Saying that the ancients didn't see race in people's physical appearances but were more concerned about cultural differences always struck me as being forced. Physical appearance was the quickest way to determine if a person was from your culture or not, especially in the ancient world. All one has to do is read the geographies of the Greeks and Romans to see that they spend a large amount of time describing the physical appearance of the people in each region covered.
trying to turn a normative statement into factual. They shouldn't mistreat people for appearance -> they haven't mistreated people for appearance What world are they living in? The Chris Chan's Rift? You won't jump the timeline no matter how much you preach tolerance
Seems like back then a physical trait was more judged upon one person not a group.such as noses etc they judged based upon physical trait onto one person nose
@@wingedhussar1453Hmm, maybe. Though I know some of the Roman accounts of the Germanic tribes talk about how they all have light colored eyes, blonde or red hair, are huge with pale skin. I think it's just more of a stereotype thing that they used when writing about a different group of people like the Germanics.
@@marcusaurelius4941 American culture has kind of changed that a bit. They're all from the same culture (kind of), but they view racism through the lens of skin color rather than heritage. It's not about ancient peoples and which cultures are better than others but rather whites vs blacks vs latinos (even though that's not a skin color, I know, they're weird) etc.
Same with the Chinese and Japanese. Multiple local tribes around the (at the time) small kingdoms of China were considered barbarians. Even before the Han showed up. In Japan, basically everyone was "Nanban".
This was FABULOUS! I appreciate your intentions here. To OPEN a dialogue!!! To offer different viewpoints (with your supporting data) to encourage discussion and debate on a very important topic that is being forced on everyone around the world! Let’s start by getting the definitions of Race correct. How can there be a dialogue if everyone is speaking in different languages??? Can we drop political biases and discuss facts, with the intention of learning and being taught??? And if one is going to teach, bring the proof to support your argument! You Do! You Do! No biases, just historical, even ancient facts! I TRUST your commentary… and I trust very few…. You, Metatron, TEACH me, instead of BRAINWASH me! I’m a proud to be a Noble One! Be Blessed and Highly Favored!
The video saying, "Racism wouldn't be based on look but by culture" disregarding that one of the easiest ways to determine someone's culture is from their physical traits, especially in the pre-industrial, pre-globalized society. As a matter of fact even in modern racism the same thing often applies. I mean if you actually asked someone who is openly racist why they don't like a certain race they'll probably tell you stuff like thinking them to be "lazy", "violent' or "untrustworthy," not just "they don't look like me."
Modern racism stems from pseudoscience of race , and thinks it's genetic, not cultural - if you look like that , you are that no matter how / where you are raised, educated- it's literally "who evolved further from apes?" ancient tribalism of course used to conflate different looks from different places , tribes and culture, but things could be really...nuanced. Also, the xenophobia applied also to people looking really similar to you, a different language or clothing or gods or traditions was enough to say "we aren't the same tribe no matter we are both blondettes or whatever"
@@elleanna5869 "Modern racism stems from pseudoscience of race , and thinks it's genetic, not cultural " Tell me you've never actually talked to most modern racists without telling me. What most people call "racism" is people having issues with the others culture in the first place. Racial eugenicists are different from your average supremacist even when there's plenty of overlap.
but in ancient times romans had contact with european cultures that were also white, of course some were whiter than them but you also have the other latin cultures and the etruscans, so Invicta has a point, we cant use the modern framing of it
“Like the Huns, the Visigoths were horsemen, but unlike the Huns, they were skilled in agriculture and stock rearing. Tall, bearded, with long blonde or red hair, and bodies swathed in skins and furs, the Goths were fearsome Warriors with a proud sense of self-worth. In the ‘civilized’ Roman Empire, desk-bound academics, like the Greek historian Eunapius, sneered at them for being arrogant and contemptuous: Their bodies provoked contempt to all who saw them, for they were far too big and far too heavy for their feet to carry them, and they were pinched in at the waist - just like those insects Aristotle writes of” - the Romans
That is why I hate when Afrocentrists say Septimius Severus was black or dark skinned but usually black like African Americans today. If he was black, why did he hate Ethiopians? Why would Rome allowed themselves to be ruled by a SubSaharan African? It is like Queen Charolette. Why would the UK let a black woman be Queen of England and why did they use white paint to paint her portraits? Just because race is different today doesn't mean that people never noticed differences. We are really not that different from Ancient Romans.
AS an african from all emperors to LARP as i would Not want to be septimus Severus the one who Basically got the ball running for more civil wars, Inflation and disloyalty of the army
Septimius was not anti-Ethiopian, but he was superstitious because the color black was associated with death in ancient Roman culture. Remember, Septimius simply ordered that the Ethiopian be removed from his sight because he was afraid, whereas the native Romans were shocked and even more superstitious than Severus, and they killed the Ethiopian who appeared out of nowhere. Aside from this context, Ethiopians could move and live in Rome alongside everyone else without being attacked.
@@gianlucarossi5672 there are interpretation of the episode that the soldier was removed rather then killed but honestly as much I can hope he survived the key is the one you report: superstiton. Ancient mindset used to depend of "omens" since the chances to control environment and events were much lower than today so it was a coping mechanism. It's still present in most underdeveloped areas of the world
They were black people of importance in europe, bu these guys always use the bad example, they blackwash the people instead of looking for the ones that were really black. Like Alexandre Dumas' father who was a general under Napoléon, or Dido Elizabeth Belle, or John Blanke, a trumpet guy under Henry wathever bumber
@@SuperRichyrich11 I believe it's a jab at the fact people do exactly that fairly commonly these days. Curling irons for hair are very common and lip injections to make them swell is also at arm's reach. Something unthinkable by Petronius is, in fact, a very frequent occurrence these days. Up yours, Petry.
Yeah, the Roman Empire was cosmopolitan in the same way the British Empire was cosmopolitan (Indian colonial workers and troops served throughout the British Empire, for example).
The Romans brought in their own administrators and governors and in many cases garrisons of legionnaires rather than rely on the locals for that stuff. Yes, locals were used as auxiliaries, and in many cases the local authorities operated under the Roman prefects, but much like the British, they put their OWN people in charge at the top.
@@stanbartsch1984 They also encouraged the integration of the local elite to 'Romanise' - it was an easier way of reducing resistance, but it didn't always work; compare Boudiccea & Cartimandua, Prasutagus & Caratacus...
Modern British progressives try to pretend like black people were living in Britain since the Middle Ages as sort kind of diaspora, without ever mentioning that they were only there to serve as a kind of exotic pet in order to show how rich and world traveled their royalty were. Also, there were only like a dozen of them.
But is that just treating race and nationality as the same thing, and therefore not about race as such? There was a lot of that usage of the word race from British imperialists like Rudyard Kipling and any number of British politicians and colonial officials at the height of the British empire, but clearly there's no such thing as a British "race". Also it occurs to me that's probably _Virtu,_ like in Machiavelli, not the English "virtue" related to morality. The vitality and dynamism of the virile masculine _Vir._
@@patrickholt2270 Not unlike today, where people use color to be racist, even though color aren't races. Whatever is easy to divide people and control them is what ends up being used at certain points in history.
Its also weird that isnt only the very narrow modern View but the modern American View . Also its really weird calling rome so tolerant when they literally a tribune to death for daring to share Power or fought a whole war because they refuse to give citizenship to Italian soccis. Then are the class divides with patricians and plebs where you werent even allowed to marry into Patrician Status and i Wonder how much they Stretch the Romans to fit a particullar modern narrative
Race, or rather hatred toward different peoples (be it ethnicity, class, etc etc) has always existed and will continue to exist in the future. Hell, even some other animal species show discriminatory behaviour, mostly social hierarchy discrimination
Heck, if pets are anything to go by, I noticed that my mother’s oldest cat, black furred, despite having a very bad temper towards my other cats (don’t ask, I have too much) immediately accepted the youngest cat we adopted and never showed any sign of violence towards him. That youngest cat is also a black cat. Maybe it’s a coïncidence, maybe it’s just his fatherly instincts that kicked in since that new cat was still a kitten back then but I couldn’t help but notice that.
There were essentially 2 stories that had the same motif, that it was that they're specifically bad luck (militarily?) I bet that was essentially a pretty widespread superstition.
I'm from Uk and it was when i was a kid we used to say Lucky Black cat. You were lucky if a black cat crossed your path. Changing a bit under USA influence. Nothing to do with the topic but..... Well I am old.
@@missread7781 The reason why it's considered good luck for a pure black cat to cross your path in the UK is that black cats were killed during various phases of European history such as periods of mass witch hunts and now they're rare to the point that the superstition changed.
@@Hokies4evr My late grandma kept spitting all over the road every time a black cat crossed our path. Which, in retrospect, was more often than you would expect. Anyway, I asked her if she could please stop with that. And she was upset, saying "At least I'm not killing them!!". And I was like, is that an option?!!! And yeah, people apparently, some, did kill those poor cats to "remove the bad luck".
Having such strong reactions when seeing Ethiopians by Brutus, Cassius and to a lesser extend Septimius Severus, is a strong indication that seeing some was very rare in Rome. This debunks some falsehood as a BBC cartoon.
Exactly. No one can convince me blacks were all over Europe or even in southern Europe. They were only seen near Ethiopia and people who saw them, made sure to note how "different" they were.
Also Europeans in their first contact with aboriginals of Australia they classified them as different race than Africans Further showing that racial classification was not just about physical appearances but also behavioral characteristics
They are genetically the more distant people from black Africans. But they don't look exactly the same Europeans actually studied (in their way) those things. Take the Caucasian classification and is very similar to what today is called western eurasian.... Don't say races exists but clustering do.
Australian Aboriginals And Tasmanian Aboriginals of pure blood or next to that liquid on average look different from the typical Sub Saharan African the ones with more nappy hair and frizzy hair rather then straight, wavy, curly, and shaggy have admixture from Melanesians And Papuans yeah.
Actually it is about physical appearance. Yeah aboriginals have black skin but their other features are not similar to subsaharans, same with black people from southern India their skin is black but they don't look like Africans
what how does that prove anything the aboriginals look nothing like any African and no one has ever suggested or mistaken those two. Sure their skin is dark but facial features, hair etc. are quite literally the opposite. Next thing u'll say sri lankans look like haitians
Yes there just have been some extra justifications (like genetics instead of "the warm climate makes them degenerate") and some re-grouping as well as shift in enemy image.
@@IsomerSoma I take issue with the generalization, the arguments the ancients used for their tribalism was different from the "scientific" claims modern racists make. I'm hesitant to label all manifestations of tribalism as racism, even if that tribalism seperates people based on their looks
In truth there is only one race--the human race. People try to change the meaning for different agendas but what they are really referring to is ethnicity. What seems to be even more lost on people is that your ethnicity and skin color are not mutually exclusive. Your ethnicity is so much more than just skin color.
@@Choom89just because you can’t always draw a clear line between races, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There is a White race, a Black race, an East Asian race, and an American Indian race. Some groups straddle the line between these races, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and are purely social constructs.
People being unaware of the interaction between ancient tribes is largely due to the modern avoidance of the topic. Also, schools rarely have students study classical literature whether Mediterranean, Chinese, Indian, Ethiopian... Ancient studies are enlightening and fascinating. How else can we keep from repeating history if we do not study it? As you shrugged and said at 17:57, "Kinda like today."
In the copy of cesars commentary on the gallic wars there are many references cesar himself and further sources in annotations refering to groups of people (tribes the romans and/or allies fought with or against) by their appearance.
It's kind of sad but it's almost impossible for many people to see someome talking about racism without having a knee jerk reaction and accusing them of racism. Happens a lot online but I've had it happen IRL too even when it's a civil, mixed race discussion.
