The Italian Genome-Fiorito et al 2015

We're pretty much on the same page, although not entirely.
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We are making the same point with respect to calculators and Italians, just saying it in different ways.

Many of the "calculators" use Tuscans as the baseline for Italians, or, alternatively, the Tuscan samples are the largest in their databases. (This is similar to how, many calculators use people from Utah of Northern & Western European ancestry as a proxy and the biggest baseline for what people think of as a generic north/west European.)

Just like Utahans, who tend more often than not to be LDS, with an entirely different migration history than the rest of the country (more British, more Scandinavian, significantly less Irish) are not the perfect baseline for all Americans of western European heritage -- As you noted, Tuscans aren't always the best proxy for Southern Italians.

This causes Southern Italians, who have a right to "Italianness" as much as anyone else, to fall under other categories, with false positives and false negatives since they don't always match Tuscans closely. GIGO. So, we're saying the same thing on that point.

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I'm sorry, but I don't think we're saying the same thing. That isn't how the ADMIXTURE program works, which is what these "calculators" are based upon. No one is comparing Southern Italians/Sicilians to Tuscans, or to Northern Italians for that matter.

Let's take a simple example where researchers are looking at modern groups alone. The algorithm is instructed to divide the data into a certain number of "cluster" or "K" groups. If you tell it to divide everybody into three groups you're going to basically get a "Caucasian" group, a "SubSaharan" African group, and a "Mongoloid" group. (Excuse the archaic terminology.) Depending on what the researcher is looking for, they might go to higher K. Some people like to limit it to 8 or so.

The clusters are usually then named for the area where they are "modal" or most frequent. In the calculators the genome of an individual is run through the same program and divided up into percentages of each cluster. That's what gives you your percent "Atlanto Med" or "Eastern European" etc. etc. Now, with the availability of ancient genomes our modern genomes are compared to them. That's how Tuscans, for example, get X percent Anatolian Neolithic or X percent WHG.

Only then do you get to the Oracle section, an algorithm first created and used by Dienekes if I'm not mistaken. The creator of the calculator has to then input modern sample reference populations for a comparison with the genome of the user. If there were no English reference sample, English people would come back as German or Norwegian or French or whatever, with very bad FST or goodness of fit numbers. With Italians it's even more important to get lots of reference samples because we have a lot of diversity. If there's no southern Italian reference sample then obviously the results for southern Italians are going to be garbage. On one of the early iterations of one of these calculators they only had a Tuscan sample to stand in for Italians. I wound up in the Balkans! :)

Things are getting better, though. There are now 4 Northern Italian samples, plus the academic Tuscan ones. There's also a sample from the Abruzzi, and there's a Western Sicilian sample, an Eastern Sicilian sample, and a Calabrian sample. One could argue the latter weren't the most representative areas from which to draw, and there should definitely be some samples from Campania and Apulia, but we have more areas sampled than a lot of other areas of Europe. Plus, in my opinion, I actually think there's rather more diversity in northern Italy than in southern Italy, perhaps because the latter were part of one governmental unit for so long (unlike northern Italy).

Anyway, your genome then gets compared to the genomes of these "reference" samples, and the similarity is computed. That's why southern Italians come out as southern Italian first and foremost. As I said upthread they may sometimes get Ashkenazi as a second or third best match. However, people have to understand that groups can wind up with similar ancestral proportions and therefore plot near each other on a PCA not because of a long shared genetic history, but just because by chance they were formed by similar ancient ancestral populations. That's why someone who is half Chinese and half English can wind up plotting near the Uighers. Or, as I said, maybe it's true that the Ashkenazim are partly descended from a southern Italian population.

Now, perhaps you were thinking of the 23andme analysis. Even there, however, users are compared to the reference samples. There's lots of southern Italians on there who've been chosen to represent southern Italians as a reference sample. It's the northern Italians for whom 23andme only has the 12 person Bergamo sample and the paltry few who have tested. Even with just those few, northern Italian users still plot north on the PCA, southern Italian users plot south, and Tuscans plot sort of midway but closer to northern Italians. (I can't believe they're getting rid of their PCA btw.)

I do know what you're getting at in terms of the computation of the "Italian" percentage. As I said somewhere or other, it can seem as if they threw magnetized markers representing all the "Italian" genomes, academic and from their users, onto a Board. Where the "cluster" is most dense, it's "Italian", where you have markers being "pulled" toward other strong "clusters", they find "minority" ancestry, like the 20-25% Northwestern European that some Northern Italians get. (For Italians, all "Southern European" percentages on 23andme are, in my opinion, "Italian". It's just that 23andme is very conservative in calling the segments.)

This is why you get these figures from a few percent to 15-20% which 23andme labels "Middle Eastern/North African" in Southern Italian/Sicilians. First of all, people don't understand, or choose not to mention because of bizarre agendas that on 23andme "Middle Eastern" doesn't mean Middle Eastern as everyone else in the world would understand it, i.e. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc. It means Caucasus, Turkey, Iran. Now, that's ancestry that everyone in Europe carries (CHG), and certainly everyone in Italy carries. That number in Southern Italians just represents the "excess", in my opinion, over what the rest of the Italians carry. Then the question is when did it get to Italy?

The majority could not have come with the "Moors", in my opinion. They may be responsible for some of the 1 or 2% SSA that shows up for some people in certain calculators (some of it may be even more ancient), and the 2-3% NA that also shows up. A few percent more "Caucasus" could have arrived with them, but it has to be extremely minor because North Africans from Egypt all the way west just don't have much of it themselves. In fact, the entire legacy has to be pretty minor if uniparental markers mean anything at all, and I think they do. (The yDna is about, what, 6-7%, and the mtDna even less.)

So, it's more likely, in my opinion, that it came before that, and I doubt much of it is "slave" ancestry, for all the reasons Razib Khan pointed out, but also because of the Italian cline. Slaves came from all over the world, the north,west, and east as well as the Middle East and North Africa, and slaves went all over, to other parts of Italy and all other parts of the Roman world, as I'm sure you know but others may not. There was no regulation saying ok all Middle Eastern slaves are going to go to southern Italy, and all northern slaves are going to go to northern Italy. It didn't work like that. So, it's probably earlier. My guess is late Neolithic/Bronze Age, maybe early Iron Age. It may have come with Indo-European speaking peoples for all we know, and I think most of it was mediated through the Greek mainland and Islands. Part of my rationale for believing this is because in most calculators, for example, mainland Greeks have the same amount or higher levels of Caucasus (or "West Asian" in the older ones), and the rest of the Balkans isn't far behind.

