Should there be Roman culture on the map in the new DLC?

[Patricius]

Out of curiosity, when did the Roman culture die out (by that I mean completely evolve into the various Romance Cultures)?

A descendant, a Count Syagrius, of the Rex Romanorum Syagrius, a ruler of Roman holdout in the north of Gaul, was an envoy to the Byzantine in the late sixth century. A further descendant was a donor of a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy the late eight century. A genuine ability to trace a verifiable Roman ancestry as opposed to a legendary Roman ancestry which some medieval lords might claim, might betoken some cultural survivals. However, once Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius held the last consulship for the city of Rome, once the Senate disappeared as something recognisable to Romans, once the civilian life of a Roman aristocrat became impossible, when Roman nobles became indistinguishable from Germanic military aristocrats, a Roman culture could hardly survive. It's hard to see much surviving the mid seventh century, certainly in the west.

 

[anomanderus]

I see that a lot of people seem to think Roman culture should be synonymous with high imperial culture, which would make the culture of various stages of the republic non-Roman by that token

 

[Ashagar]

Indeed and while some roman cultural was also urban and military centric and rural especially in Italy, with central Italy being the heart and around their colonies across their empire where they settled their legionaries.

 

[Gurluas]

Sardinia might have some Roman culture still, they held on a lot of Roman traditions and such.

 

[Slavicist]

Out of curiosity, when did the Roman culture die out (by that I mean completely evolve into the various Romance Cultures)?

Never; we still have it today (French, Italians, Spanish,..).

 

[Gurluas]

Never; we still have it today (French, Italians, Spanish,..).

That's like saying Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic is Norse.
It's not, it's descended from Norse but it has evolved into something else.

 

[Shadrol]

I think since when we talk about Roman culture, we think of pre christian Rome. A republican and empirial Rome between ~300 BC and AD. So the culture drasticly changed after Rome became christian and even then the Christians especially the catholic/western/latin-rite held up a latin tradition. With Latin being relevant well into the 16th century. As a common language of the people this is of course not true. But I think by 768 the peoples culture changed enough not to be considered Roman anymore.

 

[Joemit]

I always think of 4th and 5th century Romans when someone says Roman. It always looks cooler with the big invasions and wars and stuff, even if they probably weren't that big in real life.

 

[Gaudry]

Could make Arch-Bishops and the Pope Roman and possibly even the county of Rome as well, Traditional Roman to repressent the church sticking with old traditions more then the ruler outside the church. Would at lest give the player the option of restoring a traditional roman culture to the game without making it an all inclusive culture that would gobble up the French, Germans, Italians and others.

 

[anomanderus]

That's like saying Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic is Norse.
It's not, it's descended from Norse but it has evolved into something else.

No, that isn't true at all. The Norse are still Nordic, the Latins are still Latin. We literally wouldn't be having this debate if Napoleon had won his wars and conquered Europe, making France the new standard for Latin.

Is Arabic culture still Arabic? They have a "standard language" right? Except that Iraqi, Moroccan and Egyptian are all mutually unintelligible, like Italian and French and Spanish. The difference between the Arabic languages and the Latin languages is that the Arabs have not bothered to standardize their vernaculars into written forms.

 

[Gurluas]

No, that isn't true at all. The Norse are still Nordic, the Latins are still Latin. We literally wouldn't be having this debate if Napoleon had won his wars and conquered Europe, making France the new standard for Latin.

Is Arabic culture still Arabic? They have a "standard language" right? Except that Iraqi, Moroccan and Egyptian are all mutually unintelligible, like Italian and French and Spanish. The difference between the Arabic languages and the Latin languages is that the Arabs have not bothered to standardize their vernaculars into written forms.

Except that they aren't.
I'm half Italian, and I don't get a word of French, and I have to struggle to understand Spanish, especially when it goes into words with an Arabic origin.
I'm also half Dane, and I struggle to understand any of the Scandinavian spoken languages. Written is easier though, especially written Norwegian.

But they're in the Latin family, and in the Nordic family, but they're no longer Latin or Norse.

 

[se77061]

That's like saying Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic is Norse.
It's not, it's descended from Norse but it has evolved into something else.

Here in America, it's plain that all of you live in the country called Scandinavia.

