Was Ancient Rome Proto-Fascist?

[beaver2.0]

Well, what do you think?

[Blue3]

Well, what do you mean?

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Were cavemen proto-marxists?

[Cassius]

Well, a lot of fascist movements, in particular of course the Italian fascists adopted a lot of Roman iconography (or, perhaps more accurately, what they perceived to be Roman iconography), and Mussolini liked to drape his imperial project in terms of restoring Italy to its 'glorious Roman past'. However, you've got to remember that the Roman empire in the West evaporated 1500 years prior to the emergence of modern day fascism, and appeared in a very different era of human history, before the issues and concepts that made fascism (to the extent it was ever a coherent ideology and system of government) relevant came into being. So not really.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Were cavemen proto-marxists?

Were early Carboniferous plants proto-libertarians?

[Antonio the Sixth]

lol

[Gunnar Larsson]

By current standards it is probably fair to consider most ancient states, empires etc as extremist. Someone with better knowledge of the ancient world can probably correct me on this, but my impression is that boasts of genocides are not uncommon; for example in the Bible and by Roman generals. However, as Cassius points out, it doesn't really make sense to call it proto-anything.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Remember when LBJRevivalist asked if England under the Tudors could be considered a "welfare state"?

[Minstral]

By current standards it is probably fair to consider most ancient states, empires etc as extremist. Someone with better knowledge of the ancient world can probably correct me on this, but my impression is that boasts of genocides are not uncommon; for example in the Bible and by Roman generals. However, as Cassius points out, it doesn't really make sense to call it proto-anything.

 Its such a thing with history and historians, on the one hand they attempt to be as objective as possible and go through the evidence that is presented as best as possible. However, they are still subject to their own bias and the evidence that we have doesn't always give a good picture so they must try to fill in blanks. Did you know that the Phoenicians were the ones that first created an alphabet? Too bad their civilization is gone because the Romans destroyed Carthage and shifted them onto a conversion to a different culture. We don't know what their alphabet was and almost certainly never will.

I guess the best answer is that the things come in degrees. Even for perhaps one or two hundred years after the Western part of the Roman empire fell the Emporer would "appoint" Germanic kings to "rule" in his stead, and coins would still be minted in places like Italy and Southern Franc Until the aftermath of the Gothic war. The people still considered themselves part of the Empire , even while he really had no power there.

I guess what I mean is that there were varying degrees. The Empire waged war after war, and yet many emperors know that domestic policies of citizens needed to be addressed because they had many rights, even if it wasn't as much of a republic anymore. I forget the name, but there was an Emporer that made laws that stipulated strict laws that prohibited slaves from being abused. They even had a platform to express their grievances. Still is a system of ownership that benifets the people that make humans into chattel, but to them this would be very liberal.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Did you know that the Phoenicians were the ones that first created an alphabet?

Well the ancestor of the modern Latin alphabet anyway. Though we can be certain that the first alphabets came from the wider Canaan region; very much the realm of conjecture other than

Of course the Latin alphabet it isn't even Latin in origin/creation but Etruscan lmao.

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Actually we kind of do?

[Minstral]

Interesting point. Most of my interest and study in history was in the history of warfare, not linguistics, and the thing that I noted (and was outright stated by many) was that this particular civilization was known through the writings of Greek and Roman historians, and not through there own writings.