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Category: Trajan

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Ancient Rome Civil war Destruction of Greco-Roman world Ethnic cleansing Evropa Soberana (webzine) Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Trajan

Apocalypse for whites • XXI

by Evropa Soberana

 

Second Jewish-Roman War:
The Rebellion of the Diaspora or Kitos War

‘The Jews, overwhelmed by a spirit of rebellion, rise up against their Greek fellow citizens’.

— Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History

 
This section will deal with the Jewish revenge on the Greeks and Romans for the destruction of the Second Temple. While Judea is still exhausted and under a heavy military occupation, we will see an attempt to establish ‘communes’ or Jewish states abroad, starting with secession in Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Cyrenaica. The constitution of these Jewish territories happened to exterminate the local Greek communities.
The First Jewish-Roman War made it very clear that the Jewry, under the ‘coexistence’ with the Greeks and the authority of the Romans, had absolutely no chance of prospering or reaching levels of power as they did in the past in Egypt, Babylon and Persia.
The ‘ghettoized’ situation of the Jews submitted to Rome contrasted radically with that of the Jews who, in Mesopotamia, were subjects of the Parthian Empire. There existed many ancient Jewish communities, especially in Babylon and Susa, who saw themselves as prosperous, rich, powerful and with a long tradition. They had enjoyed ample freedom for six centuries, and they were horrified by the situation of their coreligionists within the Roman Empire.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the ‘international Jewry’ unconditionally supported the Parthian Empire during this time, partly because it treated them much better and partly because it was the only really serious enemy that lurked the borders of the Roman Empire in the East, therefore they were the only power capable of liberating Jerusalem. After all, the Parthians were the ones who killed the hated looter Crassus during the Battle of Carrhae, and if the Romans were anti-Jewish and the Parthians were enemies of the Romans, the opportunist strategy of the moment considered the Parthian Empire as a pro-Jewish regime. At this time, nothing would have pleased the Jewry more than a military campaign that conquered Judea, Syria, Asia Minor in general and, if possible, Egypt, as the Persians had done before.
In 113, Trajan, who admired Alexander the Great, was about to start a series of campaigns against the Parthian Empire, with the aim of conquering Mesopotamia. To carry out such an action, he concentrated troops on the eastern borders, at the expense of leaving many more western places unguarded. Knowing the conflict in the province of Judea, Trajan forbade the Jews to study the Torah and observe the Shabbat, which, in practice, did nothing but irritate the Jewry.

Bust of Trajan in 108 CE, in the Museum of Art History in Vienna, Austria. Trajan, the first emperor of Hispanic origin, had the honour of having ruled the Roman Empire when its borders were most extensive. Under his reign, Mesopotamia was annexed, but soon it was to be clear that every step taken by Rome towards the East would encounter as a reaction an uprising of the Jewish quarter.

In 115, the Roman army conquered all of Mesopotamia, including towns that were important Jewish centres. Throughout Mesopotamia the Jews, horrified to see themselves falling into the hands of their mortal enemies, aligned themselves with the Parthians and fought the Romans with ferocity. This open hostility, which was soon heard throughout the Empire, caused a wave of indignation and provided the perfect excuse for the Greek ethnic communities of the provinces of Cyrenaica (current coast of Libya) and Cyprus, with strong anti-Jewish tradition, to start riots against the ghettos, taking advantage of the absence of the Roman legions, which could have appeased the situation.
Several Jewish extremist leaders again preached agitation against Rome, proclaiming the end of the Empire, travelling through all the Roman provinces of Asia Minor and North Africa and exhorting local Jewries to rise up and fight against European occupation. The Jews, already angered by the disturbances with the Greek population, took advantage of the absence of Roman soldiers to begin, that same year, a bloody insurrection.
The rebellion began in Cyrenaica, led by Lukuas, self-proclaimed messiah. The Jews, in a swift stroke of hand reminiscent of their rebellion in Jerusalem half a century earlier, attacked Greek neighbourhoods and villages, destroyed Greek statues and temples dedicated to Jupiter, Artemis, Isis and Apollo, and also numerous Roman official buildings. (These actions were a mere foreshadowing of what Christians would later do on a massive scale and throughout the Empire.) The famous Roman historian Cassius Dio, in his Roman History, describes the terrible massacre that was unleashed, referring to Lukuas as ‘Andreas’, probably his Greco-Roman name.
At that time, the Jews who lived in Cyrenaica, having as captain one Andreas, killed all the Greeks and Romans. They ate their flesh and entrails, bathed in their blood and dressed in their skins. They killed many of them with extreme cruelty, tearing them from above head down the middle of their bodies; they threw some to the beasts while others forced them to fight among themselves, to such an extent that they took 220,000 to death. Cassius Dio also tells us how from their intestines they made belts, and anointed themselves with their blood. These testimonies, although perhaps should not be taken literally, are certainly interesting to see the negative image that the Jewry had in Europe, as an odious and misanthropic people.
Also noteworthy is the character of ethnic cleansing implicit in Jewish actions in Cyrenaica: let us think that, at that time when it was much less populated than now, 200,000 dead (although it may be an exaggerated number) was a monstrous figure; to such an extent that, according to Eusebius, Libya was totally depopulated and Rome had to found new colonies there to recover the population.
After the genocide in Cyrenaica, the Lukuas masses went to an unguarded city that had long been the world centre of wisdom and also of anti-Judaism: Alexandria. There they set fire to numerous Greek neighbourhoods, destroyed pagan temples and desecrated Pompey’s tomb. But this Rebellion of the Diaspora was not limited only to North Africa. Jewish terrorism in Cyrenaica and Alexandria had emboldened Jews throughout the Mediterranean, who, seeing the absence of Roman soldiers, felt the call of the uprising against Rome.
While Trajan was already in the Persian Gulf struggling against the Parthians, crowds of Jews, fanatized by the rabbis, rose up in Rhodes, Sicily, Syria, Judea, Mesopotamia and the rest of North Africa to carry out the ethnic cleansing against European populations. In Cyprus, the worst massacre of the entire rebellion took place: 240,000 Europeans were massacred and the capital of the island, Salamis, was completely razed, according to Cassius Dio. A similar cruelty was shown in Egypt and on the island of Cyprus under one Artemion, the chief of barbarism. In Cyprus they massacred another two hundred and forty thousand people, so they could no longer set foot on the island.
To quell the rebellion in Cyprus, Syria and the newly conquered territories of Mesopotamia, Trajan sent the Legio VII Claudia under the orders of a Berber prince, General Lusius Quietus. The repression of Lusius Quietus in Mesopotamia was so ruthless that the rabbis in that place forbade the study of Greek literature and eliminated the custom of brides adorning themselves with garlands on their wedding day.
In Cyprus, Lusius Quietus exterminated the entire Jewish population of the island and prohibited, under penalty of death, that no Jew step on Cyprus. Even if he was a castaway who appeared on a beach, the Jew should be executed on the spot. These actions left a deep trace in the memory of the Europeans of those places. As a reward for the services rendered, Lusius Quietus was made governor of Judea.
For the pacification of Alexandria, Trajan took troops from Mesopotamia under the command of Marcius Turbo, who in 117 had already quelled the rebellion. To rebuild the damage caused there by the revolt, the Romans expropriated and confiscated all of the Jews’ goods and wealth. Marcius Turbo remained as governor of Egypt during a period of reconstitution of Roman authority. Lukuas, who was at that time in Alexandria, probably fled to Judea.
Throughout the Rebellion of the Diaspora, well over half a million Europeans were massacred, mainly those belonging to the noblest social strata of Cyrenaica, Cyprus, Egypt and Babylon: that is, the European people of these places, men, women and children who were at that time the aristocracy of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although thousands of Jews were put to the sword and the rebellion was ruthlessly crushed by Trajan, Lusius Quietus and Marcius Turbo, many Europeans were killed after suffering atrocious tortures.

