Hellas, Rome and the Continuation of Their Legacy

By

Dr Ricardo Duchesne*

For some decades now, historians in the West are being trained to

portray the history of Europe as a long history of migrations and racial

mixing -- to make students believe that the current immigration trends

are in line with past patterns.

Even the best historians abide by the dictates of diversity. Take this

otherwise excellent book, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from

the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (1000-264 BC) ----- from the start it

says that "Italy has always been a variegated country...a patchwork of

different peoples, languages and cultures". "The resulting patch work

was the product of successive movements of population in prehistoric

times".

Yet, in truth, the peoples of prehistoric Italy were overwhelmingly

members of the "Indo-European 'Italic' languages". It sounds very

diverse when you read about the Volscians, Latins, Samnites, Romans,

Marsi, Umbrians, Sabines...with the Greeks in the south and the Celts in

the north.

Don't be misguided. These are all members of the 'Aryan' Indo-European

race. You can categorize them as the "Italic" group of the IEs who

colonized Italy in the second millennium.

Yes, there were also pre-IE "survivals forming part of a 'Mediterranean'

substratum" who came originally from Anatolia, the farmers who migrated

into southern Europe 8,000 years ago. These farming peoples, it needs to

be clarified, were also Caucasian, selected for *additional* white

traits in the new climes of Europe.

What about the famous Etruscans? They were not IE, likely Semitic,

Phoenician.

After WWII, to counter Mussolini's fascism, and the idea that Italy was

"overrun by Aryan invaders", historians pushed the idea that the

Etruscans were the most important cultural shaper of prehistoric/ancient

Rome.

But the book I referenced above, to its credit, demonstrates that "the

Etruscans had only superficial effects on Roman life and culture".

The most powerful cultural-racial influence came from the Italic IEs,

and the Greeks who had been colonizing southern Italy and by the fifth

century had created a "Great Greece".

Since the Greeks in southern Italy were the most advanced IEs in contact

with the Greek mainland, they came to provide a powerful cultural model

for an aristocratic civilization in Italy, starting with the Homeric

ideals of personal esteem in warfare, feasting with warrior companions,

pursuit of honor and prestige.

IEs are naturally inclined to create Republics because of their fierce

aristocratic pride and unwillingness to submit. Even after they

conquered Greece in the 2nd century, the Romans felt a strong cultural

bond with the Greeks.

Without the Romans, the Greek legacy would have been diluted by the

Orientalization which occurred with Alexander's expansion in the East.

Once the Roman empire experienced its own Orientalization and began to

lose its Republican ethos in a state of decadent affluence, it was for

the IE Germanic peoples to preserve this legacy.

*Ricardo Duchesne is a retired professor and author of Uniqueness of

Western Civilization,  Canada in Decay, Faustian Man, and Greatness and

Ruin.