The Prophet Muhammad says numerous times in the Hadith that black people from Africa were cursed to look that way because they were the sons of Ham, and so forced to be the slaves of the Turks and the Arabs forever more. These passages were created long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade ever began, and there are many examples in the Hadith. To give just a couple of dozens: “Shem, the son of Noah was the father of the Arabs, the Persians, and the Greeks; Ham was the father of the Black Africans; and Japheth was the father of the Turks and of Gog and Magog who were cousins of the Turks. Noah prayed that the prophets and apostles would be descended from Shem and kings would be from Japheth. He prayed that the African’s color would change so that their descendants would be slaves to the Arabs and Turks.” Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 11 “Ham [Africans] begat all those who are black and curly-haired, while Japheth [Turks] begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem [Arabs] begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and that whenever his descendants met Shem’s, the latter would enslave them.” Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 21 So you (edit: also, by “you”, I obviously don’t mean you, Metatron. I just mean people who claim that racism didn’t exist prior to the transatlantic slave trade!) can’t possibly claim that racism didn’t exist before the transatlantic slave trade - it clearly did, and in abundance. There are many even worse passages, but I don’t even know if UA-cam would allow me to post them!
Metatron you hit the proverbial nail on the head . Once again thank you for stating the facts unambiguously and with absolute conviction. Bravo Sir! God bless you and the Mrs.
@@metatronyti Saw a short clip talking about what it is thought to be the tomb of alexander's father. Do you think his remains Will be found during our life time?
@@metatronyt Since you are Reviewing Alexander on Netflix would you mind speaking on the growing number of Indians believing and Indian historians pushing this narrative of Alexander the Great Running away from india after Losing to Porus. ua-cam.com/video/R8pjZ4DgSFA/v-deo.htmlsi=1y5NUixd1fmbLefr
Another fantastic deep dive! Love it. One topic that I've always been fascinated in (and am considering doing a thesis on it) would be looking at the historiography of the Greco-Roman world. Specifically how the Greeks and Romans saw and understood history, particularly in relation to philosophy and, for lack of a better word, religion/magic/prophesying.
When you go to your disgraced senator friend's villa and he calls Apsimachos from the next room to bring some wine and out of the door comes Vercingetorix the younger with your wine and a look on his face that states he barely understands Latin let alone have a Greek education
Metatron you are the best. Thanks for opening my eyes to a whole different perspective of race analysis. I had watched that video from Invicta (great youtube channel by the way). I am grateful for the info and good points you made in the video. Keep up the good work 🔥 .
I’m a simple man. I see Metatron upload, I press like. Man deserves it. Thanks for your hard work and dedication to accurately representing history, Metatron.
I think you'll find in the usa it's the supposedly free speech right wing mob that wants to cancel "Accurate" depictions of american history in schools. ie: the civil war being fought over slavery and the obscenity of systemic racism and all its long term socio-economic effects . The US doesn't have federal requirements for teaching Black history in school curriculums, and only a handful of states have mandated it.
People were always trying to find a clear boundary between "us" and "them". That one he is right about. The thing is, as the history goes forth, our world becomes bigger. In ancient times what was important to you was your village, maybe your tribe. Empires like Rome or China were exceptions rather than the norm. And even then most subjects were not bothered by the affairs of the state. Last quarter of second millennium saw a rise of nations (yes - a nation is a relatively modern concept). At that time we would be bothered by the lot of our country. In 21st century there are unification movements like European Union, OPEC etc. Many people talk about a global village and being citizens of the world. What does it have to do with racism? When your group is small, and most other groups you meet are the same ethnicity you have to use culture to distinguish yourself from them. You tend to know much about your close neighbours. Race is rarely an issue. If you ever meet someone with different skin tone, they will be from far away. You are not competing with them for resources. But they are different enough that you are curious. That's the definition of exotic - distant enough that it has no real bearing on your life, and unknown enough to make you curious. Nowadays black people from Africa are not exotic for me (I'm from Poland). And the entire EU has become My Group. Africa is my neighbour. So is Russia, America and Asia.
Of course the size of your world was determined not just by the times you lived in, but also place and social status. E.g. 16th century polish peasant would be basically confined to his village (that's after centuries of aristocrats lobbying for taking rights away from peasants - a dark chapter in polish history). The higher you go in social standing, the bigger your world becomes even though you live at the same time just a few kilometres apart. You could become a soldier and with little bit of luck you could see more of the world. But there were people whose world was even bigger than that of a king. Those people were merchants. Spice merchants to be exact. Or silk or other oriental goods.
I’m not saying that this has any basis in fact or logic, but, I’ve noticed a pattern with videos centering around explaining racial views of ancient peoples. It always seems that the more upbeat and “airy” (flowery or lovey dovey) the narrator/creator of the video is…the higher the chances are that they aren’t being honest, or the more likely that they are “dressing up” some uncomfortable truths. While there’s plenty of decent info in his video, I can’t help but feel like there is an underlying agenda, which allows him (in his own mind) to justify bending these harsh truths to fit that agenda. Great assessment, and I think many humans like the idea of everything being “love and light and we are all oneness”, etc.. but it’s simply not the case for a large chunk of humanity, even in present times and especially the past. Anybody who thinks that every culture and society, whether 1st or 3rd world, is just misunderstood and all open arms to everyone and everything, simply hasn’t traveled enough…and if they have traveled, they’ve stayed on resort grounds lol.
Very hard to watch your videos only once. The sheer amount of information you impart can be overwhelming. I still continue to listen (twice), because I feel I am learning important information. History changes, or seems to change, because new sources are discovered
I unsubscribed from Invicta awhile back due to his forceful nature of his ideology. If he removes himself from the equation and delivers us a truthful and open minded historical take and I will consider subscribing again.
Kings and Generals seem more biased to me. They've created maps that aren't quite accurate, such as those depicting the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, where they include, for example, the Ionian islands, which were almost never part of the empire. They oscillate between portraying Alexander sometimes as Greek and other times as Greek-like. They generally focus only on battles, ignoring other historical events that contribute more to society than just wars, which has always bothered me. They seem to cater more to history enthusiasts rather than focusing on academic topics, unlike Metatron who focuses on real academic works. At least Invicta delves into details about the daily lives, diets, and perspectives of people from that time period, adopting a more documentary-style approach. Unlike Kings and Generals, who tend to attract a more nationalistic audience.
@@ChronosHellas wasn't Macedonia greek-like? at least that's how I remember it being mentioned, I believe in Plato sourcewise. They are sufficiently Greek, that you could say they are Greek and no one would complain, but if you were to distuinguish them from Greece it wouldn't be that unusual, as a Macedonian, I wouldn't be surprised Alexander is in the same sort of consideration.
@@voxsvoxs4261It's uncommon to consider Macedon as a distinct entity. Philip was a member of the Amphictyonic League, an exclusive Greek association. The Macedonians participated in the Olympics, and their dynasty, the Temenid/Argead, has its roots in Argos, the birthplace of the Virginia star. Moreover, the Pella Curse Tablet unequivocally establishes the Macedonians as Greek which they would either speak Dorian or Elean. The assertion about kings and generals purposefully avoiding upsetting Western Bulgarian viewers is real, kings and general lacks academic credibility at times, even Metatron acknowledges that Makedon is Greek, which is why I place more trust in his channel over those catering to casual history enthusiasts. It doesn’t take much to understand that following only Demosthenes (a politician) is a criminal offense to the history.
Keep in mind that you are likely interacting with people informed by critical race theory. The words they use don't mean what the average person considers them to mean, and they jump between definitions as is convenient for them. Words like "racism" mean something different to them. They are dissimulating when they use words with their own occult definitions within their critical theories.
Hope your mum's doing okay Raff coming up to the 6th anniversary on losing my mum to pancreatic cancer which happened so quickly in a matter of weeks we barely had chance to say goodbye , Anyway I'm xing my fingers for your mum and I'm hoping that losing mine puts the odds higher for your mum beating this because of odds n chances ❤
Numerous people on Reddit and online promote the myth that the Romans only despised Northern Europeans and loved and felt close to Middle Easterners. According to the primary sources, this is not really the case. The Romans said both negative and positive things about Germanic or Celtic people, as well as all other people they met. In fact, the Romans said many disparging and bad stuff about the Near Easteners, the Carthaginians, and, to a lesser extent, the Greeks. It also appears that Romans disliked Syrians and hellenized Antotalians the most, believing them to be soft and effeminate. Juvenal, for example, mocked Ethiopians' dark complexions and chastised Romans for adopting Egyptian gods. Tacitus, for example, disliked Jews, and Cicero disliked both Syrians and Jews. Tacitus, on the other hand, praised the Germanic tribes for their simple lives and referred to them as noble, brave, and virtuous people. Moreover, some native Romans sounded like these white Americans or Europeans because they complained about Rome being run over by immigrants from Syria or Greece. Juvenal wrote about a Roman who lament about seeing hardly native Romans in Rome, and another author wrote that native Roman women prefer to flirt with all the foreign men rather than with true Romans.
Kind of makes you wonder where all those migrants went after the collapse of the Western empire, since genetics shows Europeans are genetically distinct from West Eurasians. There's some marginal crossover among Sicilians, but that's about it.
@@entropybear5847 Europeans, especially Southern Europeans aren’t actually distinct from Near easterners since Southern Europeans have the largest ancient Middle Eastern Farmer DNA share compared to the rest, which is why they even look more like them than they do to Northern Europeans
@@entropybear5847 Something something "average European disagreement" but don't worry the governments of Europe today totally aren't painting the way for a modern "European disagreement" to happen to these MENA, South Asians and Africans causing a load of problems.
Far too many people's brains can only think back to the transatlantic slave trade and the American Civil rights movement, and so completely miss huge swaths of history that make many of their conclusions seem pretty silly.
Thank you for showing a link to the original video in the video description box (it was even in beginning of the description). So many people don't provide a link.
Projecting our own norms and perceptions into the past is an erroneous practice. We humans have always noted differences and identified ourselves with those who look, sound and behave like us.
Finally! Someone tackles this channel. I didn't know what to think of it, youtubers are my gateway knowledge levels on a given topic. I only read about stuff if it interests me further. That's why spreading falsehoods by youtubers is so dangerous - I may never face the lies they told.
Then I recommend viewing all youtube historians as simply being entertainment. Honestly, the entire profession should be regarded as such. The same is true for most areas of academia.
Spreading "falsehoods" is not dangerous, what nonsense are you babbling about? The intent behind the falsehoods are what would make them dangerous, not the falsehoods themselves. There's nothing wrong making mistake or not getting stuff 100% correct, but if the intent is to educate and entertain, then the achievement is likely to be watchers being inspired to look further into the subject and find out for themselves the different perspectives and understandings of the facts that are out there. These medias ARE NOT educational per se, it is only so incidentally : they are ENTERTAINMENT. If you want facts, STUDY the history yourself, read the accredited experts and keep reading on.
@@gratefulguy4130Agree, but the sad truth is that entertainment has bigger reach than scholary works and most people acquire views about the topics the entertainment talks about through movies and such. Because of this fact, the entertainment is a war zone for ideologs to spread their propaganda (Cleopatra) and should be considered a war zone by honest scholars as well if we are to see any historical accuracy in common perception whatsoever.
@@gratefulguy4130 Yeah lets just regard an entire profession has entertainment , when they spend years studying and producing knowledge, and then expand to the rest of academia , yakes.
@@gratefulguy4130Wow, amazing. I had a reply to you. A normal, agreeing reply furthering the point. It's gone now. Yet again, youtube decided to punish its user for using some word no one even considers offensive and I have no clue which of my words that could be. How fun to interact with this site.