(One can't use the "Greek" results on 23andme to analyze these migration patterns, no matter what the "usual suspects" on racist anthrofora may say when taking my words out of context, because the "Balkan" cluster at 23andme is a mess. It includes "Malta" for goodness sakes, so you're getting only the "excess" southern genes for Greeks and Balkanites.) The Spaniards are in a different situation because they have much more North African and some areas have more SSA. Based on the recent excellent analyses of their mtDna, some of it is ancient, but some of it is definitely from the period of Moorish domination as well. In one recent analysis specifically of CHG or "Caucasus", West Asian ancestry, the Spaniards seem to score from 25 in the far north to 30-31%, in comparison to 34-35 for Bergamo, from 0-3 points more of WHG. However, they have slightly more Anatolian Neolithic. I can't provide the figures for southern Italians because they weren't included in that particular run.

A final word about ADMIXTURE and even 23andme. They are both very subject to drift, meaning that there may be more underlying genetic similarity between all Italians than either analysis shows.
 
Only then do you get to the Oracle section, an algorithm first created and used by Dienekes if I'm not mistaken. The creator of the calculator has to then input modern sample reference populations for a comparison with the genome of the user. If there were no English reference sample, English people would come back as German or Norwegian or French or whatever, with very bad FST or goodness of fit numbers. With Italians it's even more important to get lots of reference samples because we have a lot of diversity. If there's no southern Italian reference sample then obviously the results for southern Italians are going to be garbage. On one of the early iterations of one of these calculators they only had a Tuscan sample to stand in for Italians. I wound up in the Balkans! :)

Things are getting better, though. There are now 4 Northern Italian samples, plus the academic Tuscan ones. There's also a sample from the Abruzzi, and there's a Western Sicilian sample, an Eastern Sicilian sample, and a Calabrian sample. One could argue the latter weren't the most representative areas from which to draw

This is exactly what I was saying actually! Just not as artfully as you. :)

I have friends who are from some little peak or valley in the southern Appennines, and they basically come across as sui generis on whatever calculator. I don't think the reference samples are sufficient.


SHIFTING GEARS:

1. Not to get too philosophical, but doesn't this call into question the use of calculators? In other words, if they need a reference population to be pretty close to what you know you are, then why do you need a calculator to tell you what you know you are?

Only the gullible (and I admit that's a large number) use a calculator and say, "OMG, I must be secretly Balkan" (in your example above) when they get an obviously bad reading.

2. And then on calculators in general, I must re-state my point about a thermometer. Again, I have friends who (and they've shown me) show up as one thing in Dodecad version X, something else entirely in Dodecad version Y, then something entirely different in Eurogenes version X, something different in Eurogenes version Y, then something different in MDLP.

Which one is right? Is one right at all? If one is right, doesn't that mean the others are wrong. So wrong, indeed. Am I right? :)

But seriously, if you have 8 thermometers, and they all read different temperatures, you know that either all 8 are wrong. Or just 7. Neither outcome gives one faith in the scientific exactitude of the measuring.
 
So, it's more likely, in my opinion, that it came before that, and I doubt much of it is "slave" ancestry, for all the reasons Razib Khan pointed out, but also because of the Italian cline. Slaves came from all over the world, the north,west, and east as well as the Middle East and North Africa, and slaves went all over, to other parts of Italy and all other parts of the Roman world, as I'm sure you know but others may not. There was no regulation saying ok all Middle Eastern slaves are going to go to southern Italy, and all northern slaves are going to go to northern Italy. It didn't work like that. So, it's probably earlier. My guess is late Neolithic/Bronze Age, maybe early Iron Age. It may have come with Indo-European speaking peoples for all we know, and I think most of it was mediated through the Greek mainland and Islands. Part of my rationale for believing this is because in most calculators, for example, mainland Greeks have the same amount or higher levels of Caucasus (or "West Asian" in the older ones), and the rest of the Balkans isn't far behind.

Slaves were predominantly imported into Italy, particularly Rome, the capital of the empire, not as much to peripheral areas of the empire, which were in fact the suppliers of the slaves for Rome. Plus there were free citizens from all over the empire who migrated to Rome, who were as numerous as the slaves.

The Spaniards are in a different situation because they have much more North African and some areas have more SSA. Based on the recent excellent analyses of their mtDna, some of it is ancient, but some of it is definitely from the period of Moorish domination as well.

That mtDNA paper did not accurately pinpoint anything regarding the allegedly "recent" mtDNA in question. They kept their options open, from anywhere around Roman times to even descendants of immigrants from the New World. Plus some of their statements are actually for Europe in general, not just Spain. Their paper does not shed any more light on the subject than autosomal studies.
 
Slaves were predominantly imported into Italy, particularly Rome, the capital of the empire, not as much to peripheral areas of the empire, which were in fact the suppliers of the slaves for Rome. Plus there were free citizens from all over the empire who migrated to Rome, who were as numerous as the slaves.



That mtDNA paper did not accurately pinpoint anything regarding the allegedly "recent" mtDNA in question. They kept their options open, from anywhere around Roman times to even descendants of immigrants from the New World. Plus some of their statements are actually for Europe in general, not just Spain. Their paper does not shed any more light on the subject than autosomal studies.


Same old, same old. This isn't theapricity or Stormfront. Nobody is impressed by cut and paste responses already posted a hundred times by you which are, as always, devoid of any data to substantiate them.

For the record, I don't give a **** if Italians carry some slave ancestry from Gauls or the British or the Germans or the Spaniards or the Syrians or Anatolians or whatever. It's all the same genes from the same ancestral populations which formed all Europeans, which you would know if you were interested in the science of all of this and more importantly, could understand it. Most slaves, unfortunately, were fodder for the mines and latifundia and galleys and the whore houses and didn't live to reproduce or weren't allowed to reproduce, again, as you would know if you'd ever actually studied the era. The ones who were manumitted and did reproduce were the survivors, the smartest and most capable of them, and, as Maciamo once opined, perhaps the best looking as well. :) That's a form of selection if you understand what that means.