Categories
Ancient Rome Caesar Augustus Caligula Claudius Emigration / immigration Evropa Soberana (webzine) Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Nero Nordicism Patriarchy Plutarch Racial studies Real men Suetonius Tacitus Tiberius Trajan Vespasian and Titus

The face of Classical Europe (II)

Were the Romans blond and blue-eyed?

 

Translated from Evropa Soberana

 

Recently I was called names on VNN forum as a result of my criticism of anti-Nordicism in my previous post. Isn’t it ironic that the signature-legend of VNN’s admin states that the Jews must be exterminated while, at the same time, some of the forum’s senior members want to grant amnesty to the mudbloods in Europe?

Hopefully this abridged translation from the Spanish blogsite Evropa Soberana, which could be read together with the first installment about the phenotype of Greeks in Classical Europe, will throw more light on why anti-Nordicists are deluding themselves.



 

Were the Romans blond and blue-eyed?

The Latin malus [“bad”] (beside which I place mélas, Greek for “black”) might designate the common man as dark, especially black-haired (hic niger est), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distinguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color.

—Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

 
The Roman case is virtually identical to the Greek case. This YouTube clip contains the first minutes from the series Rome, where fighting between Gauls and Romans is recreated. The series had tremendous blunders, great nonsense, and several lies and BS in abundance. But the atmosphere was curious, as was the march of historical events, the legions in action, the splendor of the imperial palaces, the goings-on in the alleys of Rome, etc. One of the protagonists of the series was a centurion, the one with the whistle.

He was blond.

But how can you be so fascists so Nordicists, so Nazis so anti-Teresa-de-Calcutta, as Eurocentric and racists as these media? If you had a minimum of culture (like me) you should know that the Romans were of Mediterranean phenotype (like me)—and so on.

Things like these I have heard more times than you can imagine. And similar poppycock we continue to hear even by people who, by their admiration of Rome, obviously have read something written by these sober and tough soldiers who were the Romans, right?

In this article the testimonies from the handwriting of the real Romans are presented. Forget the movies and the illiterate pundits and let the sources explain us how Romans saw themselves.


The first Roman emperors as an example of patrician racial types

We will examine the phenotype of the first Roman emperors, who were representative of the race of patricians, the Roman nobilitas, i.e., the ruling aristocracy. What interests me is not so much to demonstrate the presence of Nordic blood in the upper Roman class (which is easy), but mainly to show that the Nordic blood in Rome was also inextricably linked to the notion of divinity and of noble descent. Some passages are originally in Greek. This is because Greek had great prestige as a cultured, poetic and philosophical language, and there were many Romans educated in that language.

• Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was “blond” (subflavum) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Divus Augustus), and had “blue eyes” (glauci) according to Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XI, CXLIII):

roma-octavio

He had clear, bright eyes, in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power, and it greatly pleased him, whenever he looked keenly at anyone, if he let his face fall as if before the radiance of the sun (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum: Divus Augustus, LXXIX).

• Tiberius had “gray-blue” (caesii) eyes according to Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XI, CXLII).