The idea that race and culture are separate is one of the most deep-seated modern misconceptions. The culture can influence race (through promoting selection of individuals with certain traits), and the race can influence the culture (because of the racial traits, and the connection of race and environment, environment can influence the culture)
Good video aside, as usual, I just love that Metatron is so into his Latin roleplaying that he pronounced it Inwikta when prolly all the planet (OP included) pronounces it as it is written.
Thanks for the video. I must have missed something because, to me there is nothing new or surprising in the fact that the racism from the elite castes is always more "sophisticated" and more logically contextualized than the one of the masses. It must be my bias but I always believed it was something quite universal. As to me the simple idea of castes is the true basis to any racism. Henceforth I believe it's the same everywhere and everywhen as "castes" are everywhere and everywhen. It must look simplisitic as hell and now I feel like an idiot :/ Well thanks for helping me shaping my own ideas better. I really love your work.
Genetics seems to concur with Darwin. It seems a shame there's a massive push to erase human diversity by trying to stir us all up together into a vague monoculture.
Excellent work. I had a similar (if vastly less articulate) reaction to the Invicta work. The issue of the latter mainly being the imposition, in overly black and white terms, of a culture versus phenotype contrast between racial attitudes, Rome to today. Race, in the end,, ends up being a mere word, to which Invicta saw a differing treatment in the ancient world, which then misled him thus. It did this because back then there was not as developed sense of the arbitrary nature of cultural formation, and thus no concept of culture other than better culture ("our culture") and worse culture (all other cultures) for which the word "race" could be swapped in easily. This, to Metatron's point, does not mean phenotype was nothing back then. At 7:40, though, I'd differ, since the rather violent actions have a more profound cause in superstition/myth than animosity based on phenotype directly. Phenotypic aversion may have been merely an opportunity for a myths making, of, by the way, a fairly poetic kind - dark=dark. Then humans - ones in an anxious scenario, by the way, took the myth very seriously. Add the ancient lower regard for life in general, and, wa-lah.
There are actual American historians who (through weird, perverse form of American Exceptionalism) will argue that Race, as a concept, was invented in the Americas. Accredited people with PhDs and everything, and they're just shockingly ignorant. Their entire argument hinges on an etymological shift, that the English word "race" was probably used for the first time to distinguish between servants who were European and those were African, and before that "race" was used in more vague and variable ways. But the concept clearly existed prior to that, and other words have been used to describe these tribal and phenotypical distinctions.
The only thing US society put on steroids was the post Darwinist approach to race, the "science" one. Pseudoscientists of race in America were the non plus ultra , 3rd Reich and apartheid in SA were hugely influenced by them ...They did produce terrible consequences and must be addressed but not to the extent of saying "oh such a happy party human history before Columbus stepped on new world/ Darwin travelled on the Beagle ". People today in the rush to propaganda just lose context
This just in: Exact meanings and perceptions of words used to describe social phenomena change over thousands of years! Yeah, obviously the Roman's didn't have a word that was an exact translation of the modern "race" and meant the same exact thing a white slave owner would have seen it as during the era of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, or as we see it now. That's also true for almost every other word to describe social concepts that change over time. Are there words that we have that truly encapsulate the Roman understanding of Plebeian vs Patrician? Probably not, and what's more, the Romans probably didn't see class exactly like we do, but that doesn't mean that the Romans had no conception of socio-economic strata and saw a Claudii to be equal to a random hobo. The point is that the driving factor (racism) existed for the same general reasons that it exists today: the inhumanity of mankind. The trappings and details of their racism were dependent on the circumstances they were in, just as it is today, and just as it always has been. It's ridiculous to expect that they would be identical to what we have today, and even more ridiculous to pretend that because they aren't, it means racism or race didn't exist in the past.
Correct me if i've misread anything, though i'll add I'm pretty sure one of the biggest religions in the modern world (Christianity) stems from accepting both Jews and Gentiles into the kingdom of Heaven (Galations 3). If i recall, this ideology in the faith was very countercultural to the cultures at the time, both Jewish and Roman, so we can indirectly know just from this that the Roman's DID care about race, since the people who did preach interracial brotherhoods caused such controversy. The Jews at the time felt similarly, as that was why the story of the good samaritan was so significant. I think Invicta's grasping for straws a bit lol
Septimius Severus did not hate Ethiopians, but he was superstitious because the color black was associated with death in ancient Roman culture. Keep in mind that Septimius merely ordered that the Ethiopian be removed from his sight because he was afraid, whereas the native Romans were terrified and beyond shocked since they even more superstitious than Severus, and they killed the Ethiopian who appeared out of nowhere.Aside from this context, Ethiopians could move and live in Rome alongside everyone else without being attacked.
I'm just going to leave this here. There's a reason that Africans were so rare in Europe for millennia until modern imperialism. And trust me it's not a good reason.
When people criticize racism nowadays, they're usually thinking not of casual racism or phobic racism, but systemic racism. They're thinking of racism practiced by a government, either directly or indirectly. While the Roman Empire had racist citizens, its government did not enforce racial policies the way the United States, South Africa, or Nazi Germany did. So the Roman society was not COLLECTIVELY racist.
The increasingly popularity of the "colonial race construct" theory is annoying. It takes contemporary interpretation to explain the entire history of human interactions....and to plug "america bad because europe was bad" . Humans have been dismissive of each other since day 1, way before some ass 0 tried to constraint political and economical power of the mix children of Haitians and south Americans. And if you think just a little, this was just a product of the extremely hereditary nature of these societies.... applied in a sh!tty fashion but still a continuity of their own laws and customs wich are meant to achieve the same objectives at home....with less overt violence of course.
That modern idea about ancient people not seeing what we call race always seemed nonsensical to me. A person’s outward appearance is how human being identify and judge each other, it’s how we communicate.
I like to think that the Romans were somewhere halfway between the "I am completely colourblind" and the "one drop and you're out" extremes on the Great Scale of Racial Awareness. As most people are, probably. The fact that Mediterranean people are not as much an outlier in terms of hair colour and skin tone as northern Europeans are, on a global scale, may have helped too.
If people's appearance can be used to determine what 'people' someone is, and what people they are ('culture' if you prefer) can be used to make statements about their moral character, then how exactly is this different then the modern concept of racism?
Keeping it simple: modern racism comes out of Darwinism (Darwin himself probably disagreed) but once evolution theory stepped in , it became "who evolved further from apes?" And ended up with the answer being the Northern white Europeans" and providing whiteness charts. This was on tv shows in the US, still in the 50s and 60s. Ancient racism was more tribal. The better wasn't a particular skin tone. It was being my friend or at least an enemy of my enemy for land , survival and wealth conquest. Everyone against everyone not just "evil whitey oppressing blacks". And apes weren't in the script. Now there is a huge confusion but in Romans time you were inferior if you could not speak Greek and especially if you messed / resisted/ rebelled against the Empire. No matter how you could look. P.s. for the Ethiopian soldier, it's the same pattern with albinism or handicap especially in rural / traditional areas in Africa , if you are different from what we are used to and know it's ok with health and ordinary events, you must be a problem/curse/bad omen.
@@elleanna5869 Charles Darwin lived 1809-1882. Was no one racist before the 1800s? The African slave trade started in the 1400s. So are you telling me there was no racism involved in that until Darwin published his famous book in 1859? What about all the colonization that happened before that time? Personally, I think you are wrong. None of us can go back to Rome to really talk to people about their thoughts so I guess we’ll just keep disagreeing
@@opinionater9388 Yes, it is wrong. Not only because of time but also region... were Arabs not racist? Iranians revolted against their Arab rulers not too long after the muslim conquests because of their racism. And are the Chinese for example not racist? I doubt they use a measure of "whiteness" to prove their racial superiority... People who think "white vs black" is strictly modern and didn't exist really need to open a history book; and people who think racism only involves white people being racist... also really need to open a history book.
@@opinionater9388 The African slave trade wasn't a product of racism rather racism in the Americas was a product of the African slave trade. The African slave trade existed for centuries before Europeans began colonizing the Americas. West African nations sold other Africans as slaves to the North African countries ruled by Islam. When the Europeans began to colonize the Americas and decided that slave plantations were the best way to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the agricultural products available there they went to the existing, closest slave market in Africa.
@@Mammel248 The best examples of racism existing in Muslim history are: 1. The Holy Prophet having to tell people that blacks and whites, Arabs and non-Arabs, are all equal, and explaining to them that Bilal the Abyssinian was equal to them. 2. The Umayyads literally inventing all the modern stereotypes which American racists use when talking about black people. (violent tendencies, excessive desire for food and sex, criminality, stupidity; those ideas go back to the people who killed Husayn, not to America and Europe)
I don't know if this is why I'm subscribed to your channel but I absolutely hate when people glorify the past incorrectly as if humans wasn't pieces of shit back when and even worse at killing each other over #insert reason.
Hey Metatron man. Would you be interested in looking into homosexuality in Reneissance age (XV -XVI) Italy and particularly under the patronage of the house Medici? My Art History teacher never misses a beat in mentioning anything related to sex if it's pertaining homosexuality and I was wondering if she was right in doing that or if I'm right in being cynical instead of skeptical? These things never stop, ranging from her preaching about ancient greece as "gay utopia" up untill now when we are going through Dutch and Flemish late reneissance. XoXo in advance!
There were so many homosexuals in Italy during that time that they had to create a special police force called the Office of the night whose only job was to catch sodomites, you can literally google it
makes sense especially on how rome expanded across the peninsula aggressively refusing to give citizenship rights to other latin tribes to retain a strong roman identity / culture and political power, instead of being assimilated into the surrounding tribal cultures eventually being forced by the social wars to give citizenship rights.
I think the takeaway from this should be the ancient peoples lived and saw things different to way we see things . Stereotype are given in human race especially in more advanced cultures throughout history and still today . I think for people to think racism is less than 200 year old phenomenon is delusional there would being other forms or prejudice instead or Aswel as that the fact the human race dislikes different. You just have take indigenous African or Native American or Polynesian’s when they first saw the European it would totally alien concept for them . Another good thought provoking video .
It is even worse. People believe that racism is an european invention that no non-European culture was racist. That's wrong. Racism even the kind of racism which plagues societies to day is as old as mankind and exist everywhere.
Actually I think you got it mixed up. I think modern people are troubled by the delusion WE'RE substantially different from the ancients. Nothing meaningful has actually changed in human psychology. Nothing at all. We're the exact same, and the inability to make peace with that seems to be causing us lots of neurosis as societies.
thank you ! for using Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's De Architectura book 6 on climate , i have been using this now for the last 3 years , not to demonstrate racism but rather an understanding for it's time that the Romans felt themselves very different from the rest of the surrounding nations
Why are only Europeans constantly slandered about their cultures and heritage? Makes me wonder if there’s something far more sinister at play. It’s quite despicable how much the world feels the need to oppress one type of look which is the Anglo Saxon/Germanic ethnicities…and hold the rest at a lower level due to lack of success across the world vs that of the Europeans.
What do you expect from Invicta after making a special video for pride month ... I am not doubting his main content, it is just that I think he gets some advantages or is required to make videos on these topics ... a shame really
Personal opinion here ... I see a big difference in differentiation based on physical characteristics and discrimination / ranking based on those characteristics. Differentiation would be saying something like "you can pick her out in a crowd because her appearance is different." Discrimination is when you use someone's appearance to assume they are inferior solely based on that appearance. The modern definition of racism is discrimination ... claiming one race or another is inferior solely because they are of that race. I don't know enough about Rome to know whether the prevailing attitude was differentiation or discrimination, but it sounds like it was mostly the first. Sure, some people were racist in the modern sense, but it also sounds like they were on the fringe, and the attitude of most people in power was "we don't care about someone's looks or background, if they contribute to the glory of Rome, they're good people."