Whatever happened, after the total destruction of a magnificent civilization, the Italians, the product of everything that had gone before, whatever it turns out to be when we have the ancient dna, had the wherewithal to re-create European civilization once again in the Renaissance. So, it's all more than fine with me.

By the way, that's what real "ethnic" pride looks like....I recommend it to you in terms of your own people. Of course, that would mean acknowledging and embracing all the North African and the trace SSA and your 70-80% Near Eastern ancient ancestors.

As for that silly comment about the recent papers on Spanish mtDna, anyone who frequents this or other Boards where they were discussed knows their value and knows you are distorting their conclusions, so it's not even worth discussing it. The tide has turned, Drac. The science has proved you wrong over and over again. You're in a hole so stop digging.
 
This is exactly what I was saying actually! Just not as artfully as you. :)

I have friends who are from some little peak or valley in the southern Appennines, and they basically come across as sui generis on whatever calculator. I don't think the reference samples are sufficient.


SHIFTING GEARS:

1. Not to get too philosophical, but doesn't this call into question the use of calculators? In other words, if they need a reference population to be pretty close to what you know you are, then why do you need a calculator to tell you what you know you are?

Only the gullible (and I admit that's a large number) use a calculator and say, "OMG, I must be secretly Balkan" (in your example above) when they get an obviously bad reading.

2. And then on calculators in general, I must re-state my point about a thermometer. Again, I have friends who (and they've shown me) show up as one thing in Dodecad version X, something else entirely in Dodecad version Y, then something entirely different in Eurogenes version X, something different in Eurogenes version Y, then something different in MDLP.

Which one is right? Is one right at all? If one is right, doesn't that mean the others are wrong. So wrong, indeed. Am I right? :)

But seriously, if you have 8 thermometers, and they all read different temperatures, you know that either all 8 are wrong. Or just 7. Neither outcome gives one faith in the scientific exactitude of the measuring.

This is a reminder of all the discussions on the topic at 23andme. :) As I said from day one, if you have all four ancestors from one place, you know what you are and you don't need 23andme or any of the calculators. If you are adopted or of mixed ancestry, it can be very challenging and sometimes impossible to get precise answers.

Let's take adoptees. If they are 100% of Italian ancestry, but just don't know it, a calculator that has Bergamo, Tuscans and Southern Italians will probably tell them that. If it only has one Italian reference sample it might not. If they're 100% British, it might come close as well, but it might not be able to tell them if they're Irish versus English or what percentage of each unless there are samples for all of those groups. If they're French it might be even more off. Now, what if they're Ashkenazi or part Ashkenazi? The only place that can tell them that with any real degree of accuracy is 23andme. The calculators are hopeless. (I hope that gedmatch has taken down that "J" calculator, for example. It's totally useless.) If they're of Sephardic ancestry, however, they're out of luck because the Sephardim aren't a sufficiently bottlenecked population to pick it up. If they're a mix, again, they're out of luck. Someone Sicilian and English might be told they're Slovenian or Bulgarian. Of course, if you know the ethnic ancestry of one biological parent it's easier to at least get a region for the other one.

The people who are the real market for all of this are Americans of mixed ancestry, even if it's just a mix of English, Irish and German, who want to clarify their ancestral "roots". People from the British Isles also seem to be pretty interested, although I'm not quite sure why. I can't get any of my "real" Italian relatives to test. Their attitude is, "I know I'm Italian. I even know where all my ancestors lived for the last at least five to six hundred years. What more do I need to know? Oh, and I have too many cousins already." :) I suspect that for some groups with an ethnic inferiority complex they may be trying to prove their "European-ness" or lack of "exotic" (to them) admixture.

The problem is that there is serious overlap between the genomes of certain British people and those of people from the Netherlands and Scandinavia, for example, so they're never going to be all that accurate, in my opinion, for these purposes.

What these "calculators" are "good" for, given that they are honestly and competently made, and the primary reason for their creation, at first by Dienekes, is to try to figure out the peopling of Europe. It's all about population genetics. However, it soon became clear that these "clusters" were still too modern, and that there were more ancient "mixtures" hiding inside them. Now that we have ancient dna, the calculators are focused on those kinds of comparisons. I still don't put much stock on the precise percentages found in these amateur calculators, but there are still things to be gleaned by comparisons between different ethnic groups. You have to understand how to use and interpret them, however.

If a group like the Reich Lab or Allentoft put out the results of an Admixture run then it's a different story.
 
Same old, same old. This isn't theapricity or Stormfront. Nobody is impressed by cut and paste responses already posted a hundred times by you which are, as always, devoid of any data to substantiate them.

For the record, I don't give a **** if Italians carry some slave ancestry from Gauls or the British or the Germans or the Spaniards or the Syrians or Anatolians or whatever. It's all the same genes from the same ancestral populations which formed all Europeans, which you would know if you were interested in the science of all of this and more importantly, could understand it. Most slaves, unfortunately, were fodder for the mines and latifundia and galleys and the whore houses and didn't live to reproduce or weren't allowed to reproduce, again, as you would know if you'd ever actually studied the era. The ones who were manumitted and did reproduce were the survivors, the smartest and most capable of them, and, as Maciamo once opined, perhaps the best looking as well. :) That's a form of selection if you understand what that means.

Whatever happened, after the total destruction of a magnificent civilization, the Italians, the product of everything that had gone before, whatever it turns out to be when we have the ancient dna, had the wherewithal to re-create European civilization once again in the Renaissance. So, it's all more than fine with me.

By the way, that's what real "ethnic" pride looks like....I recommend it to you in terms of your own people. Of course, that would mean acknowledging and embracing all the North African and the trace SSA and your 70-80% Near Eastern ancient ancestors.

As for that silly comment about the recent papers on Spanish mtDna, anyone who frequents this or other Boards where they were discussed knows their value and knows you are distorting their conclusions, so it's not even worth discussing it. The tide has turned, Drac. The science has proved you wrong over and over again. You're in a hole so stop digging.

