish tribes in order to distinguish them from the Greek speaking and Italian speaking Latins of Roman history.

The very existence of the primitive Greek Romans has been completely abolished by revisionist historians who continue to support Charlemagne's Lie of 794 which inaugurated the historical dogma that the Roman language was and is Latin. This has remained so in spite of the Roman sources which describe Greek as the first language of the Romans. It seems that Charlemagne's Lie of 794 was based on hearsay and the need to cut off West Romans enslaved to the Franco-Latins from
the free East Romans. Frankish Emperor Louis II (855-875) clearly supports Charlemagne's Lie of 794 with the following words: In 871 he writes to Emperor of the Romans Basil I (867-885) that ".we have received the government of the Roman Empire for our orthodoxy. The Greeks have ceased to be emperors of the Romans for their cacodoxy. Not only have they deserted the city (of Rome) and the capital of the Empire, but they have also abandoned Roman nationality and even the
Latin language. They have migrated to another capital city and taken up a completely different nationality and language."

Let us contrast this Frankish nonsense with historical reality and the process by which Rome became the Empire of the whole Greek speaking world. The primitive Greek Romans were the result of the union of the Greek speaking tribes of Italy. These Greek tribes are the following: The Aborigines who came to the area of Rome from Achaia, Greece many generations before the Trojan War. These Aborigines had already accepted into their tribe what was left of the Greek Pelasgians of Italy who had been decimated by a mysterious sickness. Porcius Cato's inclusion of the history of the Pelasgians in Italy and their union with the Aborigines in his De Origines, repeated in detail by Dionysius, is the only mention of them that this writer
is aware of. These combined Aborigines and Pelasgians united with some Trojans who migrated to their land and together they became the ancient Greek speaking Latins whose capital was Alba Longa. A branch of these Greek speaking Latins of Alba Longa, led by the brothers Romulus and Romus, founded Rome on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills. They were joined by some of the Greek Sabines of Italy who had been settled on the adjacent Quirinal Hill. The Sabines had migrated to
Italy from Lacedaemonia in Southern Greece. The Romans continued the process of subduing and including the rest of the Greek Latins and Sabines into their political system.

Some of the Danubian Celts entered Northern Italy and began pressing upon the Etruscans who turned to Rome for help. But these Celts overran the Roman forces who tried to stop them and drove down toward Rome and defeated the main Roman army in battle and entered Rome in 390 BC. They occupied the whole of the city except the steep Capitoline Hill. The Romans had placed there all of their youth, treasures and records. The older population remained in their homes.
After receiving a substantial ransom of gold the Celts withdrew. In order to better protect themselves the Romans subdued the rest of Northern Italy. The Romans also incorporated into their dominion the Greeks of Magna Graecia, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica This was the extent of Roman territories in 218 BC.

The Punic Wars under the leadership of Hamilcar and especially of Hannibal, became the biggest threat to Rome since the Celtic occupation. Hannibal invaded Italy itself with his famous elephants and with Macedon as an ally. Macedon had conquered Rome's traditional Greek allies. Rome went as far as Spain to uproot Punic strongholds there and finally burned Carthage itself. The Romans had crossed over into Greece to liberate her Greek allies from Macedon and ended up
conquering the Macedonian Empire and incorporating it into the Roman Empire. Rome also came to the aid of her Galatian and Cappadocian allies by liberating them from King Mithridates VI of Pontus (121/120-63 BC) which resulted in the incorporation of Armenia, Assyria and Mesopotamia into the Roman Empire which now reached almost to the Caspian Sea. In this way the Mediterranean Sea became the central lake of the Roman Empire.

It is to be noted that it was the Greek Romans of Italy who finally united all Greek speaking tribes into one nation which had become Latin speaking also.

The First Roman Historians wrote in Greek, not in Latin. The first four Roman annalists who wrote in Greek were Quintus
Fabius Pictor, Lucius Cincius Alimentus, Gaius Acilius and Aulus Postumius Albinus.

The first text in primitive Latin was the Code of the Twelve Tables promulgated in 450 BC solely for the plebs. The Greek gentis abided by their own secret laws which they memorized from childhood. This is why the tradition of Roman public laws in Latin resulted from the cooperation between the consuls of the gentis and the tribunes of the plebs. In time so many of the plebs had become fluent in Greek that they became part of the administration of the Greek speaking provinces.

According to Cicero one of the first Romans who wrote in Latin prose was the Sabine Claudius, Appius Caecus who was consul in 307 and 296 BC. He delivered a speech in Latin to the Senate against making peace with Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus.

The first Roman historians who wrote in Latin were Porcius Cato (234-140 BC) and Lucius Cassius Hemina (circa 146 BC).

So what language were the Romans speaking and writing before this except Greek?

