The Whiteness of Ancient Rome By Brian Simpson

Ricardo Duchesne is producing some fanatic material supporting the white racial survival cause, much appearing at Eurocanadian.ca, which is a site far superior to Americana Renaissance, in my opinion. He has recently done great work on the racial anthropology of ancient Rome, arguing that its greatness occurred during the period of its whiteness, not because of mass migration, and that diversity in fact was a cause of the decline and fall of Rome. There is an obvious lesson here for the West today, which is neck-deep in the same goo and muck that polished off ancient Rome.

https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2021/07/he-indo-european-republican-whiteness-roman-civilization.html

“The principle of diversity does not tolerate the idea that Whites were responsible for the creation of their own civilization and nations. It is not only the so-called "settler colonial states" of America, Australia, and Canada that have been identified as nations created by "diverse immigrants". Britain, Germany, France, Spain...are now regularly called immigrant nations. The sheer fact that different ethnic European groups migrated to other European lands over the course of centuries (Slavs, Saxons, Normans, Vikings, Franks, Lombards, or Angles) makes Europe a "continent of immigrants".

 

Africans and Asians as the "genetic" founders of Europeans

Everyone on the planet has been told that modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated and migrated "Out of Africa" replacing the archaic humans that were indigenous to other parts of the Old World: Homo erectus (or its descendants) in East and South Asia, and Neanderthals in Europe. The Out of Africa hypothesis has become a permanent curricular weapon to make students believe that Africans are the true ancestors of Europeans. The prestigious magazine Scientific American recently demanded that "museums, libraries and bookstores across America" make an all out effort to portray "Blacks" as not only the "ancestors of all human beings" but as the race responsible for laying the "foundations of human civilization" and "the whole shebang" of human culture. It claimed this was the "scientific" stand to take against the "creationism" of "white supremacy". 

They are also distorting the identities of the Indo-Europeans — the "Yamnaya" — who migrated into south-central Europe during the third millennium as "a mysterious race from Asia". "Yamnaya were likely nothing like the Aryans of Nazi mythology" — as if the mere use of the word "Indo-European" requires a warning label, when it is now evident that they were a highly mobile, horse-riding, warlike people with Caucasian features who spread throughout Europe, and formed the basis of the Corded Ware and the Bell Beakers who spread into what is Germany today and western Europe into England. 

 

They also want students to believe that the migration of "Anatolian farmers" into southern Europe some 8000 years ago means that Near Eastern peoples "built the foundations of European civilization" — in order to justify the current Islamization of Europe. Discovering a "direct genetic link" between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers that "extends all the way back to southwestern Asia" somehow means that Asians were behind the origins of European civilization.

In reality, when you think through all these claims none of them challenge the indigenous authenticity of Europeans.

Firstly, the Homo sapiens who migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe continued to evolve independently in each continent in response to different environmental/cultural pressures and the random effects of genetic drift. The succession of European cultures witnessed during the Upper Paleolithic epoch (40,000-20,000 BC) should be seen as creations of peoples evolving into a European race. What is a "race" if not a population that evolved certain anatomical and behavioral traits by reason of breeding for thousands of years within a geographical area relatively isolated from other evolving/isolated populations? Europeans evolved as a race inside Europe in response to the unique ecology of this continent and their unique cultural activities. Therefore, they are absolutely indigenous to Europe. The upper Paleolithic peoples who first inhabited Europe, coming from Africa via the Near East, were neither Europeans nor indigenous to this continent. They were a migrant people closely descended from the Homo sapiens who left Africa some 50,000 (or 60,000 years ago), carrying in their genes only a fraction of the African genetic diversity, which set them on a different evolutionary trajectory, as they inhabited and reproduced under very different environmental pressures, relatively isolated from other evolving/isolated populations.

 

Yamnaya Appearance

 
Secondly, the genetic evidence shows that the Yamnaya were phenotypically European with their original homeland in present-day Ukraine, not Asia. As Thuletide points out in his straightforward articles about the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the Yamnaya, their "hair color was black, with shades of brown, and rare instances of blond; and their eye color mostly brown, some green and blue". The Corded Ware people, who descended from these earlier IEs, "had much higher frequencies of light pigmentation (blondism, blue eyes) than Yamnaya, who appear to have been almost entirely dark haired and brown eyed". We can see these Caucasoid or Europoid features among the Indo-European mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin region of China. Extensive DNA testing on the mummies have confirmed that they are of Indo-European ancestry. 