People have been noticing the differences between the species and the races since time immemorial. Sometimes people overlooked the differences, and often they did not. But it's not like they were blind.
It says a lot about the modern ideological environment that we as a society are struggling with something the ancients didn't even need to give a second thought to because it was so apparent. Perhaps all the screens and other distractions are negatively effecting modern humanity's ability to parse reality...this compulsion to reject the evidence of our eyes...
I can't even predict the things my convict cichlids will do by gender. The more complex a creature, the less behavior is genetically fixed. I've had males defend the fry beyond when the female gave up on the few remaining fry; I've currently got a female that's beating up any other fish, including her mate that gets near her six or seven surviving babies. These particular fish are quite inbred at this point, so genetically quite similar. Humans don't do the inbreeding thing to that level. Assuming we're preprogrammed behaviorially as complex as we are is kinda problematic. Rough trends, but we're not line bred pure bloods, any of us.
Critical race theory is one thing, but racial discriminatory behaviour based on phenotypic variants definitely existed and removing it from the past is a problem too.
Catullus wrote a poem where he says about support for Caesar "I don't care if you are a white man or a black man ...". This comes across as Catullus emphasising his own liberal attitude. But this implies there were other people who were non liberal and would support people based on racial appearance.
Hey there Metatron, I want to ask if there are any historical clues to if there were at lest some instances of romans having equiped at least the most elite soldiers with both Lorica hamata and Lorica segmentata. Using plate armor on top of the mail armor like in medieval times. Thanks
Another great video, although I have a minor disagreement with your last point regarding the provincial Roman Emperors. While it is true that the early provincial emperors had familial and even blood ties with Italian families, by the third century, this was no longer a requirement. For example, the so called "Illyrian emperors" were not of Italian ancestry and depending on how far you want to take it from then on, Roman Emperors had no ethnic ties to "Italy" whatsoever. They climbed the ladder of power by military service, or in other words, merit.
"the so called "Illyrian emperors" were not of Italian ancestry" Right. So I guess romans didn't fuck their way through conquered lands, nor did they colonize or migrate at all within the empire? No, they all had "Italian" ancestry and they for sure all looked roman. And you are just missing the entire point I think. Metatron said what he said as an answer to idiots claiming that some Emperors weren't romans by fact of not being born in Italy, and some going as far as claiming they were of different skin color or different culture. Metatron countered this claim by pointing to the fact that Emperors born out of Italy were still born from Roman family, and that is still true for Emperors born in Illyricum. Obviously, not all Emperors were born from good, wealthy and ancient roman family, but that's just moving the goalpost. As for your Italy remark, you are just being disingenuous. You know perfectly well what Metatron meant.
@@laisphinto6372 It is not that they forget, they just don't know their history and what little they know is from UA-cam channels like Kings and Generals or Netflix documentaries like Cleopatra or Alexander.
The illyrian emperors were descendents of roman colonisers in illyria. Sure they would likely have been taking culturaly romanised locals as wives but they were still descended from Italian romans. By your standard everyone in the USA today would be native american.
Even in India- Punjab, Sindh and Gujarat particularly, Greek slaves were sought after. Since enslaving Indians (or the Arya atleast) wasn't allowed and other ethnicities weren't seen as sophisticated and educated.
in ancients times nobody knew what a gene was, but a lot of noble peoples went to great lengths in rising cattle, and so they understood pretty well the process of inheriting traits. I have read in some books thou that such people were of the race of hector, or some other person, so then one single man could start a whole race? race must have been a similar but also different idea.
I would classify this as ancient/historical Propaganda. Gaius Julius Caesar, says he's from the House of Julia which means he's a Trojan descendant and more importantly that the god Mars is great Grand Daddy, it's used to justify Power cause it Sounds better to be a pseudo god than Just a regular human. I think in that Case ist the wronf Word and Family is a better fit.
Nah - you can "live" a range of emotions just by reading a good book or historical documents. You've experienced the story or knowledge 2nd hand by reading about it. But you, yourself, haven't lived it. Same could be said about those who documented their own society. We might know how Aristotle lived and saw his world - but we don't know how the guy sweeping the streets felt about his world.
@Raggmopp-xl7yf You lived the experience of Reading a story. That does not make it your experience. Even second hand experience is a non secular as what you experienced was the observation itself.
@@UncleMikeDrop I'm sorry, but after I wrote my comment I pictured one of those, "Theoretically that should have worked," and, "Well, obviously NOT since it just blew up!" moments and I'm laughing.
What would be the alternative(s) to lived experience. Perceived? But how is that different than lived. What one person thinks tastes good another person wouldnt. If you tell someone that something happened theyre eventually going to believe it even if it never happened. Unlived experiences? How does that work? Lived or perceived or whatever you want to call it it still doesnt change the question of why the need for the quantifiers "lived" "perceived" etc. When we talk about Hercules (fictional character) experiencing hardship because of his labors we are talking about his experiences which are separate from our own. I can experience sympathy for what he went through but unless I reenact his labors I cant experience what he went through I can only imagine what he went through. I can experience sympathy for the people who lived in Pompeii. Arent we guilty of modernism assuming peoples "lived" experiences. Writers from every era have wrote conflicting things.
A Nubian in Egypt was seen as a Nubian, not an Egyptian, regardless of how long their lineage might have been there. If anything race mattered more in the ancient world, since blood lines and tribal ties were much more pronounced and important to an individual before the age of absolutism smashed the family unit to replace it with adherence to the crown/state/corporation. Rome was a multicultural empire, but that doesn't mean citizens did not judge one another by their racial appearances. Even among the peninsula born Romans, there was a massive difference between who was considered a "true" Roman, and Italians, or Sicilians. Race was incredibly important to the Romans. They simply just had no problem letting non-Romans join the legions and die for the wealth of the Roman Elite.
I find it to be a bit strange that anyone thinks that certain evils, or sin, if you prefer, are new. Like ancient people didn't feel the things we feel, greed, avarice, desire for power, jealousy, fear of the unknown or unfamiliar, and all of the other dark things humans are capable of.
The Quran disproves your point. If you think greed is new, you haven't read about the man named Qarun, a greedy man in Ancient Egypt who refused to join the Exodus of Moses. If you think jealousy is new, you know neither the story of Lucifer who refused to prostrate to Adam, nor do you know the story of Cane killing Able out of jealousy. Desire for power is seen in Nimrod, who was trying to challenge God and trying to make people think he was the only god, yet he failed thanks to Abraham.
Conversely I don't get why people presume that modern people are substantially different and virtuous. Or that percieved virtue is likewise novel. Psychologically modern humans have been around for a long time.
@I-io8eemodern ideas like people reduce themselves to a skin color and voluntarily segregating while not even understanding the difference between species, race and ethnicity 😂 I think ancient people might have had some insight that modern times have lost.
sorry about the innapropropriate word i think i was quoting an eighteenth century translation. what i meant to say was that in juvenal's second satire he does specifically mention a distinction between black and white when criticising roman hipocrisy.
Saying that the ancients didn't see race in people's physical appearances but were more concerned about cultural differences always struck me as being forced. Physical appearance was the quickest way to determine if a person was from your culture or not, especially in the ancient world. All one has to do is read the geographies of the Greeks and Romans to see that they spend a large amount of time describing the physical appearance of the people in each region covered.
trying to turn a normative statement into factual. They shouldn't mistreat people for appearance -> they haven't mistreated people for appearance
What world are they living in? The Chris Chan's Rift? You won't jump the timeline no matter how much you preach tolerance
Seems like back then a physical trait was more judged upon one person not a group.such as noses etc they judged based upon physical trait onto one person nose
@peacewarrecords Yes, but the op isn't wrong.
@@wingedhussar1453Hmm, maybe. Though I know some of the Roman accounts of the Germanic tribes talk about how they all have light colored eyes, blonde or red hair, are huge with pale skin. I think it's just more of a stereotype thing that they used when writing about a different group of people like the Germanics.
Why? That's how it is now.
"I'm from Africa too, and I've never seen anyone like you before!" - Emp. Septimus Severus
Netflix wouldn't believe him.
Ha! I commented to early, of course it was mentioned.
@@LOCATIONREDACTED It's a North American problem, ignorance there is way too abundant.
@@mannyrodriguez5453 Same in northern europe.
@@mannyrodriguez5453Some European countries aren't much better when it comes to that type of thing. Sweden might even be worse from what I've seen.
Ancient racism can be boiled down to: "You aren't part of my tribe. The farther from my tribe the worse I view you."
isn't that avery racism ever?
@@marcusaurelius4941 American culture has kind of changed that a bit. They're all from the same culture (kind of), but they view racism through the lens of skin color rather than heritage. It's not about ancient peoples and which cultures are better than others but rather whites vs blacks vs latinos (even though that's not a skin color, I know, they're weird) etc.
@@paavoilves5416 You clearly don't understand American racial politics.
@@jonperry4580 Enlighten me.
@@jonperry4580 You're wrong
Something my history professor said in my Roman course is that anyone that wasn’t Roman was a barbarian. That really should be it as a baseline.
Same with the Chinese and Japanese. Multiple local tribes around the (at the time) small kingdoms of China were considered barbarians. Even before the Han showed up.
In Japan, basically everyone was "Nanban".
Copycats...
They got that from the Greeks, who considered all non-Greeks (including Romans) to be barbarians.
Everyone except for the Greeks. The Romans recognized them as a culture worthy of praise and emulation.
"Barbarian" is literally someone with a different culture than your own.
"You look like a giant mozzarella cheese".
*Subscribed*
Yes, the "giant mozzarella cheese" remark made me laugh and laugh. (Already a subscriber.)
As a white woman, I am now identifying as a "giant mozzarella cheese."
You can’t trust anyone who looks like a giant mozzarella cheese
*Angry Germanic tree noises*
Channing Tatum looks more like a big edam@@rattheninja2877
This was FABULOUS! I appreciate your intentions here. To OPEN a dialogue!!! To offer different viewpoints (with your supporting data) to encourage discussion and debate on a very important topic that is being forced on everyone around the world! Let’s start by getting the definitions of Race correct. How can there be a dialogue if everyone is speaking in different languages??? Can we drop political biases and discuss facts, with the intention of learning and being taught??? And if one is going to teach, bring the proof to support your argument! You Do! You Do!
No biases, just historical, even ancient facts! I TRUST your commentary… and I trust very few…. You, Metatron, TEACH me, instead of BRAINWASH me! I’m a proud to be a Noble One! Be Blessed and Highly Favored!
The video saying, "Racism wouldn't be based on look but by culture" disregarding that one of the easiest ways to determine someone's culture is from their physical traits, especially in the pre-industrial, pre-globalized society.
As a matter of fact even in modern racism the same thing often applies. I mean if you actually asked someone who is openly racist why they don't like a certain race they'll probably tell you stuff like thinking them to be "lazy", "violent' or "untrustworthy," not just "they don't look like me."
Modern racism stems from pseudoscience of race , and thinks it's genetic, not cultural - if you look like that , you are that no matter how / where you are raised, educated- it's literally "who evolved further from apes?" ancient tribalism of course used to conflate different looks from different places , tribes and culture, but things could be really...nuanced. Also, the xenophobia applied also to people looking really similar to you, a different language or clothing or gods or traditions was enough to say "we aren't the same tribe no matter we are both blondettes or whatever"
Or they might say"I'm worried that person will take my job, leaving me unable to care for my family well" if they were speaking of migrant.
@@elleanna5869 "Modern racism stems from pseudoscience of race , and thinks it's genetic, not cultural "
Tell me you've never actually talked to most modern racists without telling me. What most people call "racism" is people having issues with the others culture in the first place.
