June 25, 2026
Et tu, comment section?
The last Romans are still around
People just learned the Romans never really vanished — and the comments went feral
TLDR: The article says Roman identity never fully disappeared, with groups like Romanians and Romansh still carrying the name in some form. Readers immediately split between "Rome is still all around us," "stop glorifying empire," and the eternal internet question of who gets to call themselves Roman.
The big reveal in this history rabbit hole is delightfully chaotic: some people still identify as Roman today. The article points to modern Romanians, the tiny Romansh-speaking community in Switzerland, and Greek-descended groups like Romeika speakers and Urums as living echoes of Rome’s long afterlife. In plain English: the empire is gone, but the identity never fully clocked out.
And the comment section? Absolute arena combat. One camp went full "Rome is everywhere", rattling off everything from the calendar to the alphabet and basically arguing we’re all living in Rome’s group project. Another reader was instantly annoyed that Romansh seemed overlooked, while still giving the piece a polite gold star for the Romania section — a very classy way to say, nice article, but you forgot my guys. Then came the identity fight: one blunt commenter dropped the family-line bomb, saying descendants of Romans are not Romans, full stop.
But the spiciest pushback was from the anti-glorification crowd, who warned people not to romanticize Rome as some perfect civilization, calling it a slavery-based society living off earlier cultures. And just when things got too serious, somebody revived Tony Soprano: "Where are the Romans now? You’re looking at them." That one landed exactly as intended — half meme, half chest-thumping history joke. In other words, the Roman Empire is still alive where it matters most: online arguments.
Key Points
- •The article argues that Roman identity did not disappear entirely after the Roman Empire ended, but continued in altered forms.
- •Romanians are presented as a modern people who have long used names derived from “Roman,” and Romanian is described as the easternmost Romance language.
- •Romansh speakers in Switzerland preserved a distinct Latin-derived language and identity in Grisons through geographic and political separation.
- •The article links Romeika-speaking and Urum communities to the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople.
- •Historical labels such as Walach and related place names across Europe are cited as evidence of the long linguistic legacy of Roman identity.