America had manifest destiny and exceptionalism, and Britain had racial superiority backed by "science", both of which were used to pursue the interests of Capital.
What did Rome have?
Less than 5 minutes in and he's already struggling with the microphone. Classic Parenti
Seriously was there a CIA unit just following him around on speaking tours fucking up the mics, lol give the man a break
I read that book!
It's pretty good. It's mostly about how most historians are bourgeoisie and how that colors their interpretations of certain historical events (and when it comes to ancient societies, literally every surviving history was written by a rich failson), so of course /r/askhistorians hates it.
Manifest Destiny, pretty much. There was always some new group of 'barbarians' threatening the Roman way of life. As my history teachers used to joke, the Romans conquered the world in self-defense.
Depends on which era.
Early Rome was like pretty much any other city-state at the time: nobody knew what was going on, nobody understood how anything worked, but the ruling class figured out a way to propagate their power and hoard wealth so they did it. For a time Rome had a weird elected Monarchy, and I tend to believe that the transition to the Senate was the result of the ruling class growing and having more conflicts than could be embodied by a single strong executive.
Republican Rome could be described as a kind of Manifest Destiny - Romans believed themselves to be the best people, and so wars that had originally been about securing the economic interests of the Senate turned into subjugating nearby city-states. There's an interesting aspect to this era, since as Rome added more and more territory it also expanded the definition of "Roman" until it included basically all Latin peoples, but no matter how powerful the centralized Roman power became it was inevitable that it would run up against the practical limits of what could be accomplished with the technology at hand.
The comparison to Manifest Destiny is extra applicable to Republican Rome, because much like America a lot of the social divisions that would have spelled the end for any other society at the time were able to be smoothed over by massive expansion of land taken by conquest. The Romans conquered everyone around the Mediterranean and a big chunk of Western Europe, set up Roman colonies on the best land and put existing large settlements under Roman rule, and the cash that came in was enough to keep the middle classes happy and the army large enough to keep the lower classes in line.
The conquests came to an end with the Republic though, and Rome spent most of its existence simply maintaining itself. It's hard to sum up over a thousand years into a single "governing ideology", but basically everyone realized that the fighting for new land was over and the fighting became about the land and titles that were already Roman. Patronage networks were the precursor to feudalism, and there was a transition from pagan institutions to Christian ones, but for most of its existence Rome was just Too Big to Fail. When there was a conflict between the current Emperor and somebody else, the winner would simply declare themselves the new Roman Emperor, and inherit the institutions.
The Western Roman Empire fell when the winner of such a war simply refused to be the Emperor and left those institutions with no leader and no resources (as the treasury had been sacked), so all of the patronage networks assumed direct control over their associated regions and after a while they realized that there wasn't going to be a new Emperor and they were all living under Feudalism. The Eastern Roman Empire fell when the Muslims did a Manifest Destiny all over Constantinople/Istanbul.
Nothing. Sorry, but Ancient Rome didn't exist according to the TikToks that keep appearing on my homepage
‘Roma, Invicta et aeterna’
Meaning ‘Rome, Unconquered/Invincible and Eternal’
I don’t know anything really but I remember my history professor saying it. Don’t know that it’s much of an ideology, but a cool slogan I guess. At least it is how they thought of themselves at some point
