When Rome conquered a new area, what was the process to "romanize" it and integrate it into the empire?

by WorkReddit98

I'm imagining Rome flooding an area with Roman settlers and soldiers. Anyone in the local population who did not submit to Roman rule were systematically killed. Everyone would adopt Latin as the new language. Soldiers would intermarry with the local woman and raise families. This is a very wrong view it turns out. I'm sure the specifics also varied from Emperor to Emperor. I'm very interested in this and I hope to read some great answers from all the ancient Roman history experts here!

Tiako

Not really, you have to remember that the Roman empire didn't really have "policies" as such, and certainly didn't have anywhere near the sort of administrative reach to pull off the scheme you are describing. Remember that genocide is not only immoral, it is also very difficult, and requires the sort of organization and control not really possible until the industrialized nation state. Also, the idea of forcing a conquered area to speak a new language is a very modern notion of conquest and domination--administration would be in Latin, so anyone who wanted to do anything with the administration would have to learn it. Through diffusion of social norms it spread to the rest of the population along with other facets of Roman culture, but there was nothing like Welsh Not or the Vergonha.

Now, this isn't to say that things were rosy. Colonies were often established in conquered territories, and this would certainly involve land appropriations (intermarriage is a complicated topic I don't feel qualified to comment on). The presence of the colonies created locuses of potential social disruption, as Roman colonists seem to have a reputation of "wantonness" and of course the new administration will hardly ever protect the populace. Tribute extractions could be arbitrary, incredibly burdensome, and organized in such a way to allow for maximum exploitation, as described in Tacitus:

Hitherto the people had been compelled to endure the farce of waiting by the closed granary and of purchasing corn unnecessarily and raising it to a fictitious price. Difficult byroads and distant places were fixed for them, so that states with a winter-camp close to them had to carry corn to remote and inaccessible parts of the country, until what was within the reach of all became a source of profit to the few.

But by and large there was no real policy of "Romanization" and certainly no policy of biological dilution. The Roman administration was concerned with two things: tax extraction and security. In following this they could be extremely brutal and they frequently did little to curb the excesses of exploitation. But it wasn't genocidal.

EDIT: Martin Millet's Romanization of Britain and Greg Woolf's Becoming Roman are classic studies. David Mattingly's Experiencing the Roman Empire is a pretty powerful work attempting to break past the debate on "Romanization" to try to nail down the actual effects of the Roman Empire.

dominantgiraffe

I recall that conquering Romans would tend to assimilate the existing aristocracy of a region into the imperial system, rather than liquidating them and replacing them with an ethnically Roman administration. Not a complete answer, obviously, but we at least see here that Nazi-esque genocidal conquest wasn't the Romans' strategy.