How really \'different\' were the Romans?

[Benjamin Abbott]

I advise caution when examining the various uses of antiquity in the sixteenth century and on. Certainly writers like Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli imagined themselves as drawing on ancient wisdom, but in my reading what he and others in that period wrote about the Romans came as much from sixteenth-century European desires as from classical history. Roman and Greek military structures functioned as symbols of the discipline Machiavelli and company wanted to see in sixteenth-century armies. As recent scholarship shows, Roman soldiers weren't necessarily as mechanically disciplined as Machiavelli assumed and as we sometimes assume. This isn't to say sixteenth-century Europeans simply used antiquity for their own purposes, but that they interpreted ancient history within their own cultural matrix. The same goes double for later attempts to channel ancient Rome for military and social agendas.

Were the stereotypical time-machine scenario to take place, with folks from here in the twenty-first century going back to Rome, I suspect we'd be astounded by both the continuities and discontinuities between us and them. I view the similarities and differences as equally profound.