Racial eugenicists are different from your average supremacist even when there's plenty of overlap.
@@xShadowChrisxThey just try to rationalize racistic behavior..there is no empiric evidence for eugenic theories
but in ancient times romans had contact with european cultures that were also white, of course some were whiter than them but you also have the other latin cultures and the etruscans, so Invicta has a point, we cant use the modern framing of it
Great work. As a neoclassical historian and Romanist I substantially agree with your observations.
“Like the Huns, the Visigoths were horsemen, but unlike the Huns, they were skilled in agriculture and stock rearing. Tall, bearded, with long blonde or red hair, and bodies swathed in skins and furs, the Goths were fearsome Warriors with a proud sense of self-worth. In the ‘civilized’ Roman Empire, desk-bound academics, like the Greek historian Eunapius, sneered at them for being arrogant and contemptuous: Their bodies provoked contempt to all who saw them, for they were far too big and far too heavy for their feet to carry them, and they were pinched in at the waist - just like those insects Aristotle writes of” - the Romans
lol
Jealousy: It sits at a desk and sneers.
Funnily enough they eventually captured Rome
@@starfox300 indeed
+ @unclesam5230 irony is how quick the Imperial Elites used them as replacement legionaires in the Roman Army when locals quit milirary service.
That is why I hate when Afrocentrists say Septimius Severus was black or dark skinned but usually black like African Americans today. If he was black, why did he hate Ethiopians? Why would Rome allowed themselves to be ruled by a SubSaharan African? It is like Queen Charolette. Why would the UK let a black woman be Queen of England and why did they use white paint to paint her portraits? Just because race is different today doesn't mean that people never noticed differences. We are really not that different from Ancient Romans.
AS an african from all emperors to LARP as i would Not want to be septimus Severus the one who Basically got the ball running for more civil wars, Inflation and disloyalty of the army
Septimius was not anti-Ethiopian, but he was superstitious because the color black was associated with death in ancient Roman culture. Remember, Septimius simply ordered that the Ethiopian be removed from his sight because he was afraid, whereas the native Romans were shocked and even more superstitious than Severus, and they killed the Ethiopian who appeared out of nowhere. Aside from this context, Ethiopians could move and live in Rome alongside everyone else without being attacked.
@@gianlucarossi5672 there are interpretation of the episode that the soldier was removed rather then killed but honestly as much I can hope he survived the key is the one you report: superstiton. Ancient mindset used to depend of "omens" since the chances to control environment and events were much lower than today so it was a coping mechanism. It's still present in most underdeveloped areas of the world
Queen Charlotte wasn't black, she and her family were German.
They were black people of importance in europe, bu these guys always use the bad example, they blackwash the people instead of looking for the ones that were really black. Like Alexandre Dumas' father who was a general under Napoléon, or Dido Elizabeth Belle, or John Blanke, a trumpet guy under Henry wathever bumber
Romans: "We're not racists. We treat everyone equally."
Someone in the distance: "Screw Rome!"
Romans: *Proceeds to be incredibly racist*
They crucified people of all races, indeed.
well...ask hadrian on the "israelis"
Roman Slave markets are incredible diverse.
@@thomashauer6804 maybe they shouldn't talk shit when they have been consistently dominated by their neighbors
@@jonathanwells223
Hadrian was just upset bc his woke lover died
The funniest part of the Petronius quote: but, tell me, can we make our lips swell to a hideous thickness? Or transform our hair with curling-tongs?
Oooh. Lip fillers are black face!
Say in plain words what you meant by this
@@SuperRichyrich11 I believe it's a jab at the fact people do exactly that fairly commonly these days. Curling irons for hair are very common and lip injections to make them swell is also at arm's reach. Something unthinkable by Petronius is, in fact, a very frequent occurrence these days. Up yours, Petry.
@@alphadron4073I do not believe it is a good thing modern society has degraded that much
@@zzodysseuszzWhich society degraded from what time period to now?
Yeah, the Roman Empire was cosmopolitan in the same way the British Empire was cosmopolitan (Indian colonial workers and troops served throughout the British Empire, for example).
"We're not racist. We conquer and enslave people of all races and cultures equally."
The Romans brought in their own administrators and governors and in many cases garrisons of legionnaires rather than rely on the locals for that stuff. Yes, locals were used as auxiliaries, and in many cases the local authorities operated under the Roman prefects, but much like the British, they put their OWN people in charge at the top.
@@stanbartsch1984
They also encouraged the integration of the local elite to 'Romanise' - it was an easier way of reducing resistance, but it didn't always work; compare Boudiccea & Cartimandua, Prasutagus & Caratacus...
Modern British progressives try to pretend like black people were living in Britain since the Middle Ages as sort kind of diaspora, without ever mentioning that they were only there to serve as a kind of exotic pet in order to show how rich and world traveled their royalty were. Also, there were only like a dozen of them.
Comparing British empire which was literally cash cow of its own colonies to Rome is incredibly insulting
“The one race of outstanding eminence in virtue among all the races in the whole world is undoubtedly the Roman” ~ Pliny the Elder, Nat. His. VII. 41
And he wasn't even wrong.
You are goddam right!@@networknomad5600
But is that just treating race and nationality as the same thing, and therefore not about race as such? There was a lot of that usage of the word race from British imperialists like Rudyard Kipling and any number of British politicians and colonial officials at the height of the British empire, but clearly there's no such thing as a British "race". Also it occurs to me that's probably _Virtu,_ like in Machiavelli, not the English "virtue" related to morality. The vitality and dynamism of the virile masculine _Vir._
@@patrickholt2270 Not unlike today, where people use color to be racist, even though color aren't races. Whatever is easy to divide people and control them is what ends up being used at certain points in history.
@@patrickholt2270 Skin color isn't race. Otherwise the early modern racists wouldn't have been so adamant that Finns aren't white, but mongoloids.
That's a very hot topic to discuss on UA-cam.
Kudos for explaining some obvious things that are not to be discussed in a "modern" environment.
Its also weird that isnt only the very narrow modern View but the modern American View . Also its really weird calling rome so tolerant when they literally a tribune to death for daring to share Power or fought a whole war because they refuse to give citizenship to Italian soccis. Then are the class divides with patricians and plebs where you werent even allowed to marry into Patrician Status and i Wonder how much they Stretch the Romans to fit a particullar modern narrative
Race, or rather hatred toward different peoples (be it ethnicity, class, etc etc) has always existed and will continue to exist in the future. Hell, even some other animal species show discriminatory behaviour, mostly social hierarchy discrimination
When I was growing up, we introduced a white cow into the herd of black ones. The poor white cow was shunned because she was different. 🙁
Its a natural human thing to dislike the strange and un-familiar
@@cheften2mk it's not even human. All life discriminates favoring it's own.
Heck, if pets are anything to go by, I noticed that my mother’s oldest cat, black furred, despite having a very bad temper towards my other cats (don’t ask, I have too much) immediately accepted the youngest cat we adopted and never showed any sign of violence towards him. That youngest cat is also a black cat. Maybe it’s a coïncidence, maybe it’s just his fatherly instincts that kicked in since that new cat was still a kitten back then but I couldn’t help but notice that.
@@cheften2mk Natural doesnt mean good though
Man, I've heard it was bad luck for a black cat to cross your path, but that story about the Ethiopian was on a whole new level.
There were essentially 2 stories that had the same motif, that it was that they're specifically bad luck (militarily?)
I bet that was essentially a pretty widespread superstition.
I'm from Uk and it was when i was a kid we used to say Lucky Black cat. You were lucky if a black cat crossed your path. Changing a bit under USA influence. Nothing to do with the topic but..... Well I am old.
@@missread7781 The reason why it's considered good luck for a pure black cat to cross your path in the UK is that black cats were killed during various phases of European history such as periods of mass witch hunts and now they're rare to the point that the superstition changed.
Difference is, when the black cat crosses your path, you don’t typically slaughter it… Romans were hardcore… 😝
@@Hokies4evr My late grandma kept spitting all over the road every time a black cat crossed our path. Which, in retrospect, was more often than you would expect. Anyway, I asked her if she could please stop with that. And she was upset, saying "At least I'm not killing them!!". And I was like, is that an option?!!!
And yeah, people apparently, some, did kill those poor cats to "remove the bad luck".
Having such strong reactions when seeing Ethiopians by Brutus, Cassius and to a lesser extend Septimius Severus, is a strong indication that seeing some was very rare in Rome. This debunks some falsehood as a BBC cartoon.
Exactly. No one can convince me blacks were all over Europe or even in southern Europe. They were only seen near Ethiopia and people who saw them, made sure to note how "different" they were.
Also Europeans in their first contact with aboriginals of Australia they classified them as different race than Africans
Further showing that racial classification was not just about physical appearances but also behavioral characteristics
They are genetically the more distant people from black Africans. But they don't look exactly the same Europeans actually studied (in their way) those things. Take the Caucasian classification and is very similar to what today is called western eurasian.... Don't say races exists but clustering do.
Australian Aboriginals And Tasmanian Aboriginals of pure blood or next to that liquid on average look different from the typical Sub Saharan African the ones with more nappy hair and frizzy hair rather then straight, wavy, curly, and shaggy have admixture from Melanesians And Papuans yeah.
Rather it shows that race doesn't boil down to skin color, because other physical characteristics of the two peoples are very different
Actually it is about physical appearance. Yeah aboriginals have black skin but their other features are not similar to subsaharans, same with black people from southern India their skin is black but they don't look like Africans
what how does that prove anything the aboriginals look nothing like any African and no one has ever suggested or mistaken those two. Sure their skin is dark but facial features, hair etc. are quite literally the opposite. Next thing u'll say sri lankans look like haitians
I keep hearing that ancient world perceived race and engaged in racism differently from today but as far I can see it is broadly similar.
Targets have changed is all.
Yes there just have been some extra justifications (like genetics instead of "the warm climate makes them degenerate") and some re-grouping as well as shift in enemy image.
Not really
@@supereero9 So where are the fundamental differences and what makes lets say european colonial period racism so much different from anything else?
@@IsomerSoma
I take issue with the generalization, the arguments the ancients used for their tribalism was different from the "scientific" claims modern racists make. I'm hesitant to label all manifestations of tribalism as racism, even if that tribalism seperates people based on their looks
Great response. I remember watching Invicta's video in question and being somewhat puzzled on his reasoning.
Hell, Romans for a long period of time viewed even other “Italians” as belonging to a different race and not truly equal to Romans.
Racial ideas shift over time even within the same period (modern or ancient).
In truth there is only one race--the human race.
People try to change the meaning for different agendas but what they are really referring to is ethnicity. What seems to be even more lost on people is that your ethnicity and skin color are not mutually exclusive. Your ethnicity is so much more than just skin color.
@@Choom89just because you can’t always draw a clear line between races, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There is a White race, a Black race, an East Asian race, and an American Indian race. Some groups straddle the line between these races, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and are purely social constructs.
People being unaware of the interaction between ancient tribes is largely due to the modern avoidance of the topic. Also, schools rarely have students study classical literature whether Mediterranean, Chinese, Indian, Ethiopian... Ancient studies are enlightening and fascinating. How else can we keep from repeating history if we do not study it? As you shrugged and said at 17:57, "Kinda like today."
Just travel to other countries and you’ll witness it in real time 😅
In the copy of cesars commentary on the gallic wars there are many references cesar himself and further sources in annotations refering to groups of people (tribes the romans and/or allies fought with or against) by their appearance.
Why do people think rome was this DEI paradise?
I always get a little nervous when I see these as I love both of your channels, but happy to see the good natured back and forth.