• Caligula had a “blonde beard” (aurea barba) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Caligula, LII).

• Claudius had “gray-white hair” (canitieque) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Divus Claudius, XXX), and “gray eyes” (γλαυκόφθαλμος) according to Ioannes Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCXLVI).

• Nero was “blond or redhead” (subflavo); had “gray-blue eyes” (caesis) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Nero, LI), and descended from a family named after their light pigmentation.

Of the Domitian family two branches have acquired distinction, the Calvini and the Ahenobarbi. The latter have as the founder of their race and the origin of their surname Lucius Domitius, to whom, as he was returning from the country, there once appeared twin youths of more than mortal majesty, so it is said, and bade him carry to the senate and people the news of a victory, which was as yet unknown. And as a token of their divinity it is said that they stroked his cheeks and turned his black beard to a ruddy hue, like that of bronze. This sign was perpetuated in his descendants, a great part of whom had red beards. (Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum: Nero, I.)

• Galba had gray-white (μιξοπόλιος) hair according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLVIII) and blue eyes (caeruleis) according to Suetonius (De Vita Caesarum: Galba, XXI).

• Vitellius was “redhead” (πυρράκης) and had “gray” or “blue” eyes (γλαυκός) according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLIX).

• Vespasian had “gray-white hair” (πολιός) and “wine-colored eyes” (οινοπαης τους οφθαλμούς), although it is unclear whether this refers to red wine (brown) or white wine (green) according to Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLIX).

• Titus, according to Wilhelm Sieglin (1855-1935) in Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 109, was “blonde”.

• Domitian was “blond” (ξανθός) and had “gray or blue eyes” (γλαυκός) according Malelas (Chronographia, X, CCLXII).

• Nerva was “gray-haired” according to John V. Day (Indo-European Origins).

• Trajan had “golden hair” (caesaries) according to Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 109). But let us not forget that Trajan was not Roman but a Spanish with Celtic blood, and therefore we should not take this into account when trying to define the phenotype of the Roman patrician aristocracy.

• Adriano, from a noble Roman family established in Hispania, was “dark-haired” (κυανοχαιτα) according Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 112), and of “gray or blue eyes” (γλαυκόφθαλμος) according to Malelas (Chronographia XI, CCLXXVII).

Interestingly, despite being described as “dark-haired,” on his statue there are traces of gold paint on his hair and beard. Formerly, the statues were painted according to the colors of the original “model”. His facial features correspond to the Nordic type.

• Antoninus Pius had “gray-white hair” (πολιός) and eyes “the color of wine” (οινοπαης τους οφθαλμούς) according Malelas (Chronographia, XI, CCLXXX).

• Lucius Verus had “blond hair” (flaventium) according Sieglin (Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 110).

• Commodus had “blond hair” (ουλόξανθος) and “blue or gray eyes” (υπόγλαυκος) according Malelas (Chronographia, XII, CCLXXXIII).

Therefore, we find that:

• Of the 18 emperors from Augustus to Commodus, 9 had blond or red hair, 5 had gray or white hair, of 3 we have no way of knowing the hair color, and only one (Adriano) was described as dark-haired.

• Of the 18 emperors from Augustus to Commodus, 9 had blue or gray eyes, 2 had eyes of “the color of wine” (whatever that means, let us take it as brown), and of 7 we have no record as to the color of their eyes.

Many emperors came to power in their advanced years, with already gray or white hair. However, many were even so described with light eyes. If we had records of their appearance when they were young, it is likely that a significant proportion of them had light hair. Of the 9 Emperors with light hair, we know that at least 5 had clear eyes, and of the other 4 we know nothing about the color of their eyes. Of Tiberius, for example, we know nothing about his hair, maybe because he was bald when he came to power. And the same applies to Otto, who shaved his head and wore a wig. Nor do we know anything about the physical aspect of the “philosopher emperor” Marcus Aurelius, father of Commodus and a first-class sovereign. Many other emperors (as Julius Caesar), without being blond, were tall and had a very fair complexion, ruddy, or rosy.

From Commodus on I renounce to provide more emperor descriptions because:

1 – those individuals who began ascending to power were not of Roman origin, and therefore their phenotype cannot tell us anything about the genetic legacy of the nobilitas of Italian and patrician origin.

2 – miscegenation was already quite advanced; lineages of patrician origin having lost their meaning. At that time it was common that women of Roman high society should shave the manes of Germanic slaves to fix their blond-hair wigs.


The gods, the Italici, the patricians and the origins of Rome

Let us go back around 1200 BCE and transport ourselves to Italy. At that time, Central Europe was a buzzing propagating zone for the Indo-European stock. From what is now Germany, of a semi-barbarous proto-civilization of the iron age, flowed migrant groups in all directions. These waves were of the Celts, the Hellenes, the Illyrians and the Italici (also called italos or italiotas).

At that time, the Italici, probably with some confederate Illyrian groups as in the case of the Dorians, broke into Italy.

They were a people who, in contrast to the native inhabitants of Italy, were patriarchal rather than matriarchal; ruddy rather than swarthy; that cremated their dead instead of burying them; that brought with them a whole pantheon of gods and heroic warriors, spoke an Indo-European language, yielded a war cult and whose symbology was a lot more oriented to heavenly than earthly symbols.

Italici were the settlers of sites such as the Villanovan Culture. Subsequent “civilian” conflicts that feminist history has termed as “matriarchy vs. patriarchy,” and what is left in mythology regarding the heroic struggle of the Indo-Europeans against the native, telluric bodies (like snakes) actually refer to a spiritual confrontation triggered by the arrival of a small, aggressive and martial people that did not mix with the native population and struggled to dominate the area.

