Greeks or Italians: Which People Is Closest to Rome?

No one agrees on who descends from Rome

The question of which people is closest to the ancient Romans is a can of worms. The answer that has taken hold in common narratives—Greece guards the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, Italy that of the classical one—crumbles as soon as you look at the linguistic and genetic map. Because Latin, irony of history, is still alive in Bucharest before Athens.

The starting point is an uncomfortable intuition: if the Byzantines were the Romans of the East, today's Greeks would be direct heirs. The chain has weak links. Among them, that imperial Rome was, from very early on, a melting pot as heterogeneous as any great imperial city. It emerged from the mixing of Latins and Etruscans, argues one school of analysis, and never stopped absorbing peoples.

Which language is most similar to Latin

If the criterion is language, the podium leaves little doubt: any Romance-speaking people is ahead, and Italian takes the prize as the closest to classical Latin. There a candidate appears that almost no one has in their bets: Romanian. Romania, a forgotten periphery and later battered, preserves a Latin structure that neither Greek nor Germanic languages can claim.

Languages are not everything. Some argue that the Roman cultural ethos—despotism, caudillismo, sacralization of power—emigrated with imperial reforms and ended up nesting in places no one would call Latin. The comparison stretches all the way to Japan, and not always with poor judgment.

DNA does not hand out diplomas

When the focus shifts to genetics, the ground becomes slippery. A calculation circulating among analyses puts current classical Greek heritage at around 50-60%, and up to 70% depending on the area. The same fruta points to an evident Turkic component, also visible in gastronomy. History helps explain it: after the Greco-Turkish war of the early 20th century and the population exchange, nearly 300,000 Greeks from Anatolia were massacred and hundreds of thousands fled en masse.

For others, the least contaminated stronghold is neither in Greece nor Italy, but in islands that have been off the radar for centuries. Sardinia, for example, where hardly anything relevant peine in two millennia.

From Diocletian to Moscow: when Rome ceased to be Rome

There is a point where all positions unwittingly agree: Rome ceased to be Rome at some moment, and no one sets the date the same. The reforms of Diocletian, with the sacralization of the emperor, prostration and eunuch courts, point to an increasingly Eastern ethos—some say Persian. The Hellenization that already scandalized Cato the Elder places the change much earlier.

The question has gone two thousand years without an answer. «You seek Rome in Rome, oh pilgrim, and in Rome itself you do not find it», wrote a poet. The Vatican offers itself as the most similar state; Constantinople and Moscow fight over the testament; even the Umayyad caliphs claimed the mantle. The waiter in a story by Alberto Sarracena summed it up in one sentence: we are not like the Romans, we are the same.

What if the correct answer is that Rome no longer exists anywhere, and that is why everyone can claim it?