Never change, human race.

Still reading and enjoying Tom Holland’s Pax. Reached this bit about the downside of having a vast global Empire. (Hint, your Empire is full of foreigners).

It’s like we never change, innit.

Many senators, indeed, were now not even from Italy. Typical was

Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, the high-achieving senator from Baetica in

Spain, who, after his term of service in Galilee, had been promoted by

his former commander to serve as governor of Syria: as distinguished

a post as any in the empire. Others, talent-spotted by Vespasian, had

been fast-tracked into the senate from the provinces, either directly

or under cover of the census. Most of these men hailed from the

southern reaches of Spain or Gaul, where the coloniae - cities such

as Italica, the birthplace of Trajanus - were centuries old; but there

were senators too now from the eastern provinces. Here, for diehard

conservatives, was a most unsettling development. The presence of

men who spoke Greek as their first language in the great cockpit of

the ancient capital, where Cicero, and Caesar, and Augustus had

all held the floor, could hardly help but raise conservative hackles.

Certainly, for those who believed that Roman magistrates should

properly come from Rome, it was all most discombobulating. The

city, to the more disgruntled class of reactionary, seemed increasingly

given over to foreigners. Indeed, it seemed barely to be Roman at all.