Such hostility! Since you are in a "I will tell you what I think of you whether you like it or not" mode (and for the record you started this, again), I am forced to have to answer in similar fashion and go into "what I think of you" mode too:

You mean all the evidence that you keep trying to deny or downplay, which is a different thing. The statements of all those historians and scholars in Roman history that you already know pretty well about (specially after I gave links and quotes as examples in other threads where this subject came up) are not going to magically go away just because you want to make assumptions about most slaves conveniently dying off, or staying static in Rome for centuries and not moving around other parts of Italy, or just a few of them being manumitted, or ignoring the communities of free "peregrini", and so forth. And neither are some autosomal results, like the ones from the study which is the subject of this thread, which are not to your liking either (notice just how quickly you tried to dismiss what is in fact one of the most interesting and original parts of it, the admixture age estimates, a sort of "novelty" for a paper on Italian DNA, since they did not come out as remote as you would have hoped for), no matter how much you claim that having something to do with Roman-era slaves and immigrants doesn't really bother you. I know you pretty well from a long time ago in these forums, since long before you were made an admin. I'm not a newbie. We were already "arguing" about some of these things then. I know how very casually you try to dismiss this subject. Oh, but on the other hand you do love to consider just about any remote possibility and give credit to just about any paper whatsoever when it comes to them "Moors" from Islamic times. I wonder why? (rhetorical question, since anyone who has been around here for a long time knows why.)

The tide has "turned"? If it has, it does not seem to be exactly on your side either.

As for Maciamo, he does not seem to have any problem accepting the fact that there were many people from places like the Near East in Italy during Roman times. He has made comments about it himself (and interestingly enough also get accused of being a "racist" or using "white supremacist arguments" by some Italians because of it), and Eupedia itself touches upon the subject in its page about Italy. It seems that among the administration it is you and only you who is bothered by this.

As for the mtDNA paper, the comments about it were already made here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...-in-the-Iberian-Peninsula?p=469669#post469669

As I expected, you weren't able to argue anything to the contrary of my observations and comments there, or here for that matter. We all know why you want to give this paper super-importance, an importance which it doesn't really have. It did not settle anything about the subject that interests you (i.e. the "recently" introduced mtDNA), and far from being more informative than autosomal studies in fact it even tried to seek support from them (a support which is not really there, or at least not by the papers they tried to conjure up.) It just kept giving "possibilities" for what they estimate was of "recent" introduction. Had this exact same paper been about that same mtDNA in Italy, I would bet $1 million that you would quickly have made the exact same observations about its inconclusiveness and not given it anywhere even near as much importance as you try to give it.
 
Ignoring posts doesn't mean one necessarily agrees with the points made. I often ignore posts which I don't think are worth spending any time on because they're so obviously lacking in intellectual merit. I can't spend my entire existence correcting people who have no idea what they're talking about. I think you should be able to follow the logic here.

As for the rest, I majored in history and have a master's degree in it as well. That I sold out for a more lucrative career is beside the point. :) Roman history remains an avocation, and I have in my personal library thirty or more texts on it, and have read scores of papers on the subject as well as original sources. I'm not some illiterate teenager who can be impressed with cribbed snippets found through a google search. Your points are totally unsupported by the data. There is NO, and I repeat NO evidence to suggest that all slaves from the Middle East were sent to Italy and were in addition sent only to southern Italy. Such a suggestion is ludicrous.

Most importantly, as I already pointed out to you, should the ancient dna show that there was a big change in Italian genetics specifically from that source, I have absolutely no problem with it. It wouldn't be the first time that history gets trounced by genetics. You keep imputing your strange agenda and racist opinions onto me. I've told you before; I'm not you; I'm not a denizen of racist anthrofora. I don't share your beliefs or your concerns and preoccupations.

What possible difference can it make WHEN "Near Eastern" genes entered southern Europe? Are North African genes more objectionable to you if they came to Iberia with the Moors rather than with the Neolithic farmers or late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers? I have news for you; it's all the same alleles.

I think it's time for you to embrace your ancient Near Eastern identity, Drac. In fact it's time for all Nordicists to come to grips with reality. In your particular case it's even more imperative. Good God man, in your case it's probably 70%+ of your total ancestry. This isn't just ethnic nihilism, it's individual nihilism.

Now, why don't you go argue about whether Spaniards are blonder than Poles or something equally important and consequential.
 
I am a GSI in Roman History at a major university in CA. Hopefully some day soon I will get tenure, so those impressed with credentials can call me a full professor. In the meantime, I will have to tell you that I have eaten, breathed, drank, and probably defecated Roman history for the last 25 years.

I know which wars Rome fought against whom, and when. I've read entire books on the Roman Slave trade, and the life of average Romans, including slaves. (I still recommend Jerome Carcopino's, if anyone is looking.)

I can tell you that Angela is correct. Slaves came from all over. And went all over. If you purport to see a "Roman Era Slave DNA Signature" for Italy or South Italy, you would have to explain why such a signature is absent for much of France (Roman for ~700 years), Catalonia (Roman for ~700 years), and indeed even England (Roman for ~400 years). Do you believe slaves worked the vast plantations in those regions?

Indeed, why aren't all of these regions one gigantic melting pop, and yet incredibly homogenous at the same time, due to seven centuries of the importation of Roman-era slaves?

Angela is correct in asking: do you seriously believe that there was a sorting process somehow, where slaves of a certain ancestry went to certain regions? That, Sir, has no basis in reality, history, or common sense.

Angela is also correct in stating that large numbers of slaves went to mines, galley ships, and places like brothels, where the life expectancy was short, the treatment harsh, and the likelihood of having children small. Household slaves were often castrated.

The average manumitted slave was often well beyond childbearing age, since manumission overwhelmingly occurred only upon the death of the household paterfamilias and his surviving wife.

Aside from certain very wealthy freedmen hitting it big, manumitted slaves were often poor, and did not have the resources to raise large families.

Do I doubt that some genes made their way into the gene pool of modern Italians from Roman-era slaves? Sure. But you would expect such genes to be concentrated in the places where slave-supported industries were the largest. And they're not.

For example: the Romans used Egypt as a breadbasket for about 400 years. The Romans fought wars against the Germanic tribes continuously during that same period. German slaves were very common in Rome. Read the Ode to Bissula, or even Pope Gregory's famous comments. By your metric, there should be a visible signature of German slave genes in Egypt.