 

 

Thirdly, with regard to the farmers who settled in southern Europe about 8000 years ago, there is DNA evidence that genes for lighter skin colour did appear in the Middle East and the Caucasus "about 22,000 to 28,000 years ago, and were present in Anatolia by 8,500 years ago where their carriers became associated with the Neolithic Revolution" and the subsequent spread of farming in Europe. (I am citing the Wikipedia entry "Light skin", which references an important article on the origins of white skin genes). Once they settled in the western, central, and northern climes of Europe, it stands to reason that the descendants of these migrants would experience additional selective pressures for lighter eye, hair, and skin pigmentation in adaptation to a life with less sunlight to compensate for the consequences of vitamin D deficiency.

 

Was the Roman Empire Created by Diverse Races?

 

But there is one historic European land that even some in the dissident right hold to be racially diverse: the Italy of ancient Roman times. The Romans conquered many lands outside Europe, North Africa and large swathes of the Middle East, making this empire a racially diverse place. This is self-evidently true. The issue is whether the people who created Rome were White. The evidence shows, I will argue below, that the Romans and Italian peoples who created the greatest and most impactful empire in world history were White. 

 

I will make this argument by using the very findings and claims of an expert on ancient Rome, T. J. Cornell, who would rather believe that from prehistorical times, the Italians were a "patchwork of different peoples, languages and cultures," and says so explicitly, but once you look past his prima facie politically correct statements, he ends up demonstrating that prehistorical Italy was fundamentally European both ethnically and culturally. Almost all the "different ethnic groups" (except in the main for the Etruscans) were descendants of Indo-European speaking peoples. The famous Etruscans, who some believe were originally from the Near East, "had only superficial effects on Roman life and culture" (169). The "cultural life of archaic Rome was profoundly Hellenized" (275), and throughout the entirety of the Roman republic, and into the age of emperors, the influence of ancient Greek civilization, also founded by Indo-European speakers, the Mycenaeans, remained paramount.   

 

The book I will be examining by T. J. Cornell is: The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC). This book (published in 1995) lends itself really well to my case. It was specifically written "to integrate the results" of many decades of scholarly research about the origins of the Roman republic, years of "intense archeological activity in Italy," with Cornell continually assessing different interpretations, weighing their documentary and archeological validity, before reaching his own conclusions. This is the approach I generally take. I don't propose arguments against straw men based on sloppy and biased readings. I try to choose the strongest cases of the opposing side, evaluating very closely (and fairly) their claims. Quite often I use their own findings to refute their ideological claims. There are many good scholars out there who follow the dictates of political correctness, making ostensive statements in support of diversity, twisting and bending their own findings in a political correct direction, even though their findings, when carefully analyzed, contravene their ideological constructs.

 

 

Cornell wants us to believe that "Italy has always been a variegated country", a "mixture of different ethnic groups," "the product of foreign influences," with a concept of citizenship that "continuously" admitted "migrants and refugees" "into their midst" (31, 60). It all sounds very diverse when you read about the Volscians, Latins, Samnites, Romans, Marsi, Umbrians, and Sabines, along with the Greeks in the south and the Celts in the north. Don't be misguided. These ethnic groups are members of the 'Aryan' Indo-European race. You can categorize them as the "Italic" group of the IEs who colonized Italy in the second millennium. There were also pre-Indo-European "survivals forming part of a 'Mediterranean' substratum". These were likely descendants of the farmers who came originally from Anatolia some 8,000 years ago, and descendants of the people who were in Italy before the Anatolian farmers arrived. These descendants, as I pointed above, had undergone powerful selective pressures in a White direction in the environment of Italy. 