Under a rigid religious ritualism, on April 21, 753 BCE the heads of some Italic clans founded the city of Rome. For two centuries, Rome lived under the despotism and tyranny of the Etruscan kings, heads of a degenerate civilization that practiced sacrificial rituals, orgies, matriarchy, homosexuality, luxurious opulence, pedophilia, decadent entertainments, etc. The Etruscans came from Asia Minor, styling themselves as rasena (“chosen,” as the Jews) yet their legacy, which only represented the decline of something greater than themselves, meant that they were a doomed people.

The situation of the Roman tribute to Etruria lasted until, in 509 BCE, the Romans rose against the Etruscans and expelled the Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus, from the lands. Legends want to portray that this Italic insurrection—a “holy rebellion” against the pre-Indo-European; of patriarchy against matriarchy—was motivated by the rape of Lucretia, a beautiful and virtuous woman of Roman family at the hands of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Etruscan king and raunchy as all his people, as opposed to the Puritan morality of the Latins.

Lucretia committed suicide by honor and, this being the straw that broke the camel of the Roman patience, the patriarchs began a rebellion against the Etruscans that led to the overthrowing of the Etruscan kings, the founding of the Roman Republic and the systematic eradication of almost all Etruscan memory. (Comparable only to the “genocide” and the complete destruction of Carthage, the mortal enemy of Rome, considered as the reincarnation of Etruscan and oriental spirit, whose fields were cast in salt so that nothing would grow there.)

decopianr

Recreation of Rome during the Republic. Pay attention to the shape of the boats, so reminiscent of the Scandinavian drakkar.

With the expulsion of the Etruscan power two praetors (later consuls) who held the vacuum of power were named. It was therefore founded the Roman Republic, marked by social struggles between patricians (nobles) and plebeians.

At that time, the original Populus Romanus was divided into 30 curiae (tribes or clans), whose origin was lost among the Italic peoples before the invasion. The curiae were headed by patres (parents) of the gens (family), that is, the founding fathers of the clan and of each family that composed it. Each gens or family was considered descendant of a genius or semi-divine patriarch, who was worshiped on the household as protector idol of the house and their descendants.

If we assimilate the fact that to the Romans a gens or family was a whole social, state, military and religious institution, we may understand the importance of the geniuses and patres as leaders of this small imperial cell, that corresponded to social, political and military leadership as well as leading positions in the characteristic Roman religious worship, where Jupiter is confused with the State, the patriarch, the Senate, the Legion and the family. No wonder, then, that they were regarded as semi-divine and of very high wisdom.

The patres were those who gave their name to the breed of the patricians, namely those belonging to the system of families and clans: the aristocracy, the first nobilitas, which differed from the plebs or plebeians—the people outside the Italic clans. At first, the male patricians were the only Roman citizens, the members of the Legion, the only ones who could be senators and enjoyed all the rights and duties traditionally associated with Roman citizenship.

Later, after the “universalization” and “cosmopolitanization” of Rome during the Empire, the patricians came to form an aristocracy over the other peoples of Italy, encompassed by the plebs. The patricians as social class, and among them the patres as heads of households, are probably the most exalted expression of patriarchy and patriotism itself of the Indo-European, in opposition to the narcotic matriarchy of the pre-Indo-European peoples of Europe, already decadents and altogether “civilized”.
 

♣

 
We now turn to the patricians and Roman gods from the point of view of the phenotype, after seeing the first Roman emperors, mostly patrician.

• Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BCE), Roman consul and dictator, of patrician descent, had blond hair, blue eyes and a ruddy complexion:

…for his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance, and as for bravery, he was not ashamed to testify in his own behalf, after such great and noble deeds as he had performed. So much, then, regarding his attitude towards the divine powers. (Plutarch, De Vita: Sulla.)

What was the rest of his figure appears in his statues, but that fierce and unpleasant look of his blue eyes was still more terrible to stare at because the color of his face, being noted at intervals so ruddy and red mixed with his whiteness, and it is even said that he took his name from that, coming to be a nickname for the designated color. Thus, a teller of Athens taunted him with these lines: “If you knead a blackberry with flour, you have the portrait of Sulla.”

Marcus Porcius Cato the “Censor”, better known as Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE), the pronouncer of the famous saying Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Furthermore, I think Carthage must be destroyed”) in every speech, had reddish hair according to Plutarch:

As for his outward appearance, he had reddish hair, and keen grey eyes, as the author of the well-known epigram ill-naturedly gives us to understand: “Red-haired, snapper and biter, his grey eyes flashing defiance, Porcius, come to the shades, back will be thrust by their Queen.” (Plutarch, Cato the Elder.)

• Poppaea Sabina (30-65 CE), the wife of Nero, famous for her beauty all over Rome, was very white and redhead.

We note that the Romans, like the Greeks, saw light pigmentation as a sign of the “divine” or “supernatural”. Some may interpret this that light pigmentation was rare among the Romans. But considering naming conventions, it is clear that the light features were quite common among the patricians. According to Karl Earlson:

Once they had reached a certain stage in their lives, the patricians earned their additional name (cognomina), which was often based on their physical appearance. The name Albus indicated light skin; Ravilla, gray eyes; Caesar, blue eyes; Flavius, blonde hair; Rufus, red hair; Longus, tall; Macer, a slender constitution. All these names were common among the patricians.