It's kind of sad but it's almost impossible for many people to see someome talking about racism without having a knee jerk reaction and accusing them of racism. Happens a lot online but I've had it happen IRL too even when it's a civil, mixed race discussion.
@@arthas640Only happens in america and other bastardised countries.
Invicta is a soy slurping beta male. Unsubbed ages ago because I could see him poisoning his vids with wokery.
@@Halo_Legend True
The Prophet Muhammad says numerous times in the Hadith that black people from Africa were cursed to look that way because they were the sons of Ham, and so forced to be the slaves of the Turks and the Arabs forever more.
These passages were created long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade ever began, and there are many examples in the Hadith. To give just a couple of dozens:
“Shem, the son of Noah was the father of the Arabs, the Persians, and the Greeks; Ham was the father of the Black Africans; and Japheth was the father of the Turks and of Gog and Magog who were cousins of the Turks. Noah prayed that the prophets and apostles would be descended from Shem and kings would be from Japheth. He prayed that the African’s color would change so that their descendants would be slaves to the Arabs and Turks.”
Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 11
“Ham [Africans] begat all those who are black and curly-haired, while Japheth [Turks] begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem [Arabs] begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and that whenever his descendants met Shem’s, the latter would enslave them.”
Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 21
So you (edit: also, by “you”, I obviously don’t mean you, Metatron. I just mean people who claim that racism didn’t exist prior to the transatlantic slave trade!) can’t possibly claim that racism didn’t exist before the transatlantic slave trade - it clearly did, and in abundance. There are many even worse passages, but I don’t even know if UA-cam would allow me to post them!
Metatron you hit the proverbial nail on the head . Once again thank you for stating the facts unambiguously and with absolute conviction. Bravo Sir! God bless you and the Mrs.
People that suggest all 'bad' things are of modern origin tend to have other nasty habits.
Nose picking and nail biting
Like hating White people
not washing your face and teeth in the morning does that to ya.
I would not say that they have nasty habits, I would say that they are very naive.
they like communism?
New worlders not understanding how things worked in the Old World, classic.
My thoughts exactly 😂
Are you going to do a follow up video on the Netflix series on Alexander?
I’m preparing a full analysis of episode 1
Can't wait. : )@@metatronyt
@@metatronyti Saw a short clip talking about what it is thought to be the tomb of alexander's father. Do you think his remains Will be found during our life time?
@@metatronyt Since you are Reviewing Alexander on Netflix would you mind speaking on the growing number of Indians believing and Indian historians pushing this narrative of Alexander the Great Running away from india after Losing to Porus.
ua-cam.com/video/R8pjZ4DgSFA/v-deo.htmlsi=1y5NUixd1fmbLefr
Another fantastic deep dive! Love it. One topic that I've always been fascinated in (and am considering doing a thesis on it) would be looking at the historiography of the Greco-Roman world. Specifically how the Greeks and Romans saw and understood history, particularly in relation to philosophy and, for lack of a better word, religion/magic/prophesying.
When you go to your disgraced senator friend's villa and he calls Apsimachos from the next room to bring some wine and out of the door comes Vercingetorix the younger with your wine and a look on his face that states he barely understands Latin let alone have a Greek education
Metatron you are the best. Thanks for opening my eyes to a whole different perspective of race analysis. I had watched that video from Invicta (great youtube channel by the way). I am grateful for the info and good points you made in the video. Keep up the good work 🔥 .
I’m a simple man. I see Metatron upload, I press like. Man deserves it.
Thanks for your hard work and dedication to accurately representing history, Metatron.
Yeah, Metatron you are really doing your research. Thanks. Very informative.
The idea of race and culture being two separate things is entirely a modern American idea, and it isn't really relevant anywhere outside of America
Entirely is quite a strong word.
@@danh6720 And an accurate one. This idea did not exist until the 20th century and stems entirely from America
@@filmandfirearms Civic nationalism has been a bane upon the West.
1:00 Wow... Society needs more of this and less "canceling".
Canceling you for that comment.
@@legueu Oh, yeah? Well, I'm canceling you right now!
I think you'll find in the usa it's the supposedly free speech right wing mob that wants to cancel "Accurate" depictions of american history in schools. ie: the civil war being fought over slavery and the obscenity of systemic racism and all its long term socio-economic effects . The US doesn't have federal requirements for teaching Black history in school curriculums, and only a handful of states have mandated it.
@@AnimaVox_ Oh yeah!
Well I cancel all three of you!!
@@declanjones8888 Too late, I've already canceled myself!
People were always trying to find a clear boundary between "us" and "them". That one he is right about. The thing is, as the history goes forth, our world becomes bigger. In ancient times what was important to you was your village, maybe your tribe. Empires like Rome or China were exceptions rather than the norm. And even then most subjects were not bothered by the affairs of the state. Last quarter of second millennium saw a rise of nations (yes - a nation is a relatively modern concept). At that time we would be bothered by the lot of our country. In 21st century there are unification movements like European Union, OPEC etc. Many people talk about a global village and being citizens of the world.
What does it have to do with racism? When your group is small, and most other groups you meet are the same ethnicity you have to use culture to distinguish yourself from them. You tend to know much about your close neighbours. Race is rarely an issue. If you ever meet someone with different skin tone, they will be from far away. You are not competing with them for resources. But they are different enough that you are curious.
That's the definition of exotic - distant enough that it has no real bearing on your life, and unknown enough to make you curious.
Nowadays black people from Africa are not exotic for me (I'm from Poland). And the entire EU has become My Group. Africa is my neighbour. So is Russia, America and Asia.
Of course the size of your world was determined not just by the times you lived in, but also place and social status. E.g. 16th century polish peasant would be basically confined to his village (that's after centuries of aristocrats lobbying for taking rights away from peasants - a dark chapter in polish history). The higher you go in social standing, the bigger your world becomes even though you live at the same time just a few kilometres apart. You could become a soldier and with little bit of luck you could see more of the world. But there were people whose world was even bigger than that of a king. Those people were merchants. Spice merchants to be exact. Or silk or other oriental goods.
Commenters like you are a refreshing read. Thank you.
I’m not saying that this has any basis in fact or logic, but, I’ve noticed a pattern with videos centering around explaining racial views of ancient peoples. It always seems that the more upbeat and “airy” (flowery or lovey dovey) the narrator/creator of the video is…the higher the chances are that they aren’t being honest, or the more likely that they are “dressing up” some uncomfortable truths.
While there’s plenty of decent info in his video, I can’t help but feel like there is an underlying agenda, which allows him (in his own mind) to justify bending these harsh truths to fit that agenda.
Great assessment, and I think many humans like the idea of everything being “love and light and we are all oneness”, etc.. but it’s simply not the case for a large chunk of humanity, even in present times and especially the past.
Anybody who thinks that every culture and society, whether 1st or 3rd world, is just misunderstood and all open arms to everyone and everything, simply hasn’t traveled enough…and if they have traveled, they’ve stayed on resort grounds lol.
I think it’s more to do with his world view and less about furthering a Great agenda.
They either lack the ability to contextualize reality or they simply never experienced it in the first place.
Very hard to watch your videos only once. The sheer amount of information you impart can be overwhelming. I still continue to listen (twice), because I feel I am learning important information. History changes, or seems to change, because new sources are discovered
I appreciate that thanks
Is that an Amiga behind you? The old-timey monitor caught my eye first, then the 2-colored keyboard/machine itself.
Amiga 500, fully funcional!
This was really a sign of things to come. Can't wait for your response to his new video.
I unsubscribed from Invicta awhile back due to his forceful nature of his ideology.
If he removes himself from the equation and delivers us a truthful and open minded historical take and I will consider subscribing again.
But that ideology is only based on emotions and is therefore naturally revolutionary, so it can't be separated from everything
Yeah his latest (a few years back now) quite the how to say nicer the woke version of reality which never should collide with history...
Kings and Generals seem more biased to me. They've created maps that aren't quite accurate, such as those depicting the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, where they include, for example, the Ionian islands, which were almost never part of the empire.
They oscillate between portraying Alexander sometimes as Greek and other times as Greek-like. They generally focus only on battles, ignoring other historical events that contribute more to society than just wars, which has always bothered me. They seem to cater more to history enthusiasts rather than focusing on academic topics, unlike Metatron who focuses on real academic works.
At least Invicta delves into details about the daily lives, diets, and perspectives of people from that time period, adopting a more documentary-style approach. Unlike Kings and Generals, who tend to attract a more nationalistic audience.
@@ChronosHellas wasn't Macedonia greek-like? at least that's how I remember it being mentioned, I believe in Plato sourcewise. They are sufficiently Greek, that you could say they are Greek and no one would complain, but if you were to distuinguish them from Greece it wouldn't be that unusual, as a Macedonian, I wouldn't be surprised Alexander is in the same sort of consideration.
@@voxsvoxs4261It's uncommon to consider Macedon as a distinct entity. Philip was a member of the Amphictyonic League, an exclusive Greek association. The Macedonians participated in the Olympics, and their dynasty, the Temenid/Argead, has its roots in Argos, the birthplace of the Virginia star. Moreover, the Pella Curse Tablet unequivocally establishes the Macedonians as Greek which they would either speak Dorian or Elean.
The assertion about kings and generals purposefully avoiding upsetting Western Bulgarian viewers is real, kings and general lacks academic credibility at times, even Metatron acknowledges that Makedon is Greek, which is why I place more trust in his channel over those catering to casual history enthusiasts. It doesn’t take much to understand that following only Demosthenes (a politician) is a criminal offense to the history.
Excellent Lecture . Again I'm in awe of the amount of established historical records utilized .
Keep in mind that you are likely interacting with people informed by critical race theory. The words they use don't mean what the average person considers them to mean, and they jump between definitions as is convenient for them. Words like "racism" mean something different to them. They are dissimulating when they use words with their own occult definitions within their critical theories.
Hope your mum's doing okay Raff coming up to the 6th anniversary on losing my mum to pancreatic cancer which happened so quickly in a matter of weeks we barely had chance to say goodbye , Anyway I'm xing my fingers for your mum and I'm hoping that losing mine puts the odds higher for your mum beating this because of odds n chances ❤
Numerous people on Reddit and online promote the myth that the Romans only despised Northern Europeans and loved and felt close to Middle Easterners. According to the primary sources, this is not really the case. The Romans said both negative and positive things about Germanic or Celtic people, as well as all other people they met. In fact, the Romans said many disparging and bad stuff about the Near Easteners, the Carthaginians, and, to a lesser extent, the Greeks. It also appears that Romans disliked Syrians and hellenized Antotalians the most, believing them to be soft and effeminate. Juvenal, for example, mocked Ethiopians' dark complexions and chastised Romans for adopting Egyptian gods. Tacitus, for example, disliked Jews, and Cicero disliked both Syrians and Jews. Tacitus, on the other hand, praised the Germanic tribes for their simple lives and referred to them as noble, brave, and virtuous people. Moreover, some native Romans sounded like these white Americans or Europeans because they complained about Rome being run over by immigrants from Syria or Greece. Juvenal wrote about a Roman who lament about seeing hardly native Romans in Rome, and another author wrote that native Roman women prefer to flirt with all the foreign men rather than with true Romans.
Kind of makes you wonder where all those migrants went after the collapse of the Western empire, since genetics shows Europeans are genetically distinct from West Eurasians. There's some marginal crossover among Sicilians, but that's about it.
@@entropybear5847 Europeans, especially Southern Europeans aren’t actually distinct from Near easterners since Southern Europeans have the largest ancient Middle Eastern Farmer DNA share compared to the rest, which is why they even look more like them than they do to Northern Europeans
@@entropybear5847 Something something "average European disagreement" but don't worry the governments of Europe today totally aren't painting the way for a modern "European disagreement" to happen to these MENA, South Asians and Africans causing a load of problems.
