How really \'different\' were the Romans?

[Nathan Ross]

This may, indeed have come up before - in which case I would certainly appreciate any links to old threads

It's been touched on occasionally. This is one of the longer discussions:

Can We Think Like Romans?


Meanwhile, trying to move things on from the vexed field of genetics, this seems more the meat of the question here:

I certainly do not find it specious to draw military parallels back to the Roman era... Our military structures today have a direct and causal link - and thus there are absolute parallels

There are links and parallels, but are they direct and absolute? As a comparable example, we could look at three sculptures from different eras - say, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Henry Moore's Reclining Figure, and Richard Serra's Fulcrum and see them as entirely different. Yet clearly there are links and parallels between them - all are part of the western sculptural tradtion, and art historians can trace a clear evolution from one to the next.

But, equally, a Rhodian of the 3rd century BC looking at the the Victory and a Bishopsgate commuter (or even art historian) of the 21st century encountering the Serra would be having a very different experience. This is as much to do with the cultural context of the work as its appearance.

Generalising massively (again!), historians of the past tended to see the ancients (or at least those of the upper classes, whose writings survived) as being much like themselves. They may have lacked trousers, and had odd habits regarding chickens, but the Romans and the Athenians (less so the Spartans) were essentially people like us, and their political, military and cultural forms could be readily applied to our own societies.

Since the mid 20th century (approximately, and for obvious reasons), there's been a shift in the direction of historical understanding. We are now far more prone to accentuate the aspects of ancient societies that make them seem alien to us. In a popular application, this runs from Mary Beard on Roman slavery, to the depiction of Roman brutality in HBO's drama, to (in a more scholarly way) J.E. Lendon and Ross Cowan examining the different culture of warfare in the ancient world.

The Romans and other ancients did hold significantly different views to us, about a lot of things - life and death, the sanctity of life, the individual and the state, the structure of power, the purpose of war, the unity of mankind (or lack of it), and so on. All this is going to affect how they acted militarily. You might think things have swung too far towards this interpretation and away from the links and parallels approach - you could perhaps make that case. But these more recent views cannot be simply discounted, I think.