Thus, the Latin author Quintilian, in Institutio Oratoria (I, IV, XXV), notes that a man named Rufus or Longo has that name for his body characteristics: he is high or redhead. Plutarch (Coriolanus XI) states that two men, one redhead and one swarthy, could be distinguished because the first would be called Rufus and the second Niger. Aelius Spartianus, in Historia Augusta (II, IV), suggests that the Caesars earned their name from the fact that the founder of his gens had blue eyes (oculis caesiis). The lexicographer Sextus Pompeius Festus, in De verborum significatu (CCCLXXVI ff) states that the name Ravilia derives from “gray eyes” (ravis oculis), and the name Caesulla from blue eyes (oculis caesiis). Julius Paris, in De nominibus Epitome, VII, provides examples of names of women that, he says, have their origin in the pigmentation of those who held them: Rutila (red hair), Caesellia (blue eyes), Rodacilla (pink complexion), Murrula and Burra (red hair or ruddy complexion).

I have provided all these quotations to show that these names were not purely arbitrary but were, in fact, based on physical characteristics; and that these features were not uncommon among certain strata of Roman society.

Even where the patricians had almost disappeared, the Romans had memories of the old patres as the semi-divine beings who arrived to Italy, founded Rome, “Romanized” the peninsula and bequeathed the patriarchate to those lands, together with a strong mentality and a durable and effective political system that lasted for centuries. The ancient ancestors of the patricians were still considered in Rome as a common heritage to be proud of.

Karl Earlson summarizes how he follows Sieglin’s findings as to the pigmentation of the patricians and their identity as a breed:

Wilhelm Sieglin [in Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums, 1935] compiled the list of the Roman patricians whose names indicate light hair. He provided the following list: 7 Flavi, 20 Flaviani, 10 Fulvi, 121 Fulvii, 27 Rubrii, 26 Rufi, 24 Rufii, 36 Rufini, 45 Rutilii and 13 Ahenobarbi. This completely disrupts Sergi’s claim that: “The Romans also had their Flavi, indicating that people with fair complexion were rare and required a special name, but does not indicate that the Germanic type was considered aristocratic or dominant” (Sergi: 1901, 20). In fact, such people were not scarce.

Sieglin also determined that among the families Iulii, Licinii, Lucretii, Sergii and Virginii, the name Flavius was very common; Rufi was often seen among the families Antonii, Caecilii, Coelii, Cornelii, Geminii, Iunii, Licinii families (often also the Flavii), Minucii, Octavii, Pinarii, Pompei, Rutilii, Sempronii, Trebonii, Valgii and Vibii; Rufini was common among the gens Antonia, Cornelia, Iunia, Licinian, Trebonia and Vibia. Sieglin notes that this list could certainly be increased in the light of further research.

Besides all this, Sieglin also compiled a list of 63 blond or red-haired Romans. Many of these individuals were patricians. He also found references to 27 blond divinities (including Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Diana, etc.) and 10 blondes in heroic personalities.

Man makes the gods in their own image. These blond gods speak of the racial nature of the early Romans. (In the Aeneid, Virgil refers to Mercury, Lavinia, Turnus and Camilla as “golden-haired.”) His list of blonds includes Aeneas, the mythical ancestor of the Latins (also blond was his son Julo or Ascanius), Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome; Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and even Roma: which symbolized the city of Rome.

While most of Sieglin’s historical figures of light hair were patricians, most the 17 swarthy Romans in his references were commoners or freedmen.

On the disappearance of the patricians and the mestization of the original Romans

What happened to the patricians? They faded with time. In the numerous conspiracies and intrigues of the Empire, it was common that after the formation of two opposing parties and the victory of one over the other, the winner assassinated the head of the enemy party, his family and all the families related to him. (The strong destroy each other and the weak continue to live, as George Bernard Shaw maintained.) These calamities greatly decimated the patrician class. If we add the ongoing miscegenation in the majority of plebeian population, the immigration of slaves from Syria and the provinces of Asia Minor, Egypt and Africa, as well as the bleeding of the patrician stock over the battlefield, we may realize why the patricians did not last too long during the Empire, given the dysgenic situation. John V. Day wrote:

In a journal about the West and its future, it is fitting to end this article by briefly recounting the fate of the Roman upper class. Among Indo-European peoples, the Romans offer an especially useful example because they left masses of records, enabling later historians to determine what became of them. The evidence found in ancient texts implies that this class descended largely from Indo-Europeans who had a decidedly northern European physical type, although that isn’t something one reads in modern books about Roman history [emphasis added]. In Rome, though, the upper class was always a tiny minority. Instead of protecting its interests, it allowed itself to wither away. Consider a bleak statistic. We know of about fifty patrician clans in the fifth century B.C., but by the time of Caesar, in the later first century B.C., only fourteen of these had survived. The decay continued in imperial times. We know of the families of nearly four hundred Roman senators in A.D. sixty five, but, just one generation later, all trace of half of these families had vanished.

If we in the West want to avoid a similar fate, we must learn from Indo-European history. (*)

In the time of Julius Caesar we know 45 patricians, of which only one is represented by posterity when Hadrian rises to power. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii and everyone else, except the Comelii have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius ascended 25 families to the Patriciate, and by the reign of Nerva all but 6 have disappeared. Of the families of nearly 400 senators registered under Nero in 65 CE, trace has been lost about half of them in times of Nerva. And the records are so complete that it can be assumed that these statistics represent quite accurately the disappearance of the male lineage of the families concerned. (Cf. Tenney Frank, “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire,” American Historical Review, Vol. XI, 1916).