Let's go even further. Sardinia provides ample examples of extremely rare uniparental markers that can be used to detect Sardinian ancestry with ease. For a long time, Sardinian slaves were the most common in Rome. "Cheaper than a Sardinian slave" was the saying in the city. Yet are these Sardinian markers present in Rome? No. The similar mainland clades show a TMRCA several millennia before the Roman period.
 
The problem is that in reality you can't "correct" the majority of what I say and back up with actual sources, but simply deny it. Contrary to what you claim, it is not for lack of trying on your part.

The fact that Rome was the center of the empire and therefore the largest consumer of labor should already have told you where the majority of the slaves and free citizens were going. For example, I don't see many historians finding a great deal of funerary inscriptions with names of Hellenized foreigners in other parts of the empire other than Italy. Sure, you can find some, like for example evidence of North African and Near Eastern foreigners in Roman Britain, but this is because the conquest of that place happened rather late, at a time when the Roman armies were largely composed of non-Romans. Even quite a few Roman emperors at this time were foreigners themselves. So it should not be surprising to find some evidence of foreigners elsewhere in the empire as well, but as another user commented here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/31735-Early-London-was-Ethnically-diverse

That actually should give you an idea how many more of them there must have been in a place like Rome, the center of the empire itself. Furthermore, we also have the statements of ancient writers like Martial, Petronius, Juvenal, etc. from which is easy to gather how common were such foreigners in Rome, and also from what areas of the empire they predominantly came from. And it sure is not Gaul or Germania that they point to.

As for your "sent only to southern Italy", that is, again, your very own claim, not mine. Remember, you are the one wanting to confine any "recent" genetic influx to southern Italy, preferably mostly Sicily (the mainland is "too close for comfort".) Don't try to attribute your agendas to me. I have always said that the majority of the slaves and immigrants had Rome as their destination, which is what the historical evidence points to.

But there are DNA studies that do make the inference that Italians have "recent" DNA from around Etruscan/Roman/medieval times, like the paper that is the subject of this thread. Of course, you waste little time to dismiss them. Very different from whenever a study tries to make the same inference about Iberians. Then we must all remain very open minded and strongly believe that those mighty "Moors" were quite capable of leaving a lasting genetic impression, never mind the fact that historians estimate their numbers as being very low, and that, unlike all those pagan and early Christian slaves and immigrants in Roman Italy, there was an actual long-lasting war waged by those who remained Christian to expel them and their coreligionists. The double-standard is rather blatant. We have to believe that a relatively small group of elitist military/religious invaders, who for the most part were eventually expelled, had a considerable impact on the much larger native population of an entire peninsula, but a larger number of slaves and immigrants in another peninsula somehow miraculously barely left a trace. Angela, if you really buy that, I got a real nifty bridge to sell you.

You keep accusing others of what you yourself do. Not nice, Angela. You might be fooling some people with this claim that you don't really care if Italians have "recent" African or Eastern DNA, and that you are not worried about such things, and accusing others of being "racist" (I wonder why you don't accuse Maciamo of being so as well, since some have already accused him of such a thing when he has made statements on the subject), while you yourself are supposedly totally different, but your posts since back in the day suggest otherwise. They show a preoccupation with the subject. And no, the fact that you go around Googling for articles on other subject matter and making posts on other topics is not fooling me or anyone else who is well acquainted with you. No, you are not me, for sure. The difference between you and me is that I do not try to hide the fact that this topic interest me very much. But you do.

Angela, please, don't try to feign ignorance. You know very well what "difference" it makes. For a long time Nordicist charlatans have been accusing southern Europeans of being "tainted" with "recent blood" from Africa and the Middle East, while they paint rosy pictures of themselves, being "pure" and having truly prehistoric and ancient blood-lines, the "real whites", and blah, blah, blah. And in the case of Italy the number 1 argument they use is the fact that the Romans imported large numbers of slaves from outside Europe and that many free citizens from places like Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc. also migrated there. They did not "invent" this. They picked it up from real scholars on the subject (their writings are full of references to actual scholars like Mommsen, Tenney Frank, La Piana, Duff, etc.) but of course they give it their own "spin", claiming that the North Africans and Middle Easterners of those times were no longer "white" but "mixed race" or just plain "non-white" (this part is mostly their own invention, they did not get this idea from actual scholars and historians.) One only has to examine writings like those of Arthur Kemp to plainly see this typical Nordicist strategy. So it has become very important for Italians who care about such things to try to deny it. Unfortunately, instead of attacking the Nordicist spin on the whole thing, they have tried to deny the work of actual scholars and claim that no such things happened, or that all slaves and foreigners died off, and what have you.

I think it is time for you to embrace all those things you conveniently want others to accept, Angela, instead of claiming to be a descendant of "Celt-Ligurians", like some other Nordicists do.

Why argue about Spaniards and Poles when you can invest your time more profitably arguing about whether Italians are practically as blue eyed and blond as Orcadians because "predictions" based on some alleles seem to suggest so, or something just as important and consequential.
 
LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!
 
LoL do you even realize that the Southern half of Italy was called Magna Graecia and was hellenized long before the Roman Empire was born? Do you also realize that ancient Romans had a HUGE fetish for anything Greek? I mean, they have found thousands of Greek inscriptions in Rome, but no Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic ones. I thought that only the 1% richest Levantines was able to speak Greek. You should come up with something better than quoting butthurt Germanic historians who wish that ancient Romans were blonder than modern Scandinavians!

The inscriptions we are talking about are from later times, and have many names that are typical not of Greeks but of Hellenized Near Easterners. This matches very well with ancient authors like Juvenal who scoff and denounce the "Greeks" at Rome as fakes, Near Easterners pretending to be "Greek". Juvenal did not even like the Greeks to begin with, so he can't be accused of somehow wanting to protect "real" Greek identity. But even an anti-Greek bigot like him recognized that most of these "Greeks" were actually people from places like Syria.

The Nordictist charlatans' claims about Romans being super-blond and what have you are obviously baloney, of course. But this is not about their strange claims. We are talking about things that have been part of legitimate scholarship on Roman history for a long time, and which unfortunately these Nordicists have picked up to try to back up their own weird claims about the original Romans being more Nordic than Thor himself before Rome was influenced by all these foreign peoples.
 
Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?
 