 

The Etruscans

 

What about the Etruscans? The Etruscans inhabited the west coast of Italy bounded by the rivers Tiber and Arno, south of the Apennines, or what is known today as Tuscany. There is still a lot of speculation about the original homeland and genetics of the Etruscans. While experts agree they were not Indo-Europeans, some question the Anatolian origins hypothesis, and a recent study points to a "complex mix of genetic material deriving from western European, south west Asia and neighboring areas." Etruscan culture ruled the Tuscany region from the eight to the fifth century BC. Starting in the fourth century they gradually lost out to Roman conquests. In a chapter headed "The Myth of 'Etruscan Rome'", Cornell thoroughly undermines the popular claim that "Etruscan influence on ancient Roman culture was profound". The portrayal of the Etruscans "as the decisive factor in the development of early Rome" was driven by "ideological...hostility to German culture and Fascism" after WWI and continuing in earnest "after  the Second World War" (152). This "reaction against the Fascist cult of romanità...reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s." Students were compelled to believe that "any sign of artistic creativity or cultural sophistication in Rome must be the result of Etruscan influence" (153). To this day, "the majority of modern scholars consider this cultural influence to have been extensive and profound" (159). The NYT, for one, is still pushing this idea that "Etruscan culture permeated Roman art, architecture and religion." 

 

 

Cornell recognizes the obvious "importance of contacts between the Etruscans and Romans" (164). "The dress and insignia of kings were borrowed from the Etruscans," additional "borrowings included musical instruments, and their use in war and on formal public occasions, certain ritual procedure...and divination by examining the innards of sacrificial animals; and a particular style of architecture that influenced the design of both sacred and secular buildings". However, "if the symbols of Roman political authority were Etruscan, it does not follow that Roman political institutions or juridical concepts of power were also of Etruscan origin" (166). Cornell concludes:

The evidence of the sources suggests that the encounter with the Etruscans had only superficial effects on Roman life and culture. Formal dress, magisterial symbols, ceremonial trappings, ritual technicalities and architectural forms -- these amount to little more than outward tokens...The number of Etruscan words in Latin is comparatively small, and most of those are technical (169). 

 

The IE Greeks Profoundly Shaped Roman Civilization 

 

It began with the Mycenaeans, an aristocratic warlike IE people who colonized the Greek mainland early in the second millennium and created the first Greek civilization lasting approximately from 1750 to 1050 BC. The Homeric epics recall this heroic Mycenaean age. Cornell informs us that "Mycenaean finds in southern Italy are indeed impressive, and point to intensive contacts with the Aegean world in the Bronze Age" (40). The most important IE language in Italy was "spoken in the Greek colonies that were established around the coasts of southern Italy from the eighth century BC onwards" (43). "Recent archeological finds have increasingly demonstrated that the natives of central Italy were deeply influenced by Greek culture in the archaic period" between 580 and 490 BC (66). Indeed, "by the fifth century southern Italy was known as 'Great Greece'...The arrival of the Greeks in Italy had a profound impact on the social, economic, and cultural life of the native peoples...especially on the formation of the aristocratic order" (87).

 

Cornell goes on to describe some of the cultural traits associated with the aristocracy of early Greece and its "profound" role in the the formation of aristocratic and republican Rome. It is worth citing a few sentences: 

Greek aristocrats achieved their position of esteem by inheritance and by leadership, especially war. The mere fact of wealth was less important than the means by which it was acquired and spent. The aristocratic ethos demanded conspicuous consumption and an extravagant style of life. Honour and prestige were reinforced by mutual recognition and interaction. The most important of these reinforcing mechanisms were feasting, guest-friendship, and gift-giving...Homer's heroes lived in a competitive world in which personal esteem was the principal goal. Such esteem required continual displays of generosity and entertainment of one's peers (88). 

There is a lot more to the aristocratic ethos of Indo-Europeans. Those interested in an easy to read explanation of the role of Indo-Europeans in the making of the West may want to read my two part article published in 2009 under the title: "The Aristocratic Warlike Ethos of Indo-Europeans and the Primordial Origins of Western Civilization". IEs were the earliest pastoral people in history, highly mobile and warlike, the original riders of horses, co-inventors of wheeled vehicles and chariots. Their diet was rich in protein, meat and dairy products, which made them stronger and taller than the peoples of the civilizations of the Near East and the hunter gatherer/Neolithic peoples of Old Europe. They were the singular originators of a true aristocratic way of life in which the pursuit of glory and honor by members who treated each other as peers was the most important purpose in life. They were raised with a fierce spirit of independence and unwillingness to submit to any despotic ruler (primus inter pares). This is why IEs are naturally inclined to create republics, because they are too proud, warlike and manly, honorable and heroic, to accept submission to a ruler that expects them to kowtow, as was the case with the ruling elites of the Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.

