- NEW!
by curtd59 on March 28th, 2010
The Itals were a Danubian-river based tribe that moved into the "italian" peninsula what was occupied at the time, at least in the north, by the Etruscans, sometime around three thousand years ago. Rome was the name of the city, so called after the mythical founder "Romulus". Since the people were from the tribe Ital, the name of the peninsula was called 'Italia' - 'the land of the Itals. Just like Germania, or Gallia (the land of the Germans, or the land of the Gauls.) Just as we have 'nations' that represent people with tribal similarities, people in the ancient world did too. They just moved around quite a bit so land was just called by whatever tribe lived there. Sometimes one tribe would move across one tribe's land to get to different land. Land was more plentiful back then because there were fewer people. So, in the Roman empire, on the Italian peninsula, in the city of Rome, people could be roman citizens. Some people could be members of the Ital tribe. But most Romans were NOT members of the Ital tribe, and instead were from many tribes. Current genetic sampling of italians shows that the southern part of the country is largely Greek, while the northern part is largely germanic. You could be a Roman without being an Ital just like you can be an American without being of English heritage. Just as today, we use the term 'American' to mean people who live in a political structure on a piece of land, they used the term 'Roman' the same way - as a means of politically uniting people who do not really have the same culture, feelings, sentiments, desires or ambitions into a single system of trade, tax and law. The USA is a large place with at least six major cultures, as such the USA is an empire in the same way that the Roman empire was an empire. It is a government over multiple cultures. Most empires (except for china) fall apart over time because of these cultural differences. Think of Rome as the people who picked up after the fall of Greek civilization, the way Americans picked up after the fall of European civilization. That's what the world wars were: the fall of european civilization.
So the answer is, that the Italian peninsula has been called 'italia' for a very long time. The Roman empire was based in the city of Rome. There were a lot of roman citizens who were governed by the city of Rome. When rome fell, and could no longer govern, it eventually became a very small place with very few people living there. So rome disappeared, but Italia remained. People stopped calling themselves Romans, and started calling themselves italian after their language, or calling themselves by the name of their city.
by Brian on March 5th, 2010
Ok so I'll answer my own question as nobody seems to have an answer: The Romans became Italians when the Jews started Christianising them!
How many years did the punic wars last?
by Answerbag Staff on April 20th, 2011
| 1 person likes this
Who was the ruler from Babylon who created a code of conduct?
by Answerbag Staff on May 28th, 2010
| 1 person likes this
Were dinosaurs just the feral giant dairy herd of a previous civilization?
by Ombliss22 on November 25th, 2011
| 1 person likes this
How many years did the punic wars last?
by Answerbag Staff on May 18th, 2010
| 1 person likes this
Do you think that the Phoenicians (Canaanites) got a bad reputation by biblical slander?
by Nightkeeper on October 3rd, 2011
| 1 person likes this
You're reading When/How/why did the Romans become Italians?
Your favorite Q&A site is on Facebook! Become a fan to connect with the ever-growing community of Answerbaggers, share your thoughts and find out what Answerbag's up to next!
Comments
Thanks for the answer; it's quite interesting how these names/labels come about...the question was more tongue in cheek though.
by Brian on March 31st, 2010
Then, from a tongue-in-cheek perspective, the italians are a mess as a culture and as a nation.
The north is germanic and european, and the south greek and mediterranean. The culture is rife with corruption at every level. Crime and petty theft in the south are a way of life. And the only way to systemically fix the problem is to break the country into two different states, north and south, so that the north does not have to support the south.
The reason for their 'italian' behavior is a combination of factors, but primarily, when trade moved from the mediterranean to the atlantic, the people maintained their ethos without having the money to support that ethos. This was also true of spain, which was a hard working country until the wealth of the new world habituated the culture to hedonism. the other reason is the level of corruption, which is not quite Slavic, but still terrible. THe people gave up on their Civic ethos, because the state became a vehicle for corruption. Democracy has been terrible for italy because it has reinforced rather than corrected the corruption in both political and personal, ethical life.
Men in particular demonstrate that you do not want a maternal culture (italy is maternal) because of what it does to men - makes them useless. To be a catholic and maternal culture is as bad as being a byzantine culture. Of course from their perspective, it's a better quality of personal life, even if it is a poorer quality of political and economic life.
It is very hard for societies to regain discipline once they have lost it. You must create a class that has status and wealth, yet have that class open to expansion (Japan and china), not closed (Mexico for example, in fact, most of south america). This only occurs when the population has a civic or tribal ethos instead of an individualistic, familial, or class ethos (antagonistic). Because a polity cannot have the cultural institutions necessary to insure that the HABITS of prosperity are adopted by the culture as it transforms. Human nature is tribal. It is our HABITS that allow us to create market civilizations and the prosperity that comes with them because of the division of knowledge and labor that markets permit, and the extraordinary decline in prices that they create and maintain.
Contrary to popular belief, diversity makes people increasingly less egalitarian and charitable. For pretty obvious reasons.
You must have a class of people who forgo the opportunity for corruption (treating position as property to be exploited) as a way of funding the advancement of the collective. THe problem is, corruption is a prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have to be incorruptible in the class that has political and economic power. And the remaining people must eschew adopting corruption as well. This appears to be possible only if the ethos of the culture is one that encourages tribal benefit, racial benefit or national benefit.
by curtd59 on April 1st, 2010