Bla bla bla. Where are the countless Anatolian, Armenian and Semitic inscriptions in Italy? Only the 1% richest minority of near easterners was Greek speaking and you are telling me that they only left Greek inscriptions. By the way my name is Joseph, an Hellenized Levantine name. Does it make me a Palestinian? Are tens of millions of North Europeans with names like Luke, Thomas, Sam, Paul, John.... Jordanians and Beduins in denial?

You are comparing modern naming practices with those of 2000 years ago, quite before the spread of Christianity all over the planet.

Greek names, language and customs were very common among many Near Easterners. In Syria itself there's plenty of inscriptions in Greek.
 
But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.
 
But only the richest 1% of Easterners was Greek Speaking. So where are the inscriptions in Armenian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic,... in Italy? Answer the question and stop with the circles.

Where do you keep getting this idea that only 1% of Easterners knew Greek, or had Greek names? Regarding Syria in particular, in entire regions of it Greek names predominated. Even in many rural areas of Syria Greek language was used:

"Inscriptions and texts show the predominance of Greek throughout the region. Greek was not confined to the cities, as inscriptions, papyrus and parchments from rural settings show."

https://books.google.com/books?id=Y...nance of Greek throughout the region"&f=false

Page 284.

A pretty common language in Syria at the time, besides the other ones also present in the area.
 
The problem is that in reality you can't "correct" the majority of what I say and back up with actual sources, but simply deny it. Contrary to what you claim, it is not for lack of trying on your part.

The fact that Rome was the center of the empire and therefore the largest consumer of labor should already have told you where the majority of the slaves and free citizens were going. For example, I don't see many historians finding a great deal of funerary inscriptions with names of Hellenized foreigners in other parts of the empire other than Italy. Sure, you can find some, like for example evidence of North African and Near Eastern foreigners in Roman Britain, but this is because the conquest of that place happened rather late, at a time when the Roman armies were largely composed of non-Romans. Even quite a few Roman emperors at this time were foreigners themselves. So it should not be surprising to find some evidence of foreigners elsewhere in the empire as well, but as another user commented here:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/31735-Early-London-was-Ethnically-diverse

That actually should give you an idea how many more of them there must have been in a place like Rome, the center of the empire itself. Furthermore, we also have the statements of ancient writers like Martial, Petronius, Juvenal, etc. from which is easy to gather how common were such foreigners in Rome, and also from what areas of the empire they predominantly came from. And it sure is not Gaul or Germania that they point to.

As for your "sent only to southern Italy", that is, again, your very own claim, not mine. Remember, you are the one wanting to confine any "recent" genetic influx to southern Italy, preferably mostly Sicily (the mainland is "too close for comfort".) Don't try to attribute your agendas to me. I have always said that the majority of the slaves and immigrants had Rome as their destination, which is what the historical evidence points to.

But there are DNA studies that do make the inference that Italians have "recent" DNA from around Etruscan/Roman/medieval times, like the paper that is the subject of this thread. Of course, you waste little time to dismiss them. Very different from whenever a study tries to make the same inference about Iberians. Then we must all remain very open minded and strongly believe that those mighty "Moors" were quite capable of leaving a lasting genetic impression, never mind the fact that historians estimate their numbers as being very low, and that, unlike all those pagan and early Christian slaves and immigrants in Roman Italy, there was an actual long-lasting war waged by those who remained Christian to expel them and their coreligionists. The double-standard is rather blatant. We have to believe that a relatively small group of elitist military/religious invaders, who for the most part were eventually expelled, had a considerable impact on the much larger native population of an entire peninsula, but a larger number of slaves and immigrants in another peninsula somehow miraculously barely left a trace. Angela, if you really buy that, I got a real nifty bridge to sell you.

You keep accusing others of what you yourself do. Not nice, Angela. You might be fooling some people with this claim that you don't really care if Italians have "recent" African or Eastern DNA, and that you are not worried about such things, and accusing others of being "racist" (I wonder why you don't accuse Maciamo of being so as well, since some have already accused him of such a thing when he has made statements on the subject), while you yourself are supposedly totally different, but your posts since back in the day suggest otherwise. They show a preoccupation with the subject. And no, the fact that you go around Googling for articles on other subject matter and making posts on other topics is not fooling me or anyone else who is well acquainted with you. No, you are not me, for sure. The difference between you and me is that I do not try to hide the fact that this topic interest me very much. But you do.

Angela, please, don't try to feign ignorance. You know very well what "difference" it makes. For a long time Nordicist charlatans have been accusing southern Europeans of being "tainted" with "recent blood" from Africa and the Middle East, while they paint rosy pictures of themselves, being "pure" and having truly prehistoric and ancient blood-lines, the "real whites", and blah, blah, blah. And in the case of Italy the number 1 argument they use is the fact that the Romans imported large numbers of slaves from outside Europe and that many free citizens from places like Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc. also migrated there. They did not "invent" this. They picked it up from real scholars on the subject (their writings are full of references to actual scholars like Mommsen, Tenney Frank, La Piana, Duff, etc.) but of course they give it their own "spin", claiming that the North Africans and Middle Easterners of those times were no longer "white" but "mixed race" or just plain "non-white" (this part is mostly their own invention, they did not get this idea from actual scholars and historians.) One only has to examine writings like those of Arthur Kemp to plainly see this typical Nordicist strategy. So it has become very important for Italians who care about such things to try to deny it. Unfortunately, instead of attacking the Nordicist spin on the whole thing, they have tried to deny the work of actual scholars and claim that no such things happened, or that all slaves and foreigners died off, and what have you.

I think it is time for you to embrace all those things you conveniently want others to accept, Angela, instead of claiming to be a descendant of "Celt-Ligurians", like some other Nordicists do.

Why argue about Spaniards and Poles when you can invest your time more profitably arguing about whether Italians are practically as blue eyed and blond as Orcadians because "predictions" based on some alleles seem to suggest so, or something just as important and consequential.

Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it.

You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output.

Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more.

As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one.

If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.
 
I am a GSI in Roman History at a major university in CA. Hopefully some day soon I will get tenure, so those impressed with credentials can call me a full professor. In the meantime, I will have to tell you that I have eaten, breathed, drank, and probably defecated Roman history for the last 25 years.

I know which wars Rome fought against whom, and when. I've read entire books on the Roman Slave trade, and the life of average Romans, including slaves. (I still recommend Jerome Carcopino's, if anyone is looking.)

