Most of us probably think of the ancient Romans as a bunch of Latin speaking 'big noses' living it up while millions of foreign slaves toiled beneath their gilded sandals, right? Well, there's one thing we can say about the Romans, they were all for equal opportunity. Given time enough, virtually anyone in the Empire could become a good citizen of Rome. They might speak Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Semitic, Berber, Cushtic or Egyptian, and many of them never spoke Latin at all - Greek (particularly in the east) was usually the go to language for cross cultural communication during the Roman Era. So let's have a look at Rome from a modern map and see just who made the grade as 'Roman' in 68AD.
Heading east - the people of Rome came from; Wales, England, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy (of course), Malta, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and (take a breath) Morocco.
So when you think of Rome, don't just think of Italians...think of Europeans, Africans, and nearly everyone from the Middle East...the Roman world was pretty big.
Find out if Calvus had any clue where he was
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