Great scene from HBO's "Rome"

A great ending to episode three of the first season of Rome.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Rome
• HBO
• Julius Caesar. Titus Pullo
• Mark Antony
• Ray Stevenson
• Ciarán Hinds
• James Purefoy

[3dwardcullen69]

@bob32dt I wouldnt say only a mere 5% of the Italian genome is Roman, unless you are a geneticist, then my hat goes off to you. But I will agree that very few Roman genes were passed down to Italians in comparison to Germanic and Northern African. Lets not forget that 1/3 of Roman Italy were slaves of which the majority were from all corners of the Empire. The ethnicity of Italians is a mix of a this cluster of different people, much like the rest of Roman occupied Europe.

[RomaInvicta1]

Looked at the comments and saw the phrase "Roman Genes", didn't read anymore. If anybody is trying to claim Roman ancestry just stop.

[3dwardcullen69]

@initvesa Not really anyone was a citizen. Only some provinces were senatorial, thus granted its inhabitants citizenship. Roman citizens constituted of men predominantly from ancient Greek, Iberian, and ancient Italian ethnicities. Roman citizenship was later extended to all free and freed men throughout the empire in 230AD. Mainly to collect more taxes, and to recruit more legionaries. But I agree with your analogy and your point. Being Roman, was definitely not a uniform ethnicity

[initvesa]

@initvesa Since ancient "Romans" constitued any citizen in the empire so strictly speaking the people not round Rome probably were as diverse back then as they are today. ROME long ceased to be a mono-ethnic entity (was it ever of a single, closed tribe?) and so overall it feels like this debating "who is and who is not a Roman" genetically was pointless to begin with. Perhaps the analogy is like saying it makes some sense to say who is "English" but useless to say who is a "Brit."

[initvesa]

@3dwardcullen69 Taking a 1000 persons sample of a population for an extremely diverse people is a terrible standard of sampling. I guess the concern here is whether there is *any* group of pure bloods left dating back from the ancient time after thousands of years and it is very likely, despite that they may not be very representative or numerous. I agree that this idea of determining who is or isn't a Roman by genome is difficult even in ancient times.

[bachthoven1685]

@bachiboy18 Gold. The entire Roman Treasury, in fact.

[3dwardcullen69]

@initvesa The issue isnt whether what you said is possible or not, its whether its probable. When they do DNA tests they usually use a sample population of 1000. And they get varying results. In Italy they've discovered that in the northern part of Italy, people share common genes with Germanic ethnicities. Southern Italians are more complicated. But generally most Italians share some genes that they think date back to ancient Italy, a relatively small proportion of genes though.

[bachiboy18]

what did he see in the chests?

[initvesa]

@3dwardcullen69 Is it possible that the distribution of genes is among different segments of the populations rather than uniformly among all people? That is, the few peoples descended from the ancients are mostly intact except in small quantities in those mountain villages/ republics while the majority are different people outside but overall mixing is low?

[3dwardcullen69]

@Dianatomia I dont know where you got that but, geneticists have discovered that modern Italians are more related to Germans, Northern Africans and Greeks. Only 30% of the Italian genome is found to be ancient Italian. It seems that your opinion is the one that is biased, as mine is based on DNA evidence.