The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies

Reading histories of Rome&#x27;s collapse mainly taught me to be skeptical of historians. At every period Rome&#x27;s collapse was attributed to the <i>cause du jour</i> ignoring all the contrary evidence.

After listening to Mike Duncan&#x27;s excellent &quot;History of Rome&quot; podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist&#x2F;classist&#x2F;etc they had trouble. Their periods of greatest success were when they let people with the necessary skills and talent rise to the top regardless of their origin.<p>That said, they definitely had problems with failing to culturally assimilate immigrants during the late empire -- when &quot;citizens&quot; of the empire didn&#x27;t think of themselves as Roman but instead primarily part of some other group.

The presentation of this article is really nice. I’ve only seen it on mobile. It feels like a reading experience. There was one weird thing with a paragraph’s font that was suddenly bolded. It had a link in white without text decorations, but also bolded. The green text and white link started giving me the effect of flashing.<p>Anyways, I think this site shows that even text-heavy content can be presented online in a visually pleasing way.

Does Bret realize that private bills were in fact a common method of naturalizing people up until the 40s or so?

Rome fell because their economy depended on expansion of the empire and managing a huge empire is hard when you don&#x27;t have Internet. God bless the Internet.