Carla

“Although we read of occasional Romans, usually the ‘bad’ ones in these stories, complaining that foreigners or the low-born are taking away their birthright, the overall message is unmistakeable: even at the very pinnacle of the Roman political order, ‘Romans’ could come from elsewhere; and those born low, even ex-slaves, could rise to the top. Rome”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

“The truth is that Cato’s version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defence of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbours. But the distinctive, hard-edged sense of tough Roman austerity – which later Romans eagerly projected back on to their founding fathers and which has remained a powerful vision of Romanness into the modern world – was the product of a powerful cultural clash, in this period of expansion abroad, over what it was to be Roman in this new, wider imperial world, and in the context of such an array of alternatives. To put it another way, ‘Greeknesss’ and ‘Romanness’ were as inseparably bound up as they were polar opposites. That”
― Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome