Ancient Rome is a civilization that arguably gave rise to western civilization (well, alongside
Greece at least) and that has inspired future generations for well over 2,000 years.
If you’re a history nerd, it’s somewhat difficult not to at least be somewhat fascinated
by Rome and its achievements, but even if you’re not into history you probably know
something about the Romans, from their effective military to their emperors to their brutal
gladiatorial fights to the life of ancient luxury they lived in, we all know something
about the Romans.
Of course, since their civilization peaked thousands of years ago we also have a ton
of misconceptions about Ancient Rome, which I will try to bring to light in this video.
Let’s begin with perhaps the most famous piece of Roman clothing, the toga.
Togas were large pieces of cloth folded around the wearer’s body, over a tunic, and circular
in shape, much like your bedsheets when you’re trying to adjust them at 3 in the morning.
Togas were heavily inspired by the Etruscan tebenna and were a common sight in ancient
Rome, except… togas weren’t actually worn all the time.
As undeniably fashionable as they most certainly were, saying Romans wore togas all the time
would be like future historians saying the ancient Americans always went around wearing
two-piece suits, which I can confirm is not the case.
In reality togas were more like ancient Roman business suits, and only citizens were allowed
to wear them, as it was a sign of citizenship (also, after the 2nd century BC it was mostly
men who wore them).
Roman fashion was quite varied though, aside from the generic tunic available to most Romans,
citizen women also wore stolae as formal wear.
Similar in some ways to the toga, stolae were modest garments joined together by brooches
and pins called fibulae and generally worn with a cloak known as a palla overhead.
Next misconception, all Greco-Roman statues were plain, blank white.
Others have made good videos all about this, but there’s plentiful archaeological evidence
to support that Roman statues were actually vibrantly colored in various lifelike shades,
as opposed to the minimalist style we see today.
This misconception however dates back to the Renaissance (and spoilers, this period of
European history is kind of where a lot of our misconceptions of ancient Rome stem from),
where the artists of the time seemed to embrace the pure qualities of the white marble, and
so sculpted their own sculptures in this style.
However even famous Greco-Roman buildings like the Parthenon were vividly colored, with
its colors faintly visible into the 18th century.
One thing the statues usually depicted were their gods, a whole pantheon remarkably similar
to the pantheon of gods worshipped one peninsula over in Greece.
In fact, this has led to the misconception that Rome stole their gods from the Greeks,
kind of like the original “can I copy your homework” meme.
But did they not, what with all their different parallels?
This is not a simple question to answer, but in short the Romans didn’t just plagiarize
the Greek gods and give them Latin names, rather it is thought that their mythologies
stemmed from the even more ancient Proto-Indo-European mythology, a common ancestor to both mythologies
(Dyaus-phter giving rise to both Zeu-pater and Iu-piter, for the sky father), and then
later the Romans adopted many of the characteristics of the Greek gods into their pantheon, though
of course it’s worth pointing out that the Romans also did this for the mythologies of
other colonized peoples as well.
This was a phenomenon called religious syncretism, and Rome did this all over the place, though
of course this happened a bit more with Greece, seeing as to how much influence Greece had
over Rome.
If any piece of Rome’s massive legacy has survived in popular culture to this day, one
such piece are the gladiatorial fights, a brutal sport pitting two heavily armed opponents
against one-another, in which losing gladiators always died.
I’ve had a video about this subject in the pipeline for a long time, but in short this
also has something to do with another misconception: gladiators were always slaves or prisoners.
While many gladiators were indeed slaves forced to fight or prisoners who were really just
there to be executed, gladiators were looked at in much the same way modern sports stars
are seen today, as major celebrities who even had their own sponsors.
In addition, although it’s thought that the sport first started as slaves fighting
to the death as part of their former master’s funeral, things had to be changed by the time
it became so popular that a giant amphitheater towering over all its surroundings was built
right in the middle of the capital city for it.
Gladiators weren’t just slaves with overly dramaticized armor, they were also often volunteers
skillfully trained for years on end, so in short if they were to be killed whenever they
lost a single match, all that time and money spent on training would have essentially been
for nothing, so outside some special events, gladiators (slaves or free) were generally
not killed.
Okay now let’s kind of finish this off a bit more rapid-fire, obviously as I covered
in my recent video on ancient languages, Roman Latin sounded very different from the Latin
used by the Catholic Church today, C’s were always pronounced “K”, H was actually
pronounced, J was just I, and V was actually a U written how we write our modern V’s.
Thus, “weni widi wiki” (veni, vidi, vici), as said by “iulius kaisar” (Julius Caesar),
whose last words almost certainly weren’t “Et tu, Brute?”.
No one knows for sure what he actually said, 2nd century historian Suetonious states he
said nothing at all, meanwhile others say he actually said the Greek phrase, “καὶ
σύ, τέκνον (kai su, teknon)”, meaning “and you, kid?” since Roman patricians
often spoke with one-another in the ‘more refined’ Greek, Shakespeare just converted
it to Latin since his contemporary audience would have been more familiar with Latin than
Greek.
In fact “Et tu, Brute?”
wasn’t even Caesar’s last line in the play, his actual last line was “Then fall
Caesar!”
So yeah that’s about 0.2% of all the misconceptions about this fascinating civilization we’ve
made over the years, although let’s not be too hard on ourselves, it has been thousands
of years after all, also let’s be honest who hasn’t made mistakes in history class?
Regardless, what I hope you at least take from this video are that Greco-Roman statues
were generally brightly colored (though there were exceptions), saying Rome stole all of
Greece’s gods is disingenuous (and maybe a little mean), gladiators did die in the
arena just not nearly as much as in the movies, togas were more of a business suit, and Shakespeare
was writing fiction not historical accounts.
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