Conclusion

Were the Romans, then, blond?

ancient_romanIt all depends on what you mean by “Romans”. The original Romans did not descend from the original inhabitants of the Italian soil, but of the Italici (italios or italiotas or as you please to call them) and probably also of Illyrian groups, namely, Indo-European invaders who entered Italy from the North, what is now southern Germany. These early invaders—from whom the Latins descended (considered the most influential and who eventually gave their language to the Empire), the Sabines (considered by Plutarch “a colony of the Lacedaemonians,” i.e., Spartans), the Umbrians, Samnites and all patrician clans that founded Rome and the Republic—were indeed mostly Nordic, and also formed the basis of the political and military elite of the Empire.

However, in the later Rome these groups formed an aristocratic minority ruling over a mob of pre-Indo-European origin and, later, even Semites and black slaves. This ended up in interbreeding between all these groups. Over time, the numbers of the dominant Nordic caste withered, and with them their strong patriarchal, sober and authoritative influence in favor of the dissolution of the Empire: expressed in its cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and proliferation of slaves.

The rest of the history of the post-Roman imperial splendor and their great men, we already know. It is set in a decadent agony, punctuated by binges, parties, orgies, wine snobbery, false sophistication, acrobats, gays, stupid fads, obesity, blond wigs made from hair stolen from Germanics, mongrels, pacifists, emboldened slaves, “liberated” women, Christian zealots and a corrupt bourgeois which reneged of their homeland.

The ghost of ancient Etruria, killed by the ancient Latin Patriarchs, had reborn. Before these decaying monsters, which had nothing to do with the demigod patricians or their rude peasants and patriotic soldiers, the Germanic “barbarian” was really an authentic, pure, hard, strong, noble, idealistic, simple and brave hero, in whose blood awaited the hidden forces of the Indo-European humanity, ready to give birth and germinate in the next millennia of European power.

In short, it has not been argued that all Romans were of Nordic type. It has been argued that the Nordic blood prevailed among the Italic invaders, the ancestors of the posterior dominant Roman aristocracy, the authentic Roman citizens, who imposed their ethos throughout the Empire and spread their spirit, marking the “Roman style” with a distinctly Nordic stamp.

“Are the Germanics a healthy and natural people that will overcome the decadence of the Romans?” —Tacitus, Germania.

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See also a previous article about the subject of:

“Saying the truth about race throws even white nationalists into fits.”

(*) John V. Day, Ph.D., is the author of Indo-European Origins: The Anthropological Evidence (The Institute for the Study of Man, 2001).

Categories
Ancient Rome Hermann (Arminius) Real men Trajan Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Who We Are, 16

The following is my abridgement of chapter 16 of William Pierce’s history of the white race, Who We Are:

Death Struggle Between Germany and Rome
Decided Fate of White Race
Hermann Was Savior of Europe & White Race

 

Julius Caesar’s conquest of all the Celts and Germans west of the Rhine and his punitive raids into the German lands on the other side of the river bought time for the Romans to concentrate their military efforts against the still independent Celts inhabiting the Swiss and Austrian Alps and the lowlands between the Alps and the Danube, from Lake Constance to Vienna. More than three decades of intermittent warfare by Caesar and his successors finally subdued these Celts, and their lands became the Roman provinces of Rhaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia.

Germania Magna. By 15 B.C. the Danube had been established as the dividing line between the Roman Empire and the free German lands to the north—or Germania Magna, as the Romans named this territory bounded on the west, the south, and the east by the Rhine, the Danube, and the Vistula, respectively. The conquered German lands west of the Rhine, in Alsace, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the southern Netherlands, were divided into the Roman provinces of Upper and Lower Germany.

In 12 B.C. Emperor Augustus sent his stepson Drusus, who had played a major role in the subjection of the Celts, to the mouth of the Rhine to launch an invasion of Germania Magna. Although initially unsuccessful, Drusus led repeated campaigns against the Germans, and by 9 B.C. had defeated several tribes, most notably the Chatti, and pushed more than 200 miles into Germania Magna, reaching the Elbe.

Tribal Names. At this point an aside on the names of the German tribes may be helpful; otherwise we may easily become confused by the proliferation of often-conflicting designations given to the various tribes and groupings of tribes by the Romans, the Germans, and others. Because the ancient Germans were, for most practical purposes, illiterate (the Germans’ runes were used for inscriptions but not for writing books), the earliest German tribal names we have are those recorded by the Romans: Batavi, Belgae, Chatti, Chauci, Cherusci, Cimbri, Eburones, Frisii, Gothones, Hermunduri, Langobardi, Marcomanni, Saxones, Suevi, Teutones, etc. It is assumed that in most cases these were reasonable approximations to the actual German names.

In some cases these tribal names assigned by the Romans of Caesar’s time have survived in the names of modern nations or provinces: Belgium, Saxony, Lombardy, Gotland, and so on. More often they have not; the great stirring up of the nations of Europe between the latter part of the second century and the middle of the sixth century A.D.—the Voelkerwanderung, or wandering of the peoples—profoundly changed the German tribal groupings. Some tribes vanished without a trace; others reappeared as elements in new tribal configurations which combined many of the older tribes.

Thus, the Saxons of the eighth century consisted not only of the Saxones known to the Romans, but of many other tribal elements as well. The Franks likewise arose after Caesar’s time as a confederation of many German tribes.

