Roman DNA

Are we the same as the Ancient Romans, deep down?

Of course, we're not exactly the same. But still - are we pretty much the same? If you took the average guy, swapped his shirt and trousers for a tunic, and put him to war against Carthage, would he behave like a Roman, i.e. utterly ruthlessly?

I went to Rome recently and was stuck by the single-minded militaristic nature of the Ancient Romans. (Modern ones are quite nice). That probably sounds obvious - everyone knows that the Romans were bloodthirsty bastards. But historians are fond, these days, of saying that nothing has changed: it's the same old human nature, just dressed up a little and made to look nice. Our inner Roman is still there.

At first, this seems crazy. We're not particularly violent, after all. But the historian will point to similarities. Look at sports festivals: they're just like Gladiatorial contests! etc. But I am more of an optimist, who likes to think that we somehow managed to tamp down the violence a while back. To support this, I've jerrybuilt a dodgy social Darwinist theory to back me up.

First: think of how pale a facsimile ball sports are of blood sports. We have got to the point where watching someone pass a round object to another person quenches the bloodlust that could only have previously been quelled by witnessing the bloody deaths of brutal fighters in the ring. Isn't that odd?

This may sound crazy, or even borderline eugenicist, to others, but: what if we have had the violence systematically bred out of us over the years? To see what I mean, think of this: most extremely violent people, in Roman times, had the opportunity to rise to the top levels of power. Where are the people with violent tendencies now? Unlike in Rome, in Australia far more of them are in prison than in the military. Being aggressive towards others, in a secular democracy, generally gets you incarcerated rather than revered, except for a few small subsets (bikie gangs etc.). Now, if you're in prison, you have fewer opportunities to have children. Could a society like ours, that generally condemns violence as a vice, therefore, instigate a kind of genetic 'feedback loop' that steadily breeds violent tendencies out of the population? Or is it obnoxious just to ponder this?

I realise that a good argument against this theory is the recent existence of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. These obviously contained many extremely violent people, and they were only a few years ago - too short a time for any significant genetic change to occur.

But still - we're so much less violent these days than we were that it's hard to believe nothing's changed. Has our 'genetic temperament' changed at all since Ancient Rome? And if not, how do we manage to be so darn peaceful to one another most of the time?