What humanized the Romans for you as a individual?

[Valerian Pertinax]

Seeing the panicked human forms at Pompeii really drove home the fact that the Romans were *people*, not just names and narratives out of a history book. I hate to dwell on the atrocious, but it makes events like the siege of Jerusalem or the Antonine plague give one chills.

[markusaurelius]

For me is a combination of holding a Roman coin and wondering about the last person who used it, or bought a loaf of bread with it. Also seeing images of Pompeii, especially the one of the man an woman laying in bed holding each other, definitely put things in a personal realm. People with hopes, dreams, loved ones and a wish for a better future. Kind of applicable even today

[Flavivs Aetivs]

What humanized them for me is the tiny handful of individuals who tried to uphold the Roman way until the very end.

Rome was more than an Empire, it was an idea, and one they thought worth upholding.

[Kegluneq]

Hmmm...I think they are further removed from us than we like to think. Yes, they are human, but they are not emersed in a monotheistic culture which drives our (Western European Christians) moral and political core.

Different values on so many levels.

In fairness our society is hardly as 'monotheistic' as we like to think - Romans will have recognised a great many elements of Roman Catholicism after all (although they might wonder where all the priestesses are).

You're right to say that there are also many fundamental differences though, in terms of how we view the world and our relative places within it. Part of the joy of archaeological theory is finding ways to bridge even that gap however!

[Timianus]

Standing behind Hadrians wall West of Housteads ( looking out over the strangely colored hills as the sun illuminated the foreign landscape in waves between patches of rain), shivering in the cold and thinking, so this is what it must have felt like to stand a watch at the edge of the world..

[Quintius Clavus]

So many things and studies have humanized the Romans (and particularly Roman soldiers) for me.

Standing on Hadrian's Wall at Housteads, only me and Professor Eric Birley, in September 1978 while the winds buffetted us with a gray sky above us - after swearing to the staff at Housteads that I would not sue anyone if I got blown off the wall. Looking north as Prof Birley told me to imagine that the reforestation projects in the near distance were not there. That was how I was to see what the Roman soldiers saw.

Holding in my hands 5 Roman iron nails from Inchtuthil in Scotland, acquired in 1979, knowing that the hands of Roman soldiers held them and buried them in the ground as they dismantled the fortress before returning south in AD 87.

The comments at the beginning of this thread - about Marcus Caelius - are simply beautiful. He is a face and real person connected with the "Varus War", which grabbed me "by the throat" when I was but 9 years old. An enduring and never-to-go-away fascination. Meeting Tony Clunn in 2005 and hearing from him the other side of a post on a sort of paranormal experiences website. One seldom gets that kind of confirmation of one person's experience by another.

I study and absorb what I can to get "under the skin" of the Romans and then to convey to the public and to my fellow Roman reenactors how similar and yet how different the Romans were. I love getting at the ancient world aspects of the Romans.

[Diocle]

The question is interesting and not easy, in my case, something happened when I began to study Latin when I was a teen, it was like a discovery and an absolutely disturbing one, I understood that all the words I was using from when I was born, the most intimate words, those words you think nobody can know, because you use them inside your mind to talk with yourself, those words belonging to your deepest consciousness, actually they were Latin words, the Romans used them thousands of years before me, to express the same, exactly the same concepts and intimate feelings about life, love, fear of death, beauty, passion.
This sensation was disturbing, as I said, because if you think that your words are not yours but actually they belong to a civilization from long time dead, this means that nothing can be expressed, using this language, that has not been already expressed, nothing can be said that has not been already said, no word can be considered radically new, they, the Romans I mean, already used (and so, they lived), the same words expressing the same feelings, sensations and emotions, so, nothing could be considered new and all has been already told, they are dead but their words are still the key to live and to understand the world today, with this dark abyss of time separating us from them.

At this point repeating: 'Sorry for my bad English, guys', it would sound silly, so I shut up and vanish!

[A_Volpe]

Wearing the armor, trying out maneuvers in the kit, and having to explain the research to the public is what really "sold" it for me, and really brought the Romans "to life", and something I enjoy doing for schools and demos, so it's sort of cyclic like that.

Also, as I delved deeper into the political and historical contexts of what was going on in the world during the Roman period, to figure out how they dealt with problems and the same regions that are still "hot button" thousands of years later…That old adage of "The more things change, the more they stay the same", I find interesting while frustrating, but just helps to "humanize" History for me, and it's what keeps me going and interested in it, oddly enough, because there is always something to learn more about, or re-examine, re-construct. History and learning it will never get boring for me.

[Ovid]

It was the structure of the government,laws and ideas for me from Sulla to the Gracchus brothers. Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar. Strip away the technology and the undercurrents of modern societies still adhere to these patterns. Personally I believe they recognized this better in the 19th century than today. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/rom...e_01.shtml

[Justin I]

Shortly after my brother came home from Iraq, I remember hearing a quote from T. Sempronius Gracchus that really hit home:
"The wild beasts that roam over Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in, but the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else. Is it their lot to wander with their wives and children, house-less and homeless, over the face of the earth? ... The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called masters of the world, but they do not posses a single clod of earth that is truly their own."

Nihil novi sub sole.

[superonyxfire]

It was when I stopped seeing history as a school subject, I didn't read anything or see anything, I simply was thinking about it and suddenly I Was amazed at how the changes from Rome to today, technology wise, are not that extreme. Almost all inventions we have today are simply upgrades of the past, the internet is just a faster way of communication, trade, and so on, our modern military is just an upgraded form of the past as well, kevlar instead of lorica, tanks instead of horses, they serve the same purpose, to fight, to communicate, to trade, which means we have a very similar connection to those things, like the Romans would have seen their soldiers, or their roads and forums, that was their internet, their military, they would see it very similar to how we see our internet, our military. Knowing that, how I think and act, may often be very similar to how a Roman would think and act, really got to me.