page_title: Roman people
section_title: Greeks
hierarchical_section_title: Roman people / As a modern identity / Greeks
context_page_description: The Romans were a cultural group, variously referred to as an ethnicity or a nationality, that in classical antiquity, from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD, came to rule large parts of Europe, the Near East and North Africa through conquests made during the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire. The Romans themselves did not see being "Roman" as something based on shared language or inherited ethnicity, but saw it as something based on being part of the same larger religious or political community and sharing common customs, values, morals and ways of life.
  The city of Rome is traditionally held to have been founded in 753 BC, its early inhabitants constituting just one group of the many Italic peoples in the Italian peninsula. As the land under Roman dominion continued to increase, citizenship was gradually granted to the various peoples under Roman rule. The number of Romans rapidly increased due to the creation of colonies throughout the empire, through grants of citizenship to veterans of the Roman army, and through personal grants by the Roman emperors.
context_section_description: For centuries following the Fall of Constantinople, the dominant self-identity of the Greeks remained "Roman" (Romioi or Rhomaioi). The 18th century Greek scholar and revolutionary Rigas Feraios called for the "Bulgars and Arvanites, Armenians and Romans" to rise in arms against the Ottomans. The 19th century general Yannis Makriyannis, who served in the Greek War of Independence, recalled in his memoirs that a friend had asked him "What say you, is the Roman State far away from coming? Are we to sleep with the Turks and awaken with the Romans?".
  For the Greeks, the Roman identity only lost ground by the time of the Greek War of Independence in the 19th century, when multiple factors saw the name "Hellene" rise to replace it. Among these factors were that names such as "Hellene", "Hellas" or "Greece" were already in use for the country and its people by the other nations in Europe, the absence of the old Byzantine government to reinforce Roman identity, and the term Romioi becoming associated with those Greeks still under Ottoman rule rather than those actively fighting for independence. In the eyes of the independence movement, a Hellene was a brave and rebellious freedom fighter while a Roman was an idle slave under the Ottomans. Though some parts of Byzantine identity were preserved (notably a desire to take Constantinople itself), the name Hellene fostered a fixation on more ancient (pre-Christian) Greek history and a negligence for other periods of the country's history (such as the Byzantine period).
  Many Greeks, particularly those outside the then newly founded Greek state, continued to refer to themselves as Romioi well into the 20th century. Peter Charanis, who was born on the island of Lemnos in 1908 and later became a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University, recounts that when the island was taken from the Ottomans by Greece in 1912, Greek soldiers were sent to each village and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the island children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of the soldiers asked. ‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied. ‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ the soldier retorted. ‘‘No, we are Romans’’ the children replied. The modern Greek people still sometimes use Romioi to refer to themselves, as well as the term "Romaic" ("Roman") to refer to their Modern Greek language.
caption: Map of "Rumelia" in 1801. Almost all the Balkan peninsula was called "land of the Romans" by the Ottoman Empire.
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