London in the Roman World

I love the podcast, it would be nice to hear what a historian thinks of the episodes.

BTW they also have a podcast about vaccines which is IMHO just as good and especially good to listen to for proponents of vaccination.

Well... it's not really in a valley, and the name Londinium predates Nordic influence by several hundred years.

The Romans definitely did obliterate some cultures, Carthage most prominently - they retrieved some specific books they thought would be useful but burnt everything else. Dacia certainly suffered more than many Roman conquests, its capital was destroyed, huge numbers of slaves were extracted, and there was a huge influx of Romans after it became a province.

Others fared better - obviously Rome was much enamoured of Greek culture, but would have struggled to stamp it out even if it didn't absorb it. Egypt's history was fairly durable in that it was written, widely distributed and well-preserved in the climate of North Africa. Bear in mind that much of what survives about Rome itself is through a series of incredibly lucky events, many of which come down to Rome being the seat of Christendom for so long, which meant texts survived (even as palimpsests) in monasteries etc.

Tacitus gives us a speech by one Calgacus, a British chieftain facing Roman conquest, who probably sums them up quite neatly:

"But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace."

Is there evidence of actual active Roman "eradication" of Dacian history? It is not the Romans' fault that no history was preserved if nothing existed to preserve to begin with. We know a great deal about the Greeks before the Roman conquest because they already had a written historical tradition to be preserved.

Even if there were native written histories, without careful tending, history destroys itself through entropy over the centuries. For this reason, the vast majority of what the Romans knew about themselves is also entirely lost to us. e.g., only about a quarter of the books from the magnum opus of Rome's history of itself, Livy's "Ab urbe condita", are preserved today.

The region that is now Germany was part Roman, part not. We know very little about the parts that weren't, and most of what we know is from a few failed Roman expeditions. Of those places not even those expeditions reached: some pottery, some traces you might call ruins if you're very generous, some tribe names that Romans picked up third hand.

We typically have extremely limited history of any civilization that didn't have a pervasive and resilient writing system. A lot of cuneiform clay tablets survive, for example, because they were in a library in a city that burned and that burning baked the clay.

Fun fact: there are an estimated 500,000 to 1 million cuneiform tablets sitting in museums around the world. Less than 10% have ever been translated.

Papyrus was another medium for the written record in ancient times and it doesn't tend to survive long. Longer lasting materials only really came about centuries later when vellum and longer lived paper. So any papyrus works only tended to survive because they were repeatedly copied.

As to roman's eradicating history, let me add thsi context: the origins of Rome itself is largely unknown. Rome was sacked by the Celtic Gauls in (IIRC) the 4th centure BCE so now we have legends that are more likely fiction than fact and may well just be apocryphal (eg Romulus and Reemus). Reconstructing something as well-known (at the time) as the Twelve Tables was a significant effort.

Also consider that before the Romans there were the Etruscans. Not much is really known about them at all. They had their own language including a written language but it's never been deciphered as we simply don't have enough samples. Those we have are typically from burial sites. IIRC one of the more significant fragments was found because an Etruscan manuscript was used in wrapping a mummy.

So my point is that histories don't tend to survive, even for the conquerors, so a claim about eradicating history needs a lot of supporting evidence.

I once read a fantastic simple explanation of this: For many places in Europe, Rome is the beginning of history. Because history is the study of written materials. Anything before the written word is, by definition, pre-history.

For much of Europe, Rome brought writing.

The Romans usually let the existing culture and society survive as long as the peoples religion didn’t contradict the Roman gods and the taxes flowed.

Even without Rome, history from that era is not well known. Having architecture and literature spread widely across a continent like the romans will last a lot longer than wooden buildings and an oral tradition of a small localised tribe.

There are two factors at play here. The first one is a matter of archaeology. During the majority of the Roman period, most things were written on papyrus (or sometimes slices of wood or wax tablets). (Stone and clay tablets were also used - just not for everyday things.) This was true of the majority of places Rome conquered as well - although those places tended to produce much less writing to begin with anyway. The trouble with papyrus and these other materials is that it doesn't preserve very well, which means that the vast majority of papyrus that archaeologists have uncovered comes specifically from Egypt (because of climate reasons), and may give rise to the impression that Romans eradicated local histories in some places while preserving them in others. Roughly contemporaneous with the decline of the (Western) Roman Empire, parchment became much more common in writing, and parchment preserves much better than papyrus. The timing of parchment's adoption means much more writing survived from late antiquity than earlier periods.

Secondly, while it's true that the Romans weren't particularly interested in preserving local history and culture, that doesn't seem to have been particularly unusual of any civilization throughout antiquity. We don't have evidence for, say, the transmission of Bronze Age inscriptions that were carved into stone. It's actually far more unusual that people preserved Roman stuff!

This is a bit random, but your comment reminded me of the film The Dacians (1966) which portrays the impending Roman invasion of Dacia. It's a good film. I don't know how historically accurate it is, though.

That is just the effect of systemic illiteracy of a society.. what is not taught in a trades like system, forever vanishes and now is all there is and was, besides strange tales by grandpa.

You are wrong. The Romans didn’t erase anything because nothing was written down.

Once Rome conquered Egypt, they had a monopoly on Egyptian papyrus. That's why we know a lot more about periods of Roman rule than about areas outside of the empire or provinces when Rome did not control them.

Rome didn't have to eradicate local cultures. It just had to write things down more than the locals did.