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Comment by tovej | Hacker News Reader

What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It's clear that the Romans were an amalgamation of Indoeuropeans and Etruscans. Gauls, Celts, Goths, Greeks, Turks were all part of the Roman empire at some point.

Modern day Italians aren't one single ethnic group either. Italy is very diverse, and a unified Italy was one of the latest nation states to form on the continent.

There is also a bigger than thousand year gap in your connection of Romans to Italians. A weak argument on all counts.

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At the time of ancient Rome, Turkic tribes lived somewhere around Mongolia. Gauls, Celts, Goths, and even Greeks were as white as any typical European is today, if not more white.

Right, I'm wrong about the Turks. I meant to say Persians.

Ancient Rome and Persia were rival empires. How many Persians (other than usual small number of traders, mercenaries, slaves, etc.) lived in Rome? Even Persians are (largely) of Indo-European ancestry, migrating from the same steppes that filled Europe. Modern people of Iran consider themselves white, although they do typically have slightly darker skin than someone from Italy. It all boil down to what you consider white. If only Swedish people are white, then OK. If Hungarians are white (they typically are) then people of Iran are pretty much white, too. Anyway, race in humans is a pretty much artificial thing, but it is real in our culture nevertheless.

It depends, if you count Armenia as Persian, then all Persians in Armenia lived within the Roman empire for a century. Maybe count Armenians as their own group, that's a safer bet.

I think you've hit upon something here with defining "white". If "white" is something that you can freely define to suit your purpose, then there's no point in having this discussion. If we define "white" to be something more specific, that would make it easier to pin down some facts.

The bigger point is simply that Rome was ethnically diverse. After all, it was a huge empire, how could it not be?

OK, what is "white"? Define it. I don't know about USA, but from european perspective, Armenians are as white as any other European nation. What is USA term for that? Caucasian? Ironically, Armenians are as close to THE Caucasus region as anyone can be :) Additionally, the few Armenians, that I know in person, would consider and insult to be called Persian (for political reasons I think).

Yes, they were ethnically diverse. That does not mean that Roman senators were any other than a bunch of white male people, and that the majority of its citizens weren't what anyone from Europe today would consider "white" or "caucasian". Of course, lots of people with even totally dark skin lived in Rome and other regions, but not to the extent of "Roman senators have to be depicted as black".

Not the article, nor anyone in this thread so far has claimed that Roman senators were black.

But now that you mention it, Septimius Severus was a dark-skinned Roman imperator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo

He was from Lybia, though. How dark is that? A funny anecdote from a book of my friend who backpacked Africa 15 years ago: A (dark skinned) Sudanese man was referring to some other Sudanese people from his village as "they are black". He himself also appeared black to my friend, but the man didn't consider himself black. It appears that (many?) people from North Africa are quite precise in differences of their spectrum of skin tone :)

Libya is still white then? It feels like you're just moving the goal posts to include all people under "white". If the Roman empire had covered all of sub-saharan Africa I wonder if you would be arguing that they're really white after all.

The whole point is that ancient peoples, and especially Romans, are not a homogeneous group of people. Whether they define themselves as white is not what you should be arguing about, because most definitions of "white people" includes a diverse set of ethnicities as well.

I don't know whether Lybians consider themselves white or not. The Lybians that I've seen in person (maybe a dozen) didn't appear much darker than my European compatriots. Yes, I can spot the difference, but it was more in facial features than in darkness of their skin color, which was fairly "whitish".

WRT the Lybian Roman emperor: no one claims that ALL Roman citizen were white, or Italic, or European. Any such large Empire was heterogenous. But it is safe to say that a typical Roman citizen, espicially a Senator, would have been white for any reasonable definition of "whiteness", especially in a TV series. There was one black US president (his mother was white and father black if I remember correctly), but a typical US president so far was white.

I don't have anything against hiring a bunch of Chinese or Zimbabwean actors to play Senators, but that would certainly look odd. In the same way as hiring a bunch of Ukrainians to play Zulu warriors would look odd.

What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population.

You also seem to be really caught up on senators. If you read the entire article, you'll note very little attention was given to senators.

Even so, that is not what the original argument was. The argument was that Rome was not homogeneous. Even in a heterogeneous society, there will be trends towards looking one way or another. The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British.

Nobody has mentioned China or Zimbabwe, so this last argument is a lazy straw man.

