The Racial Struggle in Ancient Rome

by Hans F. K. Günther

Hans F. K. Günther traces the origins of the Italic peoples, highlighting their migrations and the conflicts between Nordic-descended patricians and indigenous plebeians.

These are excerpts from Hans F. K. Günther’s The Racial Elements of European History (1930) and Lebensgeschichte des Römischen Volkes (History of the Roman People) (1966).

Linguistics and prehistoric research seek the original settlements of the Italic peoples — among whom the Latin tribe became the leading one that created the Roman Empire — in areas of the upper to middle Danube, also between the upper Danube and the Eastern Alps, Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower Austria. Prehistoric research has found the area from which the Italic peoples migrated south over the Alps between eastern Switzerland, the eastern Alps, and the Danube. The closest neighbouring tribes of the Italic peoples in the central European area of Indo-European origins must have been the Celts and Germans.

Since about 2000 BC, various migrations of Italic tribes from the northeast have reached the Po Valley over the lower passes of the eastern Alps, from where further expansion took place in the Bronze Age until most of Italy — except for the Etruscan areas, which succumbed to the power of the Latin tribe of the Italic peoples only around 300 BC — was occupied by Italic tribes of Indo-European language and culture and of Nordic racial origin. The pre-population encountered by the Italic peoples in their advance must have been predominantly of Western race, and in northern Italy it was likely a racial mix of Western and Eastern, perhaps with minor Dinaric influences.

According to legend, Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC. The founders were mostly from the Latin and, to a lesser extent, the Sabine tribe. A confederation of small and very small peasant towns formed the nucleus of the Roman Empire. The population consisted mainly of peasant families of Nordic racial origin, who later became the patricians. Each peasant family of the Latin tribe seems to have had some unfree dependents — descendants of the non-Nordic pre-population who were obligated to work in the house and fields. In the city of Rome, another layer of non-Nordic racial origin eventually formed — the later plebeians, whose roots are still disputed. Some likely emerged from the dependents, others from immigrant traders and craftsmen, and another part from the pre-population of Italy, whose areas the Latins had conquered and continued to conquer. In general, the patricians as descendants of the Nordic racial conquerors and the plebeians as descendants of the Western or Western-Eastern indigenous population must have stood opposite each other as two racially different and separate layers. The origin of the plebs is also revealed in their matrilineal family relations, which were despised by the patrilineal patricians. The plebs buried their dead, while the Indo-European cremation of corpses persisted among the patricians and the upper classes imitating them until the imperial period. The first to recognise that the class opposition between patricians and plebeians was essentially a racial opposition and could be traced back to the superimposition of an indigenous population by invading conquerors was Niebuhr (Roman History, Vol. 1, 1811).

The ancient Roman-patrician nature is most likely Nordic nature in Italic form, alongside which one might suspect a Falic and an Eastern influence. Hellenic-Nordic nature probably received a certain ‘flair’ from a slight prehistoric admixture of the Dinaric race. Italic-Roman or at least Latin-Roman nature shows, alongside Nordic features of bold advancement, a certain modification of Nordic traits into powerful perseverance and dry premeditation, perhaps explainable by a Falic influence among the leading layer, and emotional traits of the Eastern race among the led layer, which manifest in a profit-oriented small trading spirit. The type of greedy and opulently living wholesale merchant, mostly represented by the Near Eastern race, appears only in the middle to later history of Rome. Artworks depicting Romans only began to appear in the 2nd century BC, and those that have been preserved are more numerous from the later period of Rome. They clearly show an Eastern, less clearly a Falic influence, and repeatedly Dinaric and Near Eastern influences. Even in the Etruscan ruling class, a certain Nordic influence was preserved, so those Etruscan families — six or seven are counted — that were admitted to the patriciate in the early Roman period must have also contributed Near Eastern and Western blood to it.

The racial struggle in the Rome of the regal period and the first centuries played out as a constitutional struggle in which the plebeians gradually achieved equality with the patricians. Corresponding to the different racial origins of both classes, the patricians had different marriage laws and customs than the plebeians. There was no marriage law, no conubium, between patricians and plebeians; indeed, the oldest legislation of Rome seems to have pronounced a marriage ban between the two classes. Children of possible loose connections between a patrician and a plebeian woman followed the pars deterior, the ‘worse hand’, as an old German legal expression of similar meaning says, i.e. the lower class, so children from the union of a Roman woman with a foreigner also followed the foreign nationality. The patrician class was intended to be a closed bloodline and to be kept pure.

Against this racial barrier was directed the lex Canuleia de conubio, adopted in 445 BC, which established a marriage law between the upper and lower classes. The resistance of the patricians against mixing with the plebeians waned only slowly; the patrician families remained closed off to the plebs long after the adoption of the lex Canuleia. When finally connections did arise between the patriciate and the respected among the plebeian families, there must have been plebeian families that could meet the traditional views of the patriciate on Roman nobility in demeanour and conduct, capability and seriousness (virtus and gravitas), and Roman lordship. Indeed, the racial composition of the plebs changed as leading families of other Italic tribes of Nordic racial origin, which had become dependent on Rome in the course of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, were transplanted to Rome and incorporated into the plebs.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)