All the above agree with each other on the general outline of Roman beginnings. The reason for this is that they based themselves on the official Roman "sacred tablets" (hierais deltois) which the first historians simply repeated. In other words they were themselves annalists. However, nothing is preserved from these tablets/annals except as repeated in the Roman historians. But, not much of their works has survived, or else may be hidden to facilitate Charlemagne's Lie.

From Cato the Gallo-Roman revolutionaries realized that the Romans and Greeks were the same people. Now the overwhelming majority of Gallo-Romans were re-gaining control of the land occupied for so many centuries by a tyrannical Frankish minority of only 2% of the population. The enthusiasm for Greco-Roman antiquity and hatred for a Papal Christianity used by the Frankish conqueror to completely debase 85% of the population led even to making natural religion supreme over supernatural religion. In spite of Cato's role in the French Revolution only fragments of his work are publicly known. But since Dionysius of Halicarnassus used the same annals as the aforementioned Roman historians one must use Dionysius to reconstruct these lost or hidden sources. Dionysius makes a clear distinction between Greek historians who do not use Roman annals and the Roman historians (and himself) who do. The trick used by some historians, who want to efface the Greek foundations of Roman history, is to mix the hearsay Greek tradition about Rome and the 3 Roman variations on the tradition about the founding of Rome found in their own hierais deltois, i.e. sacred tablets, which were evidently made of a hard material, and then to heap ridicule on the mixture they themselves create.

Only a short, but accurate summary account of the foundation annals are reported in Livy who takes for granted that Rome was founded as a Greek city and nation. Evidently this is so because he wrote his history in Latin, whereas the annals were evidently in Greek. Those who wrote in Greek simply copied what they read in Greek. It was the annalistic history of Hemina which laid the foundations for writing Roman history in Latin. Evidently, however, he and his imitators did not make full use of all the Greek texts, like speeches, at their disposal. Whereas those who wrote their histories in Greek simply copied the Greek texts directly from the annals. Since the primitive Romans were Greeks why should the official annals be in what we now call Latin. The primitive Latins and Romans were a mixture of Greek Arcadians, Trojans, Pelasgians and Lacedaemonian Sabines.

Apart from the description which the Romans make about themselves, there are also linguistic indications which clearly point to the Greek reality of the ancient Latins, Romans and Sabines.

The claim that the name Rome e.g. is simply a place name, which may derive even from the Etruscans, is sheer nonsense.

The name "Rome" in Greek means "power," "force," "fighting army" and "speed tactics."

The name "Rome" derives from two the Greek verbs: 1) roomai which means "to move with speed or violence, to dart, rush, rush on, esp. of warriors."

The closest Latin equivalent verb is ruo, which is connected to the Greek verb reo meaning "to flow, run, to hasten."

Of all the uses of Latin verbs both active and passive there is none that even comes close to meaning "rome."

Romans, Latins and Sabines were agreed that the name quiris (sing.) quiretes (pl.) would be their common name which dictionaries translate as citizen. But the Romans had a name for citizens, like the Greek, polites, i.e. civitas. But the names quiris-quiretes derive from the Greek name kouros-kouretes which means young men of fighting age and therefore warriors, "young men, esp. young warriors," Iliad 19. 193, 248. So the Romans, Latins and Sabines called themselves
first "warriors" and later "citizens."

The name "Rome" also derives from of the Greek passive verb: 2) ronnymi which means "to strengthen, make strong and mighty" and "to put forth strength, have strength or might.

It is from the original military structure of the Roman army of quiretes that the first government was fashioned into thirty curiae of 1000 men each grouped into three tribes.

Because all three groups of Romans, Latins and Sabines came to Italy by sea from Greece and Asia minor they were warrior sailors and sea faring peoples. It is obviously for this reason that at their weddings they shouted the Greek word Thalassios, sailor, at the groom and not the Latin name marinos.

Of the seven hills of Rome the Quirinal, the hill of Mars, was originally that of the Sabines. It was from here that the Roman
warriors of Romulus stole their wives from. Quiris was not only the Sabine name for a spear, but also for their god of war. They called their god of war "The Warrior" in their Greek language and later Mars.

In the Roman tradition Romulus did not die, but ascended deified to heaven without leaving behind his body since he was or became the Quirinus, a or one of the god(s) of war.

These are some of the contexts within which the Romans thought and spoke about themselves. No historian has the right to change this. It remains a fact, that the Romans themselves, the Latins themselves and the Sabines themselves believed and wanted to believe that they are Greeks. Not only this, the united Roman nation of Romans, Latins and Sabines, spoke their own common Greek Language.

[Kouros]

I'm talking about culture mainly, not genetics , race or whatever anthrotardism some TA users like to vomit.

But then they are the same. Romans were like the ultimate culture-vultures. Even the Gods were straight ripoffs.