None of these statements are meaningful without a definition on your part of what it means to be "Ancient Roman" in a genetic sense. Do you mean, say, a handful of villagers living in the area of today's Rome on 21 April 753 BCE? I'll grant you that those were possibly a homogeneous bunch. Anything later? Definitely not. Trying to pretend that there is something like a clear genetic definition of "Roman" is... what do you call it? Racism. But don't worry, not the "bad" kind, just the "scientific" kind.
Well we've got to define something
... I'd opt for something like Latium natives of 750-300 BCE, adding Etruscans. My point is to exclude Magna Graecia, because it would make it harder to make an ethnocultural statement or conclusion.
Consider this: We do not, in fact, have to define something. We don't have to define an artificial genetic category just so we can then categorize people into artificial genetic buckets.
You're right! To the Romans, every Roman citizen was a Roman. There was no "genetically Roman" category. The OP's "genetic" category is indeed a "made up concept", as you say! And the reason they made it up is the reason I stated above.
>It’s like how peasants used to say that the King is a divine representative of God, because that was the king and the system’s con job back then, to make the dumb peasants obedient through religion.
Well no one really knows because most of this comes from the writing ruling classes. If we're talking Middle Ages and the Modern Age, France offers an interesting example : absolute monarchy by divine right came very late (17th cent) and was almost never fully accepted. The system relied greatly on religion (which kept one's standing within a social class), weak origin stories (the Franks came and conquered the Gallo-Romans/ my ancestor fought in the crusades, which is why you're a serf), and a very strong system of local rights and privileges (I'm a legitimate ruler because I keep your right to hold poultry markets on Sundays, which the next village doesn't have).
The divine dimension you refer to was a constant effort in France and England (where the king was not a religious ruler) well described in "The Royal Touch" by Marc Bloch.
This is a silly argument. Biology is inherently messy and “ethnicity” is just a fuzzy clustering. You can make the exact same argument about “species” - because that too is a human abstraction that breaks down in biological reality because there are no clear lines.
My main argument was that the OP's supposedly clear-cut genetic category was not defined. You also seem to be saying that it's not clear-cut and defined. So why are you saying that my argument is silly, as opposed to the OP's?
> “ethnicity”
Neither the OP nor I mentioned this word, of course. You're shifting the goalposts. One could pick out a certain set of genetic markers, and one could do a clear-cut classification based on those. I'm firmly of the opinion that one should not, but in any case, that would be about genetics (as the OP and I discussed), and not about this word that you are trying to drag into this to deliberately muddy the waters.
> You can make the exact same argument about “species”
Proof by analogy is fraud, as they say. Even if the analogy holds. This one doesn't: There are fairly good ways of defining species objectively. For example, as the second sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species says: "It can be defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." I'm sure that there are a few exceptions around the edges, but this is much more clear-cut than any human divisions that you're trying to drag into this.
Virtually nobody really uses that definition of species because it’s totally untenable in practice - you’d put every species of wolf, dog, and coyote in the same bucket, for a simple example, but it gets much worse than this. Ligers are sometimes fertile, are lions and tigers the same species? Are vast swaths of the current catalogue of hominids the same species? When you get into fish and birds this becomes even more nightmarish. Let’s not even talk about plants. Further complicating this is that “ability to interbreed” is not even transitive!
Or consider looking at it from the other direction - it only even seems to make sense if you have some preconceived notion about species anyway. If two humans are infertile or have an infertile child, does that make them different species from each other? Of course not.
I’m not making a novel argument, Darwin goes in-depth on this very topic in the Origin of Species.
“Species” and “ethnicity” (to which “ancient Roman” belongs) are in fact identical concepts; the only difference is the zoom setting on populations, which in both cases varies for any specific example but generally is farther out for species and closer in for ethnicity. In both cases they are arbitrary lines drawn around real clustering of population genetics.
OK. You don't agree with the OP's "arbitrary lines", I don't agree with the OP's arbitrary lines, I still don't understand why you felt you needed to attack me for this. But I hope you have a lovely day.
No, I have no problem with OP's arbitrary lines - they are meaningful even though reality necessitates any such lines of this type (categorizing individuals) be drawn arbitrarily. What I have a problem with is people moralizing about science - we shouldn't even think about things because they make you uncomfortable.
There is an is-ought distinction. We can reason, investigate, and speculate about the ancient Roman people and their distinctiveness and what populations today have the closest genetic distance without there being any implication whatsoever socially or legally.
