I'm a descendant of the so-called "Barbarians"
So am I, RE, whether you mean the steppe people or the Celts and Germanics, just as you are a descendant of the civilized core people of "Old Europe". No offense is intended, but I notice a "forgetfulness" in some northern Europeans that many of them, especially in northwestern and Central Europe, are 40-50% Anatolian Neolithic like through admixture by the steppe people with people of the "civilized core" in "Old Europe". Even the Balts have a significant amount of Anatolian Neo. Then there's the Iran Neo like ancestry in steppe people, varying by area, of course. We're all a mash up of the same groups, RE, just in different proportions.
However, being the civilized core doesn't always translate into being more humane, peaceful, and less violent or cruel.
Not necessarily, yes.
It would be a very narrow approach to see only the predators in the "Barbarians" and not also in the "civilized ones". In that regard, it must be pointed out that Roman expansionism was predatory to its core. The Roman Empire was predatory in nature, meaning that it believed in military-based practices and growth. In addition, like many empires in the ancient world, was, at least partially, a system of the predatory type, with an economy widely based on slave labor.
Of course, living under the Romans was way better than living under the Hun, Mongol, Assyrian, or Aztec rule. Nonetheless, the Romans viewed and prided themselves on being Apex predators so to speak: It's for a reason that in Rome several icons such as the Eagle, Wolf, Bear, Minotaur, and later Lion were carried as the symbols of Roman Legions.
Well, I'm glad you agree there are empires and then there are empires. They might all be equally "bad" in that they accrue other lands by force if necessary, but there are differences among them.
As was pointed out by a later post, Rome initially fought defensive wars, but yes, it eventually became an empire seeking expansion, an expansion that was sometimes to protect its trade routes(Etruria and Greece), or for grain (Egypt), and other raw materials, for a very simplistic summary of its wars. Then it became about reaching defensible borders. In the case of my own Liguria, Rome already had absorbed part of southern France, but the Ligures had proved so obstreperous that they had to use the sea routes. The campaign against them was to gain a land route to Gaul. Better for the Ligures if they had just become allies of Rome. Better for Rome, too. What states wants to waste its soldiers in a needless war.
Furthermore one of the defining symbols of ancient Rome is a remarkable piece of animal folklore. The image of it is still to be seen everywhere in Rome: The twins Romulus and Remus crouching beneath a she-wolf and suckling her milk. Mythology is a way of understanding the world. It is not always right in all aspects.
The stories people tell about themselves are most revealing. The parts of folklore which appeal to us are deeply revealing. For the Romans wolves played a vital part in their myths, about the world and about themselves.
For the Romans what did they see when they looked at the babies and the she-wolf? The sons of a warlike god and a mortal imbibing animal strength from their adopted mother. Their descendents, those who looked on the statue, would know that they had the best of all worlds – human wit, animal power, and that divine spark which would give them Imperium sine fine – An Empire without end!
As someone pointed out, that's actually an Etruscan symbol.
I do, btw, agree that mythology says a lot about a culture. In that regard, what do the sculptures of the Neolithic world tell us about their mythology and their view of the world? To the best of my recollection most of them were symbols of fertility, a "mother goddess" spent and misshapen through giving fertility to people and to the natural world. There was also a great emphasis on cattle, with cattle heads decorating their homes, tied to, it would seem, the domestication of animals, to food. There were male gods too, but again also based on fertility, whose symbol was a phallus. Then we have storm gods who brought the rain, and eventually war gods too.
So, I by no means believe that "Old Europe", for example, was a peaceful paradise, a la Gimbutas. We have evidence of warfare which occurred in times of scarcity, for example, which makes sense given the nature of all human beings.
However, can you deny that the balance in favor of a mythology of war and conquest is higher in steppe culture? Don't some in the amateur pop gen community admire the steppe people specifically because they were a war-like people who claimed to be superior to other groups and therefore entitled to conquer them, slaughter those who needed to be slaughtered, enslave the rest, and take all the women for themselves?
If the Etruscans and the Latins, both a mixture of people from local Neolithic farming communities and groups from Central Europe who were themselves of European farmer stock but admixed with steppe people, had a mythology glorifying conquest, isn't it more likely it came by way of the steppe than from the Neolithic farmers of Europe?
In that regard, the Etruscans were warlike as well. A certain period of the Classical Era could be described as a time of conflict between three powers for the control of the Mediterranean: Etruria, Greece, and Rome. Later, it was the Greek kingdom of Egypt and Rome.
I spent a good part of my life having to decide matters in a black and white manner: guilty or innocent. I learned that reality isn't always that simple. We have to pretend it is in legal systems, because there must be punishment for harm to others, removal of predators from society, but the reality is so much more complex.
The same is true for history. When looking at certain periods, states in conflict, it's often not a question of black and white, good versus evil, but shades of grey. Look at World War I. I studied it in great depth at university and after, and it was a senseless war where there were "only" shades of grey
I also think it's undeniable that as empires go, Rome was a pretty good one, and not just because of the Monty Python list of the advancements it brought to conquered peoples.
Despite your implication that Rome too was "racist" or, shall we make up a word and call it "ethnicist", that isn't true in any way that affected the real lives of the people in the Roman world. If you accepted the conquest and paid your taxes, usually to your old headman, your people weren't slaughtered, and even if you resisted, everybody wasn't enslaved, all the women weren't taken for the Latin-Romans etc. Everything went on as before. With time, non-Latins or Italics of any kind could acquire property, honors, eventually become accepted into the Equestrian Order, become Senators, or go the military route, enlist, and eventually become generals and even Emperors. With time, anyone living in the Empire became a Roman citizen and could aspire to any office.
It's called Romanization. There are dozens of books about it and goodness knows how many papers. You should read about it.
For now, for the sake of argument, take my word for it. What empire of the ancient world, before or after, was comparable?
Yes, slavery is one of the absolute evils imo, but tell me which state or kingdom or group of people DIDN'T practice it in the ancient world? Did the Gauls whom the Romans conquered not practice slavery and fight wars for land or booty? Why else did they fight the Etruscans in north-central Italy and sack the city of Rome itself? What about the Britons or the Germani? What, as a matter of fact, about the Lombards and what they did to the "Romans" they conquered, or the Anglo-Saxons and the way they treated the Britons, or the Vikings? Wasn't most of the wealth of the latter from the slave trade they ran all over Europe? The Lombard and AS Laws make very interesting reading.
It always amazes me when Northern Europeans bemoan the slavery of the Roman Empire without ever mentioning any of that. Slavery was, unfortunately, the NORM in the ancient world. At least under the Romans you could escape it through manumission or buying your freedom, and rising as high in society as your abilities would dictate.
Also, when the Germanic tribes took down Rome, and with it all its advancements, setting civilization back for hundreds of years, they slaughtered people too, because they were fleeing the Huns and needed land and food. To get those things they slaughtered the people inside the core, and also, unfortunately, burned and looted and pulled down most of the public buildings, and left the rest and the roads to crumble into ruin. They also created a permanent underclass, codified under law, a status from which they could not escape. Whole swaths of Europe remained basically kingdoms of serfs tied to the land ruled over by a small illiterate and ignorant elite.
That's the grand synthesis which came about as a result of the Barbarian invasions?
I'm sorry, but I think it is "your" view of the past, and that of those who post similar opinions, which is romanticized and doesn't comport with the facts of the situation.
My God, the Nazi Empire of what, eighty to ninety years ago, slaughtered millions of people in a war of conquest, not just to get territories which contained German minorities but for "lebensraum", land to breathe, or land needed for natural development, and not just Jews and gypsies and the infirm or deficient, but many Eastern Europeans. In Poland they decimated most of their elites and officer corps, and subjected the rest to virtual slavery. The plan was to completely exterminate all Slavic peoples. In my own Italy, my great uncle had to carve caves in the grape terraces to hide young boys and men, because after 1943 when Italy surrendered, it became occupied territory, and any able bodied men were sent to work as slaves on German farms and in German factories. The same thing happened in France to a lesser extent because of Vichy. As for the Italian military, they were surrounded and forced to give up their weapons, and many were executed as "traitors", as happened in Greece, for example, unless they swore to follow the new kingdom of Salo under Mussolini. Some of them, in the King's service, not Fascist regiments, wouldn't do that, or if they did, later escaped and also had to be hidden. How does "that" compare to the Roman Empire, RE? Don't they teach any of this in German schools?
That doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that I would want to have lived in ancient Rome, even as a free male of the elites. There was too much danger from diseases we have now conquered, if nothing else, and even upper middle class people today live more comfortable lives than the elites of the time. Forget the Dark and Middle Ages which the invasions brought about; life was barely worth living in those periods.
Civilization and Advancement came along with lots of suffering and sacrifices. Think of all the millions of slaves who under inhumane conditions worked in mines, in agriculture, or who were forced to build all these impressive huge monuments and buildings. The blood, sweat, and tears of past generations throughout Europe are what gave us the advanced Western societies we enjoy today.
I would say that civilization and advancement came, in most cases, despite the blood and tears shed in endless wars. Conquests don't always bring civilization with them. Sometimes the conquest just destroys civilization, and from the rubble people have to start and build it up again. That's what happened with the invasions which brought down Rome, and the confluence of events including the warfare brought by people from the Italic peninsula which brought down Bronze Age Greece.