I can tell you that Angela is correct. Slaves came from all over. And went all over. If you purport to see a "Roman Era Slave DNA Signature" for Italy or South Italy, you would have to explain why such a signature is absent for much of France (Roman for ~700 years), Catalonia (Roman for ~700 years), and indeed even England (Roman for ~400 years). Do you believe slaves worked the vast plantations in those regions?

Indeed, why aren't all of these regions one gigantic melting pop, and yet incredibly homogenous at the same time, due to seven centuries of the importation of Roman-era slaves?

Angela is correct in asking: do you seriously believe that there was a sorting process somehow, where slaves of a certain ancestry went to certain regions? That, Sir, has no basis in reality, history, or common sense.

Angela is also correct in stating that large numbers of slaves went to mines, galley ships, and places like brothels, where the life expectancy was short, the treatment harsh, and the likelihood of having children small. Household slaves were often castrated.

The average manumitted slave was often well beyond childbearing age, since manumission overwhelmingly occurred only upon the death of the household paterfamilias and his surviving wife.

Aside from certain very wealthy freedmen hitting it big, manumitted slaves were often poor, and did not have the resources to raise large families.

Do I doubt that some genes made their way into the gene pool of modern Italians from Roman-era slaves? Sure. But you would expect such genes to be concentrated in the places where slave-supported industries were the largest. And they're not.

For example: the Romans used Egypt as a breadbasket for about 400 years. The Romans fought wars against the Germanic tribes continuously during that same period. German slaves were very common in Rome. Read the Ode to Bissula, or even Pope Gregory's famous comments. By your metric, there should be a visible signature of German slave genes in Egypt.

Let's go even further. Sardinia provides ample examples of extremely rare uniparental markers that can be used to detect Sardinian ancestry with ease. For a long time, Sardinian slaves were the most common in Rome. "Cheaper than a Sardinian slave" was the saying in the city. Yet are these Sardinian markers present in Rome? No. The similar mainland clades show a TMRCA several millennia before the Roman period.


It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.
 
Look what was at the bottom of my pile of posts. It's like finding a lump of coal in the bottom of a Christmas stocking. :) What a very disappointing effort, Drac. Thousands of letters, but no scholarship, no reasoned, logical, and data based points to refute the arguments of others, including a professor of Roman history-only an attempt to project your repugnant agenda and lack of intellectual integrity onto me. How very typical of you. For your information, I didn't even know that racist anthrofora existed until a few years ago when I followed a link in a posting on a respectable genealogy site. If you want to do battle with Italian Nordicists over whether Spaniards or Italians are less "northern", they are here, to my shame and disappointment, as should be obvious, but leave me out of it.

You can deny all you wish, you can try to besmirch me with innuendo, but I am confident that my knowledge of the subject matter and the logic and quality of my argumentation are apparent to the readers of this Board, as is the lack of respect for your own output.

Your day is over. No one takes you seriously any more.

As for my heritage, given where my family has lived for at least six hundred years, I would say I am indeed probably descended from Celt-Ligures since both my parents come from areas where they lived, but probably equally, of course, from the Roman citizens of Luni. Then you have to add in the Etruscans, my "favorites" if I can be said to have any, who had settlements across the Magra, perhaps some stray Greek merchants or even residents of Luni, perhaps indeed a slave or two who might have been manumitted, although our area, especially my father's was far too poor and mountainous for slaves to be very feasible, and yes, to some Indo-Europeans who came into the Po Valley. Before all of that, of course, there would be a lot of ancestry from Neolithic farmers and the smaller input from whatever WHG might have survived. There might be a stray Lombard in there too, given the number of Lombard castles in the area and a surname that appears often in my family tree, but the total impact would be minute, which would be more than fine with me. The Lombard lords and nobles of my area (and the Franks who sometimes succeeded them) were bloodsucking oppressors one and all and I have no desire to claim ancestry from any of them. Given the nearness to the coast, I might have had a stray ancestress who didn't run quite fast enough when the Saracens came raiding, but I don't see it in my dna. The strangest thing I see is a steppe mtDna, but unlike most men, I don't define myself by a uniparental marker. It's a very small part of my total make-up. I actually don't think those mtDna clades are as "fit" as something like "H" for example, so if anything I would have preferred to get another one.

If all these calculators are correct, what I do see is that I am overwhelmingly Southern European in ancestry, which is what I expected and hoped, and indisputably Italian, which is also what I expected and hoped. Would that you felt the same way about all your ancestors...there would perhaps be less misinformation coming from your postings, and you would perhaps be a happier and less angry person.



As I suspected, hardly much of a reply. The usual gratuitous diatribes and denials.


You admitted it yourself, you know well what Nordicist agendas are from at least a few years ago.


No scholarship, no backing up your statements with those of actual historians, denials, suspicious agendas, etc. That sounds pretty much like your posts on this subject. I am the one who more than a few times has actually cited sources to back up what I say. Been doing it around here for quite a while.


A "professor of Roman history"? Hmmm... yeah, sure. Like I said before, if you really believe that, I've got this real nifty bridge to sell you.


I wish I could say the same about "your day", but you never had one to begin with. I never took you seriously when it came to this topic. Your posts on this subject were always pretty easy to "read between the lines". And I see nothing nowadays to change this conclusion either.


Just pointing out what you do and then you strangely claim that it is others that do it to you.


Lack of respect for my output? The only ones doing so are you and some of those other "anthrofora... Italian Nordicists" you referred to in your post. No one else. Who do you think, for example, gave negative points to my post above showing "Joey" that his gratuitous assertion that hardly anyone among people like Syrians knew Greek or had Greek names is quite mistaken by showing him an actual academic source stating how common it actually was? I notice, however, that you seem to rejoice at the fact that posts backed-up by actual sources are the ones getting attacked and given negative votes. Why am I not surprised? No wonder that many of the old users simply ended up quitting these forums. In fact, I know well why some of them left, since they actually sent me PMs on the subject.
 
It's a pleasure to have someone on the Board with specialized scholarly knowledge in this field and I'm sure other expertise as well. As you can see, a great deal of disinformation or just superficial information gets posted here on certain topics.

