page_title: Roman people
section_title: Romans in Late Antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: Roman people / (Ancient/Classical) Roman Empire / Romans in Late Antiquity
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Ancient Egyptian art in the Museo archeologico nazionale (Florence)
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: By Late Antiquity, many inhabitants of the Roman Empire had become Romani, with the term no longer simply being a civic designation for a citizen of the city of Rome, but referred to a citizen of the orbis Romanus, the Roman world. By this time, the city of Rome had lost its exceptional status in the empire. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, definitely one of the Romani, hailing from modern-day Greece, wrote in the 4th century and refers to Rome almost as a foreign city, full of vice and corruption. Few of the Romani probably embodied all aspects of what the term had previously meant, many of them would have come from remote or less prestigious provinces and practiced religions and cults unheard of in Rome itself. Many of them would also have spoken "Barbarian" languages or Greek instead of Latin.
  The prelevant view of the Romans themselves was that the populus Romanus, Roman people, represented a "people by constitution" as opposed to Barbarian peoples such as the Franks or Goths, who were described as gentes ("people by descent"; ethnicities). To the people of the empire, "Roman" was just one layer of identification, in addition to local identities (similar to local and national identities today, a person from California can identify him/herself as a "Californian" within the context of the United States and an "American" in the context of the world). If a person originated from one of the major imperial regions, such as Gaul or Britannia, one might have been viewed as a Roman, but still distinct from Romans of other major regions. It is clear from the writings of later historians, such as the Gallo-Roman Gregory of Tours, that such lower levels of identity, such as being the citizen of a particular region, province or city, were important within the empire. This importance, combined with there being clearly understood differences between local populations (the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus comments on the difference between "Gauls" and "Italians" for instance) illustrates that there were no fundamental differences between the local Roman identities and the gentes-identities applied to Barbarians, though the Romans themselves would not have seen the two as equivalent concepts. In the late Roman army, there were regiments named after Roman sub-identities (such as "Celts" and "Batavians") as well as regiments named after gentes, such as the Franks or Saxons.
  Religion had been an important aspect of Romanitas since Pagan times and as Christianity gradually became the dominant religion in the empire, Pagan aristocrats became aware that power was slipping from their hands as times changed. Some of them began to emphasize that they were the only "true Romans" because they preserved the traditional Roman literary culture and religion. This view enjoyed some support by poets and orators, such as the orator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, who saw these Pagan aristocrats as preserving the ancient Roman way of life, which would eventually allow Rome to triumph over all of its enemies, as it had before. This movement was met with strong opposition from the leaders of the church in Rome, with some church leaders, such as Ambrose, the Archbishop of Mediolanum, launching formal and vicious assaults on paganism and those members of the elite which defended it. Followers of paganism viewed Rome as the greatest city in the empire because of its glorious Pagan past, and though Christians accepted Rome as a great city, it was great because of its glorious Christian present, not its Pagan past. This gave Romanitas a new Christian element, which would become important in later centuries. Though the city would be important as the source of auctoritas and the self-perception of the imperial elite, it was not as important politically during the late empire as it had been before.
caption: 4th century portrait of a woman from Roman Egypt.
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