The Romans were a Latin culture from Latium in central Italy which dominated the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire from 753 BC to 476 AD.
History[]
The Romans were said to have been descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas's refugee followers and the Latins, and, when Romulus founded the city of Rome in the Alban Hills in 753 BC, he had the Roman men abduct Sabine women and rape them to populate the new city. The Romans came to speak the Latin language, and the Romans would break free of Etruscan rule in 509 BC and become an independent republic.
Over the next several centuries, the Romans gradually conquered (or vassalized) and assimilated their neighbors, starting with the Latins and Etruscans, and later including the Italic tribes of central Italy, the Gauls of northern Italy, the Greeks of southern Italy, and other cultural groups outside of Italy.
The Romans bestowed citizenship upon their conquered and assimilated peoples, and they also spread the Latin and Greek languages, expanded their infrastructure and political system, and also converted "barbarians" into Roman subjects. By 117 AD, at the height of the Roman Empire, the Roman culture stretched from England, France, Portugal, and Morocco in the west to Germania Inferior, Austria, Dacia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt in the east, and the empire also included the entire Mediterranean world and North Africa.
The spread of Roman culture influenced modern philosophy, linguistics, civilization, and nation-states. The Romans ceased to be a single ethnic group as the result of assimilation, instead becoming a Latin-speaking civilized culture. The empire was divided during the 4th century AD, and the Eastern Roman Empire came to be more Greek due to its situation at the former Greek city-state of Byzantium, while the Western Roman Empire was overrun by barbarians during the 5th century AD.
Over the next several centuries, the Romans, the original inhabitants, and the new barbarian tribes combined cultures to create new cultures, including the French, the Romano-British, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and others.
Today, Romance (of Latin origin) languages include Romanian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and Roman culture is carried on through linguistics and through politics (the republican system was later adopted in the United States and many other countries after the late 18th and 19th centuries).