 

The prehistorical IEs in Rome (before the Mycenaeans arrived) were already aristocratic, but since the Greeks in southern Italy were the most advanced IEs at the time (an extension of the civilization of Greece), they came to provide "the model which the Italian aristocracies consciously adopted" (89) as the Romans went about creating an urban, civilized culture in the archaic period and after. Cornell is emphatic about this influence: "Hellenism was to be a pervasive influence, the single most important factor of change and development in Roman (and Italian ) history...[I]n the course of the archaic period Greek ideas affected every aspect of life at all levels of society." (92). This influence intensified after the Romans conquered Greece in the 2nd century BC. Educated Greeks were eagerly sought as tutors, doctors, and artists. Among the long standing peoples in the East the Romans conquered, it was only the culture of the Greeks that drew their highest admiration. Roman literature, rhetoric, history, art, religion, education, architecture, philosophy was deeply influenced by the Greeks. The educated Romans were bilingual. This is the basis of Horace's famous statement: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artisintulit agresti Latio. "Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium."

 

The Greeks in their turn came to appreciate the world historical significance of the Romans, to see them as continuators of the Hellenistic legacy, as racial cousins, in stark contrast to the way they saw the civilizations of the East. Cornell tells us indeed that today the most important historical sources on early Rome and the rise of Rome are Greek. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in Rome during the reign of Augustus, wrote his Roman Antiquities in twenty books, of which we possess the first eleven, covering the period from the origins to 264 BC.  The universal history by Diodorus Siculus (published in the 30s BC) covered the period from 486 to 302 BC. Book 5 of the Geography of Strabo (63 BC-21AD) "contains some extremely important sections on the early history of Rome" (3). Another key source is the famous Parallel Lives by Plutarch (46-120AD). It is said that Plutarch was one of the most educated men of antiquity, a voracious reader who consulted as many sources as he could in constructing his biographies aimed at teaching future generations about the virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided. He has biographies of 12 key figures in the rise of Rome: Romulus, Numa, Publicola, Coriolanus, Camillus, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Aratus, Philopoemen, Titus Flamininus, Elder Cato, and Aemilius Paullus. It should be underlined that Parallel Lives is a series of paired biographies in which a Greek is matched with a Roman parallel. This parallelism is reflective of the elective affinity Greeks and Romans felt as a people with a similar aristocratic IE heritage. 

 

The historian Polybius, another key authority on early Rome, wrote his The Histories, which covered the period of 264–146 BC and the Punic Wars, in conscious awareness that Rome had picked the torch of universal history from the Hellenistic Greeks. It was Polybius's conclusion that the Romans rose to world supremacy because of their republican institutions and customs as an aristocratic people with a pantheon of demanding gods which encouraged them to pursue noble acts, virtue, as well as piety towards their traditions, elders, and religion. By republican form of government, Polybius meant a balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — which brings me to my next point: as much as the Romans borrowed from the Greeks, and other peoples (the Samnite oblong, shields and javelin, for example), which they happily acknowledged, they prided themselves on achieving mastery over all their competitors, and creating their own true republican institutions coupled with the most effective military force the world had ever seen. 

 

We have all heard about the most important contributions of Romans: their aqueducts, concrete, their creation of the most sophisticated system of roads in the ancient world, their arches, which allowed the weight of buildings to be evenly distributed along various supports in the construction of their bridges, monuments and buildings, the Julian Calendar, their systematic compilation of juristic writings, corpus juris civilis, their new types of surgical tools along with the first field surgery units. But it may be that their greatest legacy was the republican form of government. 

 

The Fathers of the United States Constitution self-consciously assumed the Roman mantle of "res-publica" as their guiding principle in the creation of a government organized for the "public good". They believed that the Roman model of "mixed republican government" was the best to create institutional  checks and balances to limit the natural greed of powerful men for unlimited power and tyranny (See Mortimer Sellers "The Roman Republic and the French and American Revolutions" in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, edited by Harriet Flower). We should not assume however that an aristocratic class on its own freed from a despotic ruler guarantees a republican government. In their primordial tendencies, aristocratic governments are oligarchic rather than republican, although republicanism presupposes the higher authority of a class of nobles. 

 

Due to the famous legend that the Roman Republic began in 509 BCE when they dethroned the last Etruscan king and changed "from a monarchy to an aristocratic republic," it is assumed that a republic is inherently incompatible with any form of monarchical or dictatorial powers. Roman aristocrats, to be sure, despised any noble among their ranks who elevated himself above their peers to rule in the interests of the lower classes or the class of independent farmers. Like the Greeks, they view aristocrats who attacked the privileges of their patrician peers and sought the popular support of plebians, as tyrants. In fact, from 509 to 401 BC, the proportion of offices held by the patricians increased to the point that they gained a virtual monopoly over the government. The year 509 was not the first year of the Republic. The "democratic" component of the republican form of government was missing. It was from within their ranks that a tiny group of aristocratic families elected two annual magistrates called "consuls" with executive powers. 

 

The plebians did make some gains during the 400s. In 494 BC the patricians granted them the right to annually elect their own leaders, who were called tribunes of the plebs. In 449, the plebs gained the right to appeal to the people and hold plebiscites binding on the whole community; and in 445 the law prohibiting intermarriage between plebians and patricians was repealed. But it was really during the 300s that plebians were successively allowed to become consults, censors, praetors, pontiffs, and augurs. And it was after 366, when plebians became eligible for election to one of the consulships, that the conflict between patricians and plebians became less acrimonious. By 300, the plebians had achieved substantial equality with the patricians. The plebian leaders, however, were themselves wealthy landowners, and once they were included into the ruling elite they came to resemble the patrician class in their privileges and wealth, rather than represent the interests of the plebs as a whole. Nevertheless, the plebs in general did gain from the decline and eventual abolition of debt-bondage. The foremost issue that dominated the struggle between the patricians and the plebs was the fact that large tracts of public lands controlled by the state were continually being encroached by the patricians with many plebs were falling into debt bondage. The plebs wanted access to the public lands. A law in 367 gave them some access to these lands. However, as Cornell explains, the land hunger of the plebs was "largely satisfied by the conquest and settlement of new territories" during the 300s. 

 

By integrating the plebs into the government as equal citizens, allowing them to share in the spoils of war, and creating a mass army of citizen farmers, the republican government generalized the original warlike ethos of the aristocratic class. It is often asked: why were the Romans so successful at war for so many centuries? For Polybius, the Roman army made up of citizens and fighting as integral members of their homeland was crucial. The Roman historian Sallust similarly argued that the common aims of the governing elite and the Roman plebs allowed Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world. Recent historians believe it was the flexible variety of alliances Rome established with its defeated competitors in Italy along with either full grants of citizenship (to the Latins, which gave them eligibility for office) or limited citizenship for the "allies" without the right to vote but with municipal self-government, combined with programmes of resettlement of citizens into the lands of conquered peoples, with the obligation to provide manpower and military support. Rome was able to field huge armies. This republican style of warfare set Rome apart from Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms where the monarch decided to fight his wars with a professional army in which mercenaries played a big role (See Stephen Oakley, "The Early Republic" and David Potter, "The Roman Army and Navy" in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, edited by Harriet Flower). 

 

Republican Rome, then, contained a substantial democratic component with a system of rewards that encompassed a large citizenry, although patricians and wealthy plebians did control the Senate, the tribunes, and the magistrates. In this respect Rome was oligarchic, and would eventually become a monarchical imperial state. Writing about the fall of republican Rome is beyond the scope of this article. It had a lot to do with the erosion of the class of independent farmers, the rise of huge estates worked by slaves, the replacement of citizen-soldiers with a professional army expressing loyalty to the general in command rather than the republic, coupled with the rise of Senators with vast resources, too powerful to be contained by republican norms. I will close by saying that without the Romans the Greek legacy would have been trampled upon and forgotten by the Orientalization which occurred with Alexander's expansion in the East. Once the Roman empire experienced its own Orientalization and began to lose its Republican ethos in a state of decadent affluence and assimilation of Eastern habits it was for the Celtic and Germanic peoples (descendants of the Corded War and Bell Beakers) to preserve this legacy and start a new epoch in the history of the West.”