The Romans referred to all the German tribes collectively as Germani, but this was apparently originally the name of only a single minor tribe, which later lost its independent existence. In similar manner the Romanized Franks of a later day referred to all their German neighbors by the name of a single tribal grouping which arose during the Voelkerwanderung, the Alamanni; the French name for any German is still allemand.

Conquests. Over the next dozen years the Roman military machine continued to consolidate and expand its conquests in Germania Magna. Most of the independent tribes left were those east of the Elbe. Some, like the Marcomanni, had been forced to leave their ancestral lands in the west and resettle east of the Elbe in order to avoid defeat by the Romans. The Germans were on the defensive everywhere, and they seemed well on the way to suffering the collective fate of the Celts.

They were finally beginning to learn one vital lesson, however: they must either unite in the face of the common enemy or become extinct; the independence of the various tribes was a luxury they could no longer afford. A king of the Marcomanni, Marbod, succeeded in uniting most of the tribes east of the Elbe and organizing a standing draft army of 70,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry from among them, the first time the Germans had accomplished such a feat.

The imperial representative in the conquered German lands was Publius Quintilius Varus, who was more a lawyer and a politician than a general. As an administrator he was brutal, arbitrary, and rapacious. Overturning all local customs, contemptuous of German tradition and sensibility, Varus applied the same measures against the tribes of Germania Magna which he had used earlier while he was proconsul in the Middle East and which Caesar had employed successfully to break the spirit of the Celts in Gaul. He succeeded instead in transforming the respect Germans had learned for Roman power into a bitter and implacable hatred.

The 19th-century English historian Edward Creasy describes especially well the German reaction to Varus and his army:

Accustomed to govern the depraved and debased natives of Syria, a country where courage in man and virtue in woman had for centuries been unknown, Varus thought that he might gratify his licentious and rapacious passions with equal impunity among the high-minded sons and pure-spirited daughters of Germany. When the general of any army sets the example of outrages of this description, he is soon faithfully imitated by his officers and surpassed by his still more brutal soldiery. The Romans now habitually indulged in those violations of the sanctity of the domestic shrine and those insults upon honor and modesty by which far less gallant spirits than those of our Teutonic ancestors have often been maddened into insurrection.

Hermann the Cheruscer. As the latter-day Romans were shortly to learn, the Germans dared a great deal. There came to the fore among the wretched, conquered tribes a German leader cast in the mold of the Celt Vercingetorix. Unlike the case with the latter, however, this new leader’s daring brought success. He was Hermann, son of Segimar, king of the Cherusci. The Romans called him Arminius. In Creasy’s words:

It was part of the subtle policy of Rome to confer rank and privileges on the youth of the leading families in the nations which she wished to enslave. Among other young German chieftains Arminius and his brother, who were the heads of the noblest house in the tribe of the Cherusci, had been selected as fit objects for the exercise of this insidious system. Roman refinements and dignities succeeded in denationalizing the brother, who assumed the Roman name of Flavius and adhered to Rome throughout all her wars against his country. Arminius remained unbought by honors or wealth, uncorrupted by refinement or luxury. He aspired to and obtained from Roman enmity a higher title than ever could have been given him by Roman favor.

Shortly before 1 A.D. Hermann went to Rome to learn the Roman ways and language. He was 17 or 18 years old. He served five years in a Roman legion and became a Roman citizen, a member of the equites, or knightly class. He was sent by Augustus to aid in the suppression of the rebellion in Pannonia and Dalmatia.

What Hermann learned about the Romans redoubled his hatred of them. Again, Creasy’s words on the subject can hardly be bettered:

Vast, however, and admirably organized as the fabric of Roman power appeared on the frontiers and in the provinces, there was rottenness at the core. In Rome’s unceasing hostilities with foreign foes and still more in her long series of desolating civil wars, the free middle classes of Italy had almost wholly disappeared. Above the position which they had occupied an oligarchy of wealth had reared itself; beneath that position a degraded mass of poverty and misery was fermenting. Slaves, the chance sweepings of every conquered country, shoals of Africans, Sardinians, Asiatics, Illyrians, and others, made up the bulk of the population of the Italian peninsula. The foulest profligacy of manners was general in all ranks….

With bitter indignation must the German chieftain have beheld all this and contrasted it with the rough worth of his own countrymen: their bravery, their fidelity to their word, their manly independence of spirit, their love of their national free institutions, and their loathing of every pollution and meanness. Above all he must have thought of the domestic virtues which hallowed a German home; of the respect there shown to the female character and of the pure affection by which that respect was repaid. His soul must have burned within him at the contemplation of such a race yielding to these debased Italians.

When he returned to his people at the age of 25, Hermann was given a Roman command under Varus. He immediately set to work organizing a revolution. The most difficult obstacle he had to overcome was neither the Germans’ lack of military stores or even a single walled fortress, nor their traditional disunity; it was the opposition from the conservative faction among his own people.

As is always so with conservatives, they preferred immediate prosperity under Roman rule, through the trade opportunities it offered or through advantages bestowed on individual leaders by the Romans, to freedom, honor, and the long-range preservation and promotion of their own stock. One of the most hostile of these Romanized conservatives was Hermann’s own father-in-law. Nevertheless, Hermann prevailed over the conservative opposition and won most of the leaders of the Cherusci and the neighboring tribes to his conspiracy.

In the summer of 9 A.D. Varus’ army, consisting of five legions, was encamped among the Saxons, west of the Weser in the modern state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Late in the month of September Hermann contrived to have a localized rebellion break out among some tribes to the east, and messengers soon arrived at Varus’ camp with news of the insurrection. Varus immediately set out with three of his legions to crush the revolt, giving Hermann the task of gathering up the Romans’ German auxiliary forces and following him.