Far too many people's brains can only think back to the transatlantic slave trade and the American Civil rights movement, and so completely miss huge swaths of history that make many of their conclusions seem pretty silly.
Thank you for showing a link to the original video in the video description box (it was even in beginning of the description). So many people don't provide a link.
Projecting our own norms and perceptions into the past is an erroneous practice.
We humans have always noted differences and identified ourselves with those who look, sound and behave like us.
Finally! Someone tackles this channel.
I didn't know what to think of it, youtubers are my gateway knowledge levels on a given topic. I only read about stuff if it interests me further.
That's why spreading falsehoods by youtubers is so dangerous - I may never face the lies they told.
Then I recommend viewing all youtube historians as simply being entertainment.
Honestly, the entire profession should be regarded as such. The same is true for most areas of academia.
Spreading "falsehoods" is not dangerous, what nonsense are you babbling about? The intent behind the falsehoods are what would make them dangerous, not the falsehoods themselves. There's nothing wrong making mistake or not getting stuff 100% correct, but if the intent is to educate and entertain, then the achievement is likely to be watchers being inspired to look further into the subject and find out for themselves the different perspectives and understandings of the facts that are out there. These medias ARE NOT educational per se, it is only so incidentally : they are ENTERTAINMENT. If you want facts, STUDY the history yourself, read the accredited experts and keep reading on.
@@gratefulguy4130Agree, but the sad truth is that entertainment has bigger reach than scholary works and most people acquire views about the topics the entertainment talks about through movies and such.
Because of this fact, the entertainment is a war zone for ideologs to spread their propaganda (Cleopatra) and should be considered a war zone by honest scholars as well if we are to see any historical accuracy in common perception whatsoever.
@@gratefulguy4130 Yeah lets just regard an entire profession has entertainment , when they spend years studying and producing knowledge, and then expand to the rest of academia , yakes.
@@gratefulguy4130Wow, amazing.
I had a reply to you. A normal, agreeing reply furthering the point.
It's gone now. Yet again, youtube decided to punish its user for using some word no one even considers offensive and I have no clue which of my words that could be. How fun to interact with this site.
The idea that race and culture are separate is one of the most deep-seated modern misconceptions. The culture can influence race (through promoting selection of individuals with certain traits), and the race can influence the culture (because of the racial traits, and the connection of race and environment, environment can influence the culture)
Good video aside, as usual, I just love that Metatron is so into his Latin roleplaying that he pronounced it Inwikta when prolly all the planet (OP included) pronounces it as it is written.
Thanks for the video.
I must have missed something because, to me there is nothing new or surprising in the fact that the racism from the elite castes is always more "sophisticated" and more logically contextualized than the one of the masses. It must be my bias but I always believed it was something quite universal. As to me the simple idea of castes is the true basis to any racism. Henceforth I believe it's the same everywhere and everywhen as "castes" are everywhere and everywhen. It must look simplisitic as hell and now I feel like an idiot :/
Well thanks for helping me shaping my own ideas better.
I really love your work.
Before Darwin, races were closely linked to ethnicities, so there were hundreds of races. After Darwin, we only have about 5.
Genetics seems to concur with Darwin.
It seems a shame there's a massive push to erase human diversity by trying to stir us all up together into a vague monoculture.
Which loose a lot of its senses considering how many natives tribes there is all over the world, that don't look like each others
Excellent work. I had a similar (if vastly less articulate) reaction to the Invicta work. The issue of the latter mainly being the imposition, in overly black and white terms, of a culture versus phenotype contrast between racial attitudes, Rome to today. Race, in the end,, ends up being a mere word, to which Invicta saw a differing treatment in the ancient world, which then misled him thus. It did this because back then there was not as developed sense of the arbitrary nature of cultural formation, and thus no concept of culture other than better culture ("our culture") and worse culture (all other cultures) for which the word "race" could be swapped in easily. This, to Metatron's point, does not mean phenotype was nothing back then.
At 7:40, though, I'd differ, since the rather violent actions have a more profound cause in superstition/myth than animosity based on phenotype directly. Phenotypic aversion may have been merely an opportunity for a myths making, of, by the way, a fairly poetic kind - dark=dark. Then humans - ones in an anxious scenario, by the way, took the myth very seriously. Add the ancient lower regard for life in general, and, wa-lah.
I would like to see Metatron do a video about the Eastern Roman Empire(history,military,politics etc)
You 2 are actually my favorite roman historical channels
There are actual American historians who (through weird, perverse form of American Exceptionalism) will argue that Race, as a concept, was invented in the Americas. Accredited people with PhDs and everything, and they're just shockingly ignorant.
Their entire argument hinges on an etymological shift, that the English word "race" was probably used for the first time to distinguish between servants who were European and those were African, and before that "race" was used in more vague and variable ways. But the concept clearly existed prior to that, and other words have been used to describe these tribal and phenotypical distinctions.
The only thing US society put on steroids was the post Darwinist approach to race, the "science" one. Pseudoscientists of race in America were the non plus ultra , 3rd Reich and apartheid in SA were hugely influenced by them ...They did produce terrible consequences and must be addressed but not to the extent of saying "oh such a happy party human history before Columbus stepped on new world/ Darwin travelled on the Beagle ". People today in the rush to propaganda just lose context
This just in: Exact meanings and perceptions of words used to describe social phenomena change over thousands of years!
Yeah, obviously the Roman's didn't have a word that was an exact translation of the modern "race" and meant the same exact thing a white slave owner would have seen it as during the era of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, or as we see it now. That's also true for almost every other word to describe social concepts that change over time. Are there words that we have that truly encapsulate the Roman understanding of Plebeian vs Patrician? Probably not, and what's more, the Romans probably didn't see class exactly like we do, but that doesn't mean that the Romans had no conception of socio-economic strata and saw a Claudii to be equal to a random hobo.
The point is that the driving factor (racism) existed for the same general reasons that it exists today: the inhumanity of mankind. The trappings and details of their racism were dependent on the circumstances they were in, just as it is today, and just as it always has been. It's ridiculous to expect that they would be identical to what we have today, and even more ridiculous to pretend that because they aren't, it means racism or race didn't exist in the past.
Well said.
A youtube response in a respectful manner between fellow history lovers :O
I thank you very much for that ! Quite interessting
Invicta has been declining for a while imo. I can't take their video on the Sacred Band seriously and their obsession with gay Greeks.
Just another channel run by liberals degenerating into projecting modern liberal sensibilities.
Seethe guys greeks existed and were very common
@@undary0u That must be why ancient greeks called each other homosexuals as an insult, huh?
@@jonperry4580Just like today, genius
I think you’re brilliant, fair and reasonable. I enjoy your videos. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻💕🇨🇦
Correct me if i've misread anything, though i'll add I'm pretty sure one of the biggest religions in the modern world (Christianity) stems from accepting both Jews and Gentiles into the kingdom of Heaven (Galations 3). If i recall, this ideology in the faith was very countercultural to the cultures at the time, both Jewish and Roman, so we can indirectly know just from this that the Roman's DID care about race, since the people who did preach interracial brotherhoods caused such controversy. The Jews at the time felt similarly, as that was why the story of the good samaritan was so significant. I think Invicta's grasping for straws a bit lol
I used to be subbed to Invicta, then they took a Temu sponsorship.
Septimius Severus did not hate Ethiopians, but he was superstitious because the color black was associated with death in ancient Roman culture. Keep in mind that Septimius merely ordered that the Ethiopian be removed from his sight because he was afraid, whereas the native Romans were terrified and beyond shocked since they even more superstitious than Severus, and they killed the Ethiopian who appeared out of nowhere.Aside from this context, Ethiopians could move and live in Rome alongside everyone else without being attacked.
I'm just going to leave this here. There's a reason that Africans were so rare in Europe for millennia until modern imperialism. And trust me it's not a good reason.
I love how you pronounce Cicero - NEVER heard it pronounced that way. 😊
When people criticize racism nowadays, they're usually thinking not of casual racism or phobic racism, but systemic racism. They're thinking of racism practiced by a government, either directly or indirectly. While the Roman Empire had racist citizens, its government did not enforce racial policies the way the United States, South Africa, or Nazi Germany did. So the Roman society was not COLLECTIVELY racist.
The increasingly popularity of the "colonial race construct" theory is annoying. It takes contemporary interpretation to explain the entire history of human interactions....and to plug "america bad because europe was bad" . Humans have been dismissive of each other since day 1, way before some ass 0 tried to constraint political and economical power of the mix children of Haitians and south Americans. And if you think just a little, this was just a product of the extremely hereditary nature of these societies.... applied in a sh!tty fashion but still a continuity of their own laws and customs wich are meant to achieve the same objectives at home....with less overt violence of course.
thank you for fighting misinformation!!
That modern idea about ancient people not seeing what we call race always seemed nonsensical to me. A person’s outward appearance is how human being identify and judge each other, it’s how we communicate.
I like to think that the Romans were somewhere halfway between the "I am completely colourblind" and the "one drop and you're out" extremes on the Great Scale of Racial Awareness. As most people are, probably. The fact that Mediterranean people are not as much an outlier in terms of hair colour and skin tone as northern Europeans are, on a global scale, may have helped too.
If people's appearance can be used to determine what 'people' someone is, and what people they are ('culture' if you prefer) can be used to make statements about their moral character, then how exactly is this different then the modern concept of racism?
Keeping it simple: modern racism comes out of Darwinism (Darwin himself probably disagreed) but once evolution theory stepped in , it became "who evolved further from apes?" And ended up with the answer being the Northern white Europeans" and providing whiteness charts. This was on tv shows in the US, still in the 50s and 60s.
Ancient racism was more tribal. The better wasn't a particular skin tone. It was being my friend or at least an enemy of my enemy for land , survival and wealth conquest. Everyone against everyone not just "evil whitey oppressing blacks". And apes weren't in the script. Now there is a huge confusion but in Romans time you were inferior if you could not speak Greek and especially if you messed / resisted/ rebelled against the Empire. No matter how you could look. P.s. for the Ethiopian soldier, it's the same pattern with albinism or handicap especially in rural / traditional areas in Africa , if you are different from what we are used to and know it's ok with health and ordinary events, you must be a problem/curse/bad omen.
@@elleanna5869 Charles Darwin lived 1809-1882. Was no one racist before the 1800s? The African slave trade started in the 1400s. So are you telling me there was no racism involved in that until Darwin published his famous book in 1859? What about all the colonization that happened before that time? Personally, I think you are wrong. None of us can go back to Rome to really talk to people about their thoughts so I guess we’ll just keep disagreeing
@@opinionater9388 Yes, it is wrong. Not only because of time but also region... were Arabs not racist? Iranians revolted against their Arab rulers not too long after the muslim conquests because of their racism. And are the Chinese for example not racist? I doubt they use a measure of "whiteness" to prove their racial superiority... People who think "white vs black" is strictly modern and didn't exist really need to open a history book; and people who think racism only involves white people being racist... also really need to open a history book.
@@opinionater9388 The African slave trade wasn't a product of racism rather racism in the Americas was a product of the African slave trade. The African slave trade existed for centuries before Europeans began colonizing the Americas. West African nations sold other Africans as slaves to the North African countries ruled by Islam. When the Europeans began to colonize the Americas and decided that slave plantations were the best way to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by the agricultural products available there they went to the existing, closest slave market in Africa.
@@Mammel248
The best examples of racism existing in Muslim history are:
1. The Holy Prophet having to tell people that blacks and whites, Arabs and non-Arabs, are all equal, and explaining to them that Bilal the Abyssinian was equal to them.
