The second volume of David Pace’s Back to the Future series will be published this fall with Crown Publishing. Based on his highly popular blog, the series looks at fascinating parallels between today’s world and that of the ancient Romans. Volume Two links the unravelling of the Roman Republic through the increasing power of the mob to the revolutions of the present day brought on by social media.
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Welcome to Paceromana
This is the official website of historian David Pace, where ancient Rome is a place not of the past, but of the future. Launched in the dying days of the 2nd millenium and still going strong.
The Natives are Restless
The problem of dealing with aboriginal cultures who happen to be occupying land we would like to get our hands on is one that goes back to the very foundations of human civilizations. Think of the Canaanites, inconveniently occupying the coveted lands that Yahweh had promised to the Hebrews. What followed was a massacre of the sort that remains familiar to us in our own time in events such as the Armenian holocaust or the ethnic cleansings of the Balkan Wars.
The Romans were no strangers to ethnic cleansing. Initially reluctant conquerors, fighting mainly just to secure their own borders, eventually they fell victim to the lust for land, particularly in cases, as with the Samnites, where early defeats had bred a powerful urge for revenge. A fairly usual practice on taking over the lands of the particularly bellicose was to kill off the fighting menfolk and sell the women and children into slavery, thus effectively emptying the land to be parcelled off to Roman soldiers and noblemen and ensuring there would be no descendants around to seek revenge.
Today we think of these methods as particularly brutal, and yet they had the advantage of being clear and final. Compare our own treatment of the aboriginals of the so-called New World, and it is unlikely, when the tally is done, that much would remain to us in the way of moral high ground.
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