10/22/2025
True !
𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 to the myth that the Roman Empire was made up of ethnically homogeneous “Italians,” but that image says more about 19th-century nationalism than ancient history.
Modern Italy was born in the 19th century, but it borrowed its sense of greatness from a past that never truly belonged to it.
After the unification of Italy in 1861, nationalist thinkers sought to forge a cohesive identity for the new Italian state.
One that could rival the great empires of Europe.
To do so, they reached backward, claiming ancient Rome as the cultural and racial forebear of the modern Italian nation.
Writers, politicians, and ideologues promoted the idea of a pure, ethnically “Italian” Roman Empire, casting it as the cradle of Western civilization and the ancestral foundation of the Italian people.
This narrative, later embraced and weaponized by Mussolini’s fascist regime during World War II, erased centuries of imperial diversity in favor of a myth:
𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘙𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘢.
But history, and archaeology, tells a far more fascinating story.
And far more diverse.
At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the foggy highlands of Britain to the deserts of North Africa, from the Rhine to the Euphrates. Its citizens came from everywhere.
Amazigh, Gauls, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Thracians, Iberians, Jews, Celts.
And Rome welcomed them all. Not as foreigners, but as Romans.
Emperors and the ruling class themselves weren’t even always from the Italian peninsula.
Trajan, hailed as one of Rome’s greatest rulers, was born in Hispania (modern Spain).
Septimius Severus, founder of a powerful imperial dynasty, came from Leptis Magna in what is now Libya.
Philip the Arab was from Arabia.
Caracalla’s mother was Syrian.
And by the third century AD, it was normal for emperors to be African, Syrian, or Illyrian.
Archaeology confirms what the ancient writers already knew…
Rome was a world power built by a 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦.
In Roman Britain, the skeleton of an elite woman was discovered whose isotope and DNA analysis suggests she had North African ancestry.
Troops stationed along Hadrian’s Wall came from modern-day Algeria, Morocco, and Syria, sent to guard the empire’s chilly northern frontier.
In York, the remains of a woman known as the “Ivory Bangle Lady” point to a high-status individual of mixed African and European descent.
To be Roman was never about ethnicity or race.
It was about allegiance, law, language, and the unifying idea of the 𝘙𝘦𝘴 𝘗𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢, a shared civic identity that transcended geography and ancestry.
The myth of an ethnically “Italian” Roman identity is a fiction, crafted long after the empire’s fall, to serve modern nationalist agendas.
But the real Rome was a tapestry of cultures, faiths, skin tones, and languages. Its strength came 𝘯𝘰𝘵 from racial purity, but from imperial diversity.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
And it certainly wasn’t built by just one kind of people.