2. The Umayyads literally inventing all the modern stereotypes which American racists use when talking about black people. (violent tendencies, excessive desire for food and sex, criminality, stupidity; those ideas go back to the people who killed Husayn, not to America and Europe)
I don't know if this is why I'm subscribed to your channel but I absolutely hate when people glorify the past incorrectly as if humans wasn't pieces of shit back when and even worse at killing each other over #insert reason.
Ethiopian person: exists.
Romans: now this is an avenger level threat.
Hey Metatron man. Would you be interested in looking into homosexuality in Reneissance age (XV -XVI) Italy and particularly under the patronage of the house Medici? My Art History teacher never misses a beat in mentioning anything related to sex if it's pertaining homosexuality and I was wondering if she was right in doing that or if I'm right in being cynical instead of skeptical?
These things never stop, ranging from her preaching about ancient greece as "gay utopia" up untill now when we are going through Dutch and Flemish late reneissance.
XoXo in advance!
Based on the Greek portrayal she is most likely lying.
There were so many homosexuals in Italy during that time that they had to create a special police force called the Office of the night whose only job was to catch sodomites, you can literally google it
makes sense especially on how rome expanded across the peninsula aggressively refusing to give citizenship rights to other latin tribes to retain a strong roman identity / culture and political power, instead of being assimilated into the surrounding tribal cultures eventually being forced by the social wars to give citizenship rights.
I adore that the presenter uses classical pronunciation! "Kikero" all the way!
He's the whole deal, not just a presenter.
I think the takeaway from this should be the ancient peoples lived and saw things different to way we see things . Stereotype are given in human race especially in more advanced cultures throughout history and still today . I think for people to think racism is less than 200 year old phenomenon is delusional there would being other forms or prejudice instead or Aswel as that the fact the human race dislikes different. You just have take indigenous African or Native American or Polynesian’s when they first saw the European it would totally alien concept for them . Another good thought provoking video .
It is even worse. People believe that racism is an european invention that no non-European culture was racist. That's wrong. Racism even the kind of racism which plagues societies to day is as old as mankind and exist everywhere.
Actually I think you got it mixed up. I think modern people are troubled by the delusion WE'RE substantially different from the ancients. Nothing meaningful has actually changed in human psychology. Nothing at all. We're the exact same, and the inability to make peace with that seems to be causing us lots of neurosis as societies.
18 emperors were born in nowadays Serbia.
Most of them were Romans, not Serbs
thank you ! for using Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's De Architectura book 6 on climate , i have been using this now for the last 3 years , not to demonstrate racism but rather an understanding for it's time that the Romans felt themselves very different from the rest of the surrounding nations
Glad you did this metatron
"I don't care what they tell you in school Septimus Severus was black."
Why are only Europeans constantly slandered about their cultures and heritage? Makes me wonder if there’s something far more sinister at play. It’s quite despicable how much the world feels the need to oppress one type of look which is the Anglo Saxon/Germanic ethnicities…and hold the rest at a lower level due to lack of success across the world vs that of the Europeans.
Noticing a trend you might say?
@@LS-jv9hp
Precisely
@17:40 "Well yeah, but they look like giant mozerella cheeses." -- Metatron about white people, 2024.
What do you expect from Invicta after making a special video for pride month ... I am not doubting his main content, it is just that I think he gets some advantages or is required to make videos on these topics ... a shame really
It was a mostly good video though.
Personal opinion here ... I see a big difference in differentiation based on physical characteristics and discrimination / ranking based on those characteristics.
Differentiation would be saying something like "you can pick her out in a crowd because her appearance is different."
Discrimination is when you use someone's appearance to assume they are inferior solely based on that appearance.
The modern definition of racism is discrimination ... claiming one race or another is inferior solely because they are of that race.
I don't know enough about Rome to know whether the prevailing attitude was differentiation or discrimination, but it sounds like it was mostly the first. Sure, some people were racist in the modern sense, but it also sounds like they were on the fringe, and the attitude of most people in power was "we don't care about someone's looks or background, if they contribute to the glory of Rome, they're good people."
People have been noticing the differences between the species and the races since time immemorial. Sometimes people overlooked the differences, and often they did not. But it's not like they were blind.
It says a lot about the modern ideological environment that we as a society are struggling with something the ancients didn't even need to give a second thought to because it was so apparent. Perhaps all the screens and other distractions are negatively effecting modern humanity's ability to parse reality...this compulsion to reject the evidence of our eyes...
Yeah
I can't even predict the things my convict cichlids will do by gender. The more complex a creature, the less behavior is genetically fixed. I've had males defend the fry beyond when the female gave up on the few remaining fry; I've currently got a female that's beating up any other fish, including her mate that gets near her six or seven surviving babies. These particular fish are quite inbred at this point, so genetically quite similar. Humans don't do the inbreeding thing to that level. Assuming we're preprogrammed behaviorially as complex as we are is kinda problematic. Rough trends, but we're not line bred pure bloods, any of us.
@@RebeccaOre not everyone is a boomer hippy like you
Racism has always been political, even racist ideologies, like nazism, made exceptions for political reasons
Placing modern day post modernist critical race theory onto history and attitudes of those of the past is a problem.
Critical race theory is one thing, but racial discriminatory behaviour based on phenotypic variants definitely existed and removing it from the past is a problem too.
Catullus wrote a poem where he says about support for Caesar "I don't care if you are a white man or a black man ...". This comes across as Catullus emphasising his own liberal attitude. But this implies there were other people who were non liberal and would support people based on racial appearance.
Hey there Metatron, I want to ask if there are any historical clues to if there were at lest some instances of romans having equiped at least the most elite soldiers with both Lorica hamata and Lorica segmentata. Using plate armor on top of the mail armor like in medieval times. Thanks
You are THE BEST pedagogue ive ever seen. BY FAR.
Another great video, although I have a minor disagreement with your last point regarding the provincial Roman Emperors. While it is true that the early provincial emperors had familial and even blood ties with Italian families, by the third century, this was no longer a requirement. For example, the so called "Illyrian emperors" were not of Italian ancestry and depending on how far you want to take it from then on, Roman Emperors had no ethnic ties to "Italy" whatsoever. They climbed the ladder of power by military service, or in other words, merit.
"the so called "Illyrian emperors" were not of Italian ancestry"
Right. So I guess romans didn't fuck their way through conquered lands, nor did they colonize or migrate at all within the empire? No, they all had "Italian" ancestry and they for sure all looked roman. And you are just missing the entire point I think. Metatron said what he said as an answer to idiots claiming that some Emperors weren't romans by fact of not being born in Italy, and some going as far as claiming they were of different skin color or different culture. Metatron countered this claim by pointing to the fact that Emperors born out of Italy were still born from Roman family, and that is still true for Emperors born in Illyricum. Obviously, not all Emperors were born from good, wealthy and ancient roman family, but that's just moving the goalpost.
As for your Italy remark, you are just being disingenuous. You know perfectly well what Metatron meant.
What do you mean when you say: "Roman Emperors had no ethnic ties to "Italy" whatsoever"?
IT seems people forget that Romans colonize ,for crying Out loud the Legions Pension was retirement on Farmland Most of IT IS in the provinces
@@laisphinto6372 It is not that they forget, they just don't know their history and what little they know is from UA-cam channels like Kings and Generals or Netflix documentaries like Cleopatra or Alexander.
The illyrian emperors were descendents of roman colonisers in illyria. Sure they would likely have been taking culturaly romanised locals as wives but they were still descended from Italian romans.
By your standard everyone in the USA today would be native american.
Even in India- Punjab, Sindh and Gujarat particularly, Greek slaves were sought after. Since enslaving Indians (or the Arya atleast) wasn't allowed and other ethnicities weren't seen as sophisticated and educated.
in ancients times nobody knew what a gene was, but a lot of noble peoples went to great lengths in rising cattle, and so they understood pretty well the process of inheriting traits.
I have read in some books thou that such people were of the race of hector, or some other person, so then one single man could start a whole race? race must have been a similar but also different idea.
I would classify this as ancient/historical Propaganda. Gaius Julius Caesar, says he's from the House of Julia which means he's a Trojan descendant and more importantly that the god Mars is great Grand Daddy, it's used to justify Power cause it Sounds better to be a pseudo god than Just a regular human.
I think in that Case ist the wronf Word and Family is a better fit.
Distinguishing is a good word to enable the use of classification. celebrated, well-known or eminent because of past achievements; prestigious
Why do people say "lived experience"?
Is not ALL experience lived?
Nah - you can "live" a range of emotions just by reading a good book or historical documents. You've experienced the story or knowledge 2nd hand by reading about it. But you, yourself, haven't lived it. Same could be said about those who documented their own society. We might know how Aristotle lived and saw his world - but we don't know how the guy sweeping the streets felt about his world.
@Raggmopp-xl7yf You lived the experience of Reading a story. That does not make it your experience.
Even second hand experience is a non secular as what you experienced was the observation itself.
@@UncleMikeDrop I guess I view it as theoretical vs practical knowledge.
@@UncleMikeDrop I'm sorry, but after I wrote my comment I pictured one of those, "Theoretically that should have worked," and, "Well, obviously NOT since it just blew up!" moments and I'm laughing.
What would be the alternative(s) to lived experience. Perceived? But how is that different than lived. What one person thinks tastes good another person wouldnt. If you tell someone that something happened theyre eventually going to believe it even if it never happened.
Unlived experiences? How does that work?
Lived or perceived or whatever you want to call it it still doesnt change the question of why the need for the quantifiers "lived" "perceived" etc. When we talk about Hercules (fictional character) experiencing hardship because of his labors we are talking about his experiences which are separate from our own. I can experience sympathy for what he went through but unless I reenact his labors I cant experience what he went through I can only imagine what he went through. I can experience sympathy for the people who lived in Pompeii.
Arent we guilty of modernism assuming peoples "lived" experiences. Writers from every era have wrote conflicting things.
A Nubian in Egypt was seen as a Nubian, not an Egyptian, regardless of how long their lineage might have been there. If anything race mattered more in the ancient world, since blood lines and tribal ties were much more pronounced and important to an individual before the age of absolutism smashed the family unit to replace it with adherence to the crown/state/corporation.
Rome was a multicultural empire, but that doesn't mean citizens did not judge one another by their racial appearances. Even among the peninsula born Romans, there was a massive difference between who was considered a "true" Roman, and Italians, or Sicilians. Race was incredibly important to the Romans. They simply just had no problem letting non-Romans join the legions and die for the wealth of the Roman Elite.
I find it to be a bit strange that anyone thinks that certain evils, or sin, if you prefer, are new. Like ancient people didn't feel the things we feel, greed, avarice, desire for power, jealousy, fear of the unknown or unfamiliar, and all of the other dark things humans are capable of.
The Quran disproves your point.
If you think greed is new, you haven't read about the man named Qarun, a greedy man in Ancient Egypt who refused to join the Exodus of Moses.
If you think jealousy is new, you know neither the story of Lucifer who refused to prostrate to Adam, nor do you know the story of Cane killing Able out of jealousy.
Desire for power is seen in Nimrod, who was trying to challenge God and trying to make people think he was the only god, yet he failed thanks to Abraham.
Conversely I don't get why people presume that modern people are substantially different and virtuous. Or that percieved virtue is likewise novel.
Psychologically modern humans have been around for a long time.
@I-io8eemodern ideas like people reduce themselves to a skin color and voluntarily segregating while not even understanding the difference between species, race and ethnicity 😂 I think ancient people might have had some insight that modern times have lost.
sorry about the innapropropriate word i think i was quoting an eighteenth century translation. what i meant to say was that in juvenal's second satire he does specifically mention a distinction between black and white when criticising roman hipocrisy.