"White" is a very confusing term which should just be avoided in these discussions. Even talking purely about ancestry of ancient peoples (including Romans), it conflates very diverse origins - Old European farmers (reflected today most clearly by Sardinians), Near Eastern/Levantine (found peculiarly in ancient Etruscans, which agrees with their mythology that tells of a descent from some ancient people of Lydia), Eurasian steppe peoples (this would be the PIE culture-related component that people tend to think about most readily, but there was a lot less of it in the urbanized Mediterranean area than farther north in continental Europe!) were quite distinguishable back then, even though all of them might be described very loosely as "white".

> What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population.

We're circling back to the definition of "white". How's that a bold statement? Today's Great Britain has very diverse population, too, including lots of people from Africa, and yet I wouldn't think that a statement that a typical Brit is white is controversial. Typical Brit is not black, although there are many black British people, of course. And even if we constrain discussion to the most narrow definition of "white" (say, 18th century Englishmen) let's not forget that English people are the result of centuries of mixing of Britons, Germans, Celts... So, white Britons are themselves of diverse ancestry, but all these diverse ancestral people are "white". Let me repeat that race is an artificial construct, but if I'm pressed to say if someone is "white" or "not quite white" I can only go by outside appearance. Someone in Europe can have some genes from one Zimbabwean ancestor, but if he "looks white" to me, I can only say he's "white".

> The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British.

Yes. That is a TV series. The point of TV series (in my opinion) is not to be 100% accurate, it's to entertain and (somewhat) educate. And the people in TV series are not real ancient Romans, but current actors. The series is for British audience, so it's normal that it's filled with British actors. If the series was produced in Bulgaria, the senators would be played by Bulgarian actors. Both are not exactly of the same color spectrum as ancient Romans, but are close enough to pass as Romans to their viewers. If the series was produced in China, and Romans were played by Chinese actors, that would probably pass as normal to Chinese audience. Maybe Zimbabwean actors could pass as Romans, at least in sub-Saharan Africa; why not? I'm not sure why people insist so much that British actors are bad representation of Romans. They seem quite OK to me (I'm not British).

> Even Persians are (largely) of Indo-European ancestry, migrating from the same steppes that filled Europe.

It is worth emphasizing that "Indo-European" is a linguistic description, not a genetic one. The Indo-European languages spread through Europe, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent largely through the people already living there shifting from the language they had been speaking before to Indo-European, because Indo-European had higher social prestige. That Iranians today speak an Indo-European language does not mean that their ancestors all came down from the steppe.

(In the last decades, work on historical DNA has identified certain genes that do appear to testify to some Indo-European population movements, but the impact of this is less than one might think for a discussion like this one.)

Although Persians are on the edge of the Roman Empire, so I don't think this is related to this discussion too much, it depends on what you consider "white". When I google "iranians" and go to images, I see people that, if I must classify them into a "race", I can most closely classify them as white(ish).

Here's an interesting (USA) article that illustrates this issue: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...

Are people from Teheran, for example, "white, black, Asian, American Indian, or Native Hawaiian" (copy-pasted the choices from the article)? In my opinion, American obsession with race is silly.

Yes, definitely the "were they white or not?" discussion is silly. I just wanted to emphasize that whatever Iranians look like, you can't assume they represent a look that moved down from the steppe just because they speak an Indo-European language.

> What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It means that the second image, showing Roman senators played by a few dozen white Italian extras, is a perfectly likely depiction, and the caption about how real Roman senators were much more swarthy ("like modern Italians", he claims) is nonsense.

(Of course, the HBO show was filmed in Italy, and almost all the extras and background characters were Italians.)

Even if I am wrong, he is wrong too.

It's great that you're engaging in the discussion. You didn't really respond to my questions though. If you could, it would ground your argument, and we could actually talk about something concrete.

Also, if you have some sources for your claims, I would appreciate it if you at least mentioned them. At the moment you seem to be arguing from emotion.

These days you can actually do direct comparisons of ancestry, and it turns out that the closest-related people to the "natives" of early Republican Rome can still be found in modern-day central Italy, in the area known as Abruzzi and local surroundings. So, Italians yes but rather "swarthy" in modern terms. It's not nonsense, it's what you get from the genetic data.

A Roman would likely have taken issue (and maybe taken offense) with that claim.

  The men of Britain are taller than the Celti, and not so yellow-haired, although their bodies are of looser build. The following is an indication of their size: I myself, in Rome, saw mere lads towering as much as half a foot above the tallest people in the city, although they were bandy-legged and presented no fair lines anywhere else in their figure. Their habits are in part like those of the Celti, but in part more simple and barbaric— so much so that, on account of their inexperience, some of them, although well supplied with milk, make no cheese; and they have no experience in gardening or other agricultural pursuits.

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