12-20-2011, 04:24 AM
All this was nothing really new. People tend to exaggerate on the magnitude of these events. Slavs were never that numerous in their invasions and by the time they descended to the Balcans, the people had already more or less put collective identity over their local one. As I see it, by the 5th century Greeks had already accepted that they were now members of a larger political entity. I would also suggest caution (this can be a very interesting issue) as to whether it was the Greeks that were in the end genetically mixed up more with the various invaders or the invaders with the Greeks. Anyways, this is not a discussion about genetics but about conscious political decisions and an abandonment of local ethnicism mainly because of planned and conscious Roman Imperial policies. I do not personally see, at least during the first 8 centuries AD migratory pressures playing much of a role in this process.