I am glad you like our "Roman history professor" new visitor so much, but you should actually bother to check out the very source he recommended before getting too excited by his quite uninformed posts on this topic. For example, here are some of Carcopino's thoughts on the subject that you dislike so much and try to deny or downplay at any cost:

https://archive.org/stream/dailylifeinancie035465mbp#page/n7/mode/2up

"Whether by personal favour, by emancipation, or by mass naturalisations extended at one stroke either to a class of demobilised auxiliaries or to a municipality suddenly converted into an honorary colony, a new flood of peregrini acquired citizenship. Never had the cosmopolitan character of the Urbs been so distinctly marked. The Roman proper was submerged on every social plane, not only by the influx of Italian immigrants but by the multitude of provincials bringing with them from every corner of the universe their speech, their manners, their customs, and their superstitions. Juvenal inveighs against the mud-laden torrent pouring from Orontes into the Tiber. But the Syrians, whom he so greatly despised, hastened at the first possible moment to assume the guise of Roman civilians; even those who most loudly advertised their xenophobia were themselves more or less newcomers to Rome, seeking to defend their adopted home against fresh incursions....


In the Senate House senators from Gaul, from Spain, from Africa, from Asia, sat side by side; the Roman emperors, Roman citizens but newly naturalised, came from towns or villages beyond the mountains and the seas. Trajan and Hadrian were born in Spanish Italica in Baetica. Their successor, Antoninus Pius, sprang from bourgeois Stock in Nemausus (modern Nimes) in Gallia Narbonensis; and the end of the second century was to see the empire divided between Caesar Clodius Albinus of Hadrumetum (Tunis) and Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna (Tripoli.) The biography of Septimius Severus records that even after he had ascended the throne he never succeeded in ridding his speech of the Semitic accent which he had inherited from his Punic ancestors. Thus the Rome of the Antonines was a meeting place where the Romans of Rome encountered those inferior peoples against whom their laws seemed to have erected solid ethnic barriers, or -to be more accurate- Rome was a meting pot in which, despite her laws, the peoples were continually being subjected to new processes of assimilation. It was, if you will, a Babel but a Babel where, for better or for worse, all comers learned to speak and think in Latin."


Pages 55 & 56.


"Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the ingenui. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty towards the servi... With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable."

Page 56.

"Indeed, a Greek who lived at Rome in the middle of the second century was struck by the levelling which had taken place between slaves and freemen, which to his amazement extended even to their clothes. Appian of Alexandria, writing under Antoninus Pius, remarks that even in externals the slave is in no way distinguished from his master, and unless his master donned the toga praetexta of the magistrate, the two were dressed alike. Appian supplements this by recording a thing which astonished him even more: after a slave had regained his liberty he lived on terms of absolute equality with the Roman citizen. Rome, alone of all cities of antiquity, has the honour of having redeemed her outcasts by opening her doors to them. It is true that the freed slave remained bound to his former master, now his patronus, sometimes by services due or by pecuniary indebtedness, and always by the duties implied by an almost filial respect (obsequium). But once his emancipation or manumissio had been duly pronounced, whether by a fictitious statement of claim before the praetor (per vindictam) or by the inscription of his name on the censors register (censu) at the solemn sacrifice of the lustrum, or more commonly in virtue of a testamentary clause (testamento) , the slave obtained by the grace of his master, living or dead, the name and status of a Roman citizen. His descendants of the third generation were entitled to exercise the full political rights of citizenship and nothing further distinguished them from ingenui."

Page 59.

"Ultimately all the emperors, out of love for their own freed slaves or those of their friends, took pains to obliterate the last trace of their servile origin, either by utilising the legal fiction of the natalium restitutio or by slipping onto their finger the gold ring which might open the way to the equestrian status. Hence in the period we are studying, the slaves who benefited by the ever-increasing numbers of manumissions were placed on a footing of complete equality with other Roman citizens, enabled to secure positions and fortunes and to purchase droves of slaves in their turn, as we see Trimalchio doing."

Pages 59 & 60.

"The numerous colleges devoted to these heterogeneous gods at Rome not only co-existed without friction but collaborated in their recruiting campaigns. There was in fact more affinity and mutual understanding between these diverse religions than rivalry. One and all were served by priests jealously segregated from the crowd of the profane; their doctrine was based on revelation, and their prestige on the singularity of their costume and manner of life. One and all imposed preliminary initiation on their followers and periodical recourse to a more or less ascetic regimen; each, after its own fashion, indulged in the same astrological and henotheistic speculations and held out to believers the same messages of hope. Romans who had not been seduced by these exotic cults suspected and hated them. Juvenal, for instance, who could not repress his wrath to see the Orontes pour her muddy floods of superstition into the Tiber, hit out with might and main against them all, without distinction."

Page 130.

"Juvenal's savage and inexhaustible anger need not surprise us. He expresses with all the force of his genius the natural reaction of the "ancient Roman," hater alike of novelty and of the foreigner, to whom emotion and enthusiasm were a degradation, and who would gladly have disciplined the outpourings of faith by such ordinances as governed a civil or military parade. At this distance of time his prejudices necessarily appear to us gravely unjust, first, because he traced to the oriental religions alone superstitions whose origin goes back to prehistoric times long before Rome was invaded by the Orient, and in whose development oriental religion had no part;"

Page 131.


There's more of these interesting comments and observations in the book, a bit too many and too long to quote here in full, but you folks can get the point from the above (anyone can peruse them for themselves if they so wish.) Ironically, many of them blatantly contradict the totally gratuitous statements of the very person who recommended the work of this historian.

In conclusion, good recommendation. This academical source, which I very much doubt the person who recommended it has actually read, in fact once again supports what I've been saying all along and certainly not Angela. Nothing "new" here. I will simply add Carcopino's work to the long list of academical and scholarly sources that for the last 200 years have been pointing out pretty much the same things after thorough examination of the historical evidence.
 
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The slaves in Roman empire were used for heavy work and their life expectancy was very low. You can read this in every historian book of Italy. American and suprematist germanic historians are a bunch of envious who think that ancient Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and even Egyptians were nordic. So lol.
The hellenized persons in Roman Italy came from Magna Graecia. Do you have realized that?Just look at how many colonies from Greeks there were in Italy. For example there were colonies outside Magna Graecia like Ancona and Adria who were sub-colonies of Siracusa. Surely the Greek speaking were them not "Syrian slaves" that surely has spoken in Aramaic.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Grecia
 

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