 

[Jokolytic]

The Veronese Riddle dates to 8th-early 9th century and contains a late form of Vulgar Latin into what would become Italian:


Se pareba boves
alba pratalia araba
albo versorio teneba
negro semen seminaba

I think the "Italian" culture in 769 should be Italo-Roman at least, and transition into Italian if a Germanic group or other ruler has ruled over territory with it for some time. Otherwise it can be revived or stagnate as is.

 

[DominusNovus]

I want to reiterate that there was no one 'Roman' or 'Latin' culture that spanned the length of the Roman political structure, from 753 BC to AD 476 (just to use the common dates). Thats why you have names like Julus in the earliest days, Julius in the late Republic, Constantius in the late empire... hell even the alphabet changed over the course of the history of Rome.

Further, the Latin spoken in different areas of the Empire varied greatly, even at the height of Classical Latin. For example, when Spain was conquered, the Latin spoken by the Romans that settled there was different than the Latin spoken by those that would conquer Gaul 100-200 years later (which is why Spanish has 'queso', from the Latin 'caeseus,' while French has 'fromage,' which comes from the Latin 'formaticum,' which was the popular word for cheese later on).

That being said, we should remember that places like Venice remained totally independent of any Germanic control until... Napoleon sold them out to Austria. So, really, if any place was going to be 'Roman' it would be places like Venice. And even they drifted away from what we would considered proper Latin. But then you look at the Popes, who were still being born to people with very Latin names (Pope Gregory was born as Gregorius Sabellus, to a man named Marcellus). Of course, we also have the problem that people were still writing everything in proper Latin, even if they speaking it entirely differently...

Add to all of that the Byzantine influences in Italy during this time period.

 

[Ciccillo Rre]

I read many good comments here, with the possible exception on the one about Sardinia whose history, also ethnographically and linguistically, is very complex.

The problem here is that the evolution from Vulgar Latin (the language spoken by everybody in the Empire since the 2nd-3rd century, probably before, and with great dialectal and geographical variations) into the modern languages has been very continuous and fluid, and it is hard to draw lines. Add to this the fact that senses of shared nationality and cultural identity are essentially modern constructs, you then get a representation of how difficult it is to give an answer to this question.

I would say this: it seems that unless it gets removed, we will have a Lombard culture on the map. I suggest that we put a "Roman" or "Latin" culture in the areas roughly correspondent to Latium, Tuscany, the Pentapolis and Sardinia and give the people there late Roman names that we can draw from the sources. In the end, we have absolutely no written material in any form of early Italian until the tenth century, the Sao ko kelle terre "parchments" (I would still classify the example above as Vulgar Latin). Lombards and these Latins would be part of the same culture group, and we would have a melting pot chain of events that makes all of these guys Italian, similar to the one that transforms both the Anglo-Saxon and the Normans into English.

 

[Slavicist]

That's like saying Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic is Norse.
It's not, it's descended from Norse but it has evolved into something else.

Precisely!

The Norse never died out.

 

[daniloy]

People always want to shoehorn the romans into every game.

 

[Federalist girl]

I would agree with the fellow that said we could chart the end of the Romans with the Justinianic invasion of Italy. Before then, it was basically the CK2 equivalent of a "Roman" cultured Italian province with an Ostrogothic king. The Roman urban culture largely survived the fall of the Western Empire, and the Goths tended to use Roman officials and bureaucrats to govern. The Senate even got a degree of its influence back, while it had withered to basically a municipal council under the late emperors.

But after the Gothic Wars destroyed Roman society and after the Lombards invaded, I think we can mark a definitive end to Roman culture. The Italians who followed were, of course, genetically the same as their predecessors -- it's just that the cultural aspects that characterized Roman society had finally broken apart. There's a degree of continuity in civic self-governance and the senatorial aristocracy filing into Church offices, but it wasn't the same as it was before Justinian mucked it up.

That said, I'm really not sure about "Lombard" being used as a majority culture in places -- should be the ruler culture, like the Normans were in 1066.

 

[Unknownkin]

Roman names seem to stick around for quite awhile. Many of the barbarian successors to Rome kept the bureaucrats and priests of the old imperial administration around, so its feasible for their to still be a romanesque culture on the map, or at least a few nobles ruling over provinces of say lombard, visigothic or frankish culture. this could definitely be the case in central Italy or Venice

 

[Ashagar]

Yes and I would note that at least in central Italy roman culture was rural as well as urban but the Justinianic invasion of Italy disrupted all aspects of life in Italy along with the massive damage, which likely explained a great deal why the romans of rome and the people of Latinum really, really didn't like the Byzathine very much.