Hermann sprang his carefully planned trap. Instead of gathering an auxiliary force to support Varus, he sent his agents speeding the revolutionary call to the tribes, far and near.

Hermann then set out in pursuit of Varus, catching up with him amid the wild ravines, steep ridges, and tangled undergrowth of the Teutoburger Forest, about 20 miles west of the Weser, near the present town of Detmold. The progress of the Roman army had been severely hampered by the heavy autumn rains and the marshy condition of the ground, and Hermann fell on Varus’ legions with a suddenness and fury which sent the Romans reeling.

For nearly three days the battle raged with a ferocity which exacted a heavy toll from both sides. The Germans employed guerrilla tactics, suddenly attacking the floundering Roman columns from an unexpected quarter and then withdrawing into the dense forest before the Romans could group themselves into effective fighting formation, only to attack again from a different quarter.

On the third day of battle the exhausted remnants of Varus’ army panicked and broke, and the Germans annihilated them. Once more, we will let Creasy tell the story:

The Roman officer who commanded the cavalry, Numonius Vala, rode off with his squadrons in the vain hope of escaping by thus abandoning his comrades. Unable to keep together or force their way across the woods and swamps, the horsemen were overpowered in detail and slaughtered to the last man…. Varus, after being severely wounded in a charge of the Germans against his part of the column, committed suicide to avoid falling into the hands of those whom he had exasperated by his oppressions. One of the lieutenant generals of the army fell fighting; the other surrendered to the enemy. But mercy to a fallen foe had never been a Roman virtue, and those among her legions who now laid down their arms in hope of quarter drank deep of the cup of suffering, which Rome had held to the lips of many a brave but unfortunate enemy. The infuriated Germans slaughtered their oppressors with deliberate ferocity, and those prisoners who were not hewn to pieces on the spot were only preserved to perish by a more cruel death in cold blood.

Only a tiny handful of Romans escaped from the Teutoburger Forest to carry the news of the catastrophe back to the Roman forts on the other side of the Rhine. Varus’ legions had been the pick of Rome’s army, and their destruction broke the back of the Roman imperium east of the Rhine.

A furious German populace rose up and exacted a grisly vengeance on Roman judges, Jewish speculators and slave dealers, and the civil servants Augustus had sent to administer the conquered territories. The two Roman legions remaining in Germania Magna were able to extricate themselves to Gaul only after hard fighting and severe losses.

The tidings struck Rome like a thunderclap of doom. The aged Augustus felt his throne tremble. He never fully recovered from the shock, and for months afterward he let his hair and beard grow, and was seen by his courtiers from time to time pounding his head in despair against the palace wall and crying out, “Oh, Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!”

Hermann’s great victory by no means ended the Roman threat to the Germans east of the Rhine, and many more battles were to be fought before Rome finally accepted, in 17 A.D., the Rhine and the Danube as a boundary between Roman and German territory. Clearly, though, that September day in 9 A.D. is a watershed of world history; the battle of the Teutoburger Forest is one of the half-dozen most decisive events in the history of the White race. Had Hermann lost that day to Varus, or had the conservatives among the Germans succeeded in aborting or betraying his revolution, the heart of Germany would have been Romanized. The land of the Angles and the Saxons and the Goths would have been permanently open, as was Rome, to the filth of the Levant: to Oriental customs and religion; to the mercantile spirit which places monetary gain above all else in life; to the swart, curly-haired men who swarmed in the marketplaces of the Mediterranean world, haggling over the interest on a loan or the price of a blond slave girl.

The Nordic spirit, the Faustian spirit, which is the unique possession of that race which burst into Europe from the eastern steppes more than 6,000 years ago; the spirit which carried Greece to the heights and impelled the earliest Romans to impose a new order on the Italian peninsula; the spirit which had eventually succumbed to racial decay in the south and which had been crushed out of the Celts of Gaul and Britain—that spirit would also have been crushed out of the Germans and replaced by the spirit of the lawyers and the moneychangers.

The fact that that spirit survived in the Germans, that it thrived again in Britain after the Saxon conquest, that it lived in the Vikings who sailed their dragon ships across the Atlantic to the New World five centuries after that, that after another ten centuries it carried our race beyond the bounds of this planet—is due in very large measure to the passion, energy, skill, and courage of Hermann the Cheruscer.

Arminius says goodbye to Thusnelda. Johannes Gehrts (1884)

Four hundred years were yet to pass and a great deal more German blood shed before the German ascendancy over Rome became final and irreversible, but the events of 9 A.D. presaged everything which followed. After Hermann’s mighty feat the decaying Roman Empire was almost continuously on the defensive rather than the offensive. Although the southwestern corner of Germania Magna, encompassing the headwaters of the Rhine and the Danube (the area which had been abandoned by the Marcomanni prior to the Hermannschlacht), was later colonized by Rome; and although Emperor Trajan added the trans-Danubian province of Dacia to Rome’s possessions at the beginning of the second century, no really serious program of conquest of German lands was again attempted.

The German unity which Hermann forged did not last long, unfortunately. Although he outmaneuvered his rival Marbod, who was forced to seek Roman protection, Hermann himself lost his life to an assassin a few years later. Traditional intertribal rivalries and jealousies came to the fore again. Just as Roman decadence prevented the Romans from conquering the Germans in the ensuing decades, so did German disunity prevent the reverse.