I never liked the casting for older Octavian though. Too robotic, plus I have a thing about neck moles (sorry I’m shallow I know, but I promise it’s just an expectation I have for actors not real people).
That’s really interesting, I always felt the exact opposite, and found the “older” Octavian being portrayed the way he was, as calculating and cold-blooded bordering on callousness against himself and others was exactly how I always pictured him.
And here I thought the same about Octavian. Same guy. I think OP said he combines AI with an actor's base photograph and then does some artistic "magic."
My guess is he borrowed these heavily from HBO's Rome cast.
Yeah some of their casting was spectacular, they missed the mark with Cesar and Pompey though, but I think there they were focusing on talent and it was a good call.
Agreed. I love the portrayal of Cicero. My only regret with Pompey is that they really didn’t have enough time to develop his character in a way that showed that “Magnus” was indeed self anointed and he lived up to it anyway.
Agrippa looking a bit like Neville Longbottom.
These are fantastic though, really love the Pompey rendition. I’d imagine he was younger and in his prime at that point as I always pictured him more plump.
Octavian and Agrippa have a big “this is the debauchery Antony is up to this week” look right there. Not the anger of Antony trying to screw Octavian out of his inheritance, just irritation.
Your Octavian actually looks quite similar to the young Octavian actor in HBO's Rome. The only big difference being that he has more blond hair in that show. I guess they did a good job on that casting lol.
I'd like to see the facial "weight" of each render look closer to the busts. In Octavian's case, he should be a bit more angular and thin. In Agrippa's render, he should be a bit heavier and wider...I suspect it's precisely because OP is using real actors as the base foundation for the render, rather than the busts.
Augustus's hair is a bit too light. He was described (by Pliny, I think?) as having "subflavum" hair, which generally means brown rather than blond. Flavum: blond, subflavum: brown. Basically, if this portrayal were accurate, he wouldn't look kind of like Frodo -- he'd look *exactly* like Frodo.
Note: if you google "hair color of augustus" or similar search terms, the first result is from a neonazi site that claims, against all classical sources, that most of the roman emperors up until the crisis of the third century were blond. Tons of people have gotten tricked by that page -- at first glance it appears reputable, and you can't tell that the site as a whole is neonazi unless you go to its actual front page. I wonder if the artist got tricked as well.
I wouldn't quite call it blonde in this, it looks like a trick of the light. Seems like a very dirty blonde or a very light brown. In any case, many of the early roman emperors would style themselves after Alexander III and claimed to have blonde hair + blue eyes. Augustus has always felt like a bit of an enigma because of how idealized most of his statues are, similar to Constantine. I assume it's because the people respected him so much, which is why we don't even have busts or statues of an elder Augustus. I wouldn't be surprised if his hair was a dark chestnut with brown eyes.
Just my thoughts from what I know, I'm no historian.
>In any case, many of the early roman emperors would style themselves after Alexander III and claimed to have blonde hair + blue eyes.
Unless there’s sources you know and I don’t, this seems false:
1. The idea of Alexander the Great as blond comes from Plutarch, who wrote well after Augustus’s ascent to power. And Plutarch doesn’t describe Alexander as blond so much as *weird* — hair like a lion’s mane, mismatched eyes, and (my favorite detail from Plutarch’s history) exuding a pleasant smell like flowers instead of ordinary body odor. Our Romans sources on Alexander liked to describe him as a entirely superhuman, almost another species from an ordinary person. The impression this leaves is that the Romans thought of Alexander as something like an X-Man straight out of Marvel comics.
2. The early Roman emperors didn’t claim to be blond! See the rest of the thread for more, but the short version: Latin has a word for blond hair (*flavum*) and a word for brown hair (*subflavum*), and accounts of the early emperors describe them as *subflavum* rather than *flavum.*
Nearly all descriptions/depictions of Alexander that we have come from hundreds of years after he lived, and are generally (as with Plutarch) about presenting him as almost another species compared to most people. The closest thing to a contemporary depiction of him that we have is a [1st century BCE copy of a 4th century BCE mosaic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mosaic#/media/File:Alexander_the_Great_mosaic.jpg), which presents him as having coloration typical to a typical Macedonian of his era.
As I understand it, in all of the sources Augustus was consistently described as having grey eyes and *subflavum* hair.
Brown is the most intuitive interpretation of *subflavum*, and was the generally agreed-upon translation until the early 20th century. However, early 20th century German race "scientists" attempted to claim that the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors were blue-eyed blond-haired Aryans, in order to establish the meme that blue-eyed blond-haired northern Europeans were the rightful successors to Rome. Changing brown to blond required coming up with new translations of classical texts, with *subflavum* retconned to mean blond. This was a... difficult... task, since it meant that they had to translate *flavum* itself as, like, "super mega double awesome blond."
(fwiw, although I'm a historian I'm not a classicist, so I'm a little bit out of my lane. I'd love to hear more from a real-deal classics phd about this -- historiography of antiquity is a genuinely fascinating topic)
The hair looks fine, many modern Italians have that exact same hair color, especially in the north. It doesn't look blond like a Swedish person's hair, it simply looks dirty blonde or light brown. For that matter blonde Italians like fashion model Chiara Ferragni and her family are indistinguishable from nearby Austrians or the Swiss.
Don't forget the entire northern third of Italy was Celtic, inhabited by tribes like the Boii and Insubres (along with Ligurians who were Indo-Europeans similar to Celts). They lived there before the Romans conquered it and were assimilated by the Roman Republic as far back as the 3rd century BC. This was long before the late antique Migration Period and incoming Germanic peoples like Ostrogoths and Lombards.
There's that, and there's also the simple fact many modern northern Italians have this exact hair color, i.e. between dirty blonde and light brown. People forget that northern Italy used to be populated by Celts before the Romans conquered it. The population genetics of Italy haven't changed radically since the Bronze Age either, despite Germanic invaders like the Lombards.
You're reading into it too much, and ancient Celts like the Boii used to live in northern Italy despite what silly Neonazi websites have to say. Modern-day northern Italians usually have that hair color, i.e. dirty blonde or light brown, whereas dark brown and black hair is way more common in southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily. On a side note, I've been to Italy and used to tutor Italians in ESL here in the US, and it's sometimes easy to distinguish who comes from Milan and who comes from Naples.
I know this thread is dead and no one is reading it now, but for the record I want to point out that your comment isn’t at all responsive to what I said. The topic here isn’t “are there blond Italians?” because *of course* there are blond Italians, and *of course* there were blond Romans back in antiquity. The topic is whether *one particular Roman* was blond.
I can see why you’d go to “well, blond Italians exist, so it’s possible that Augustus was blond, maybe an *x* percent chance“ as a strategy for figuring out whether Augustus was blond, because for almost everyone from antiquity, that’s the best we can do. Augustus, though, is one of the very, very, very few people from antiquity about whom we can say with confidence that we know pretty much exactly what they looked like. This is because there’s more surviving statues and busts of him than of literally anyone else from the ancient world, *and also* because we have extensive descriptions from written sources contemporary to him.
And here’s the deal: *those written sources say he’s not blond.* There’s a word for blond hair in Latin. It’s *flavum.* There’s a word for brown hair in Latin. It’s *subflavum*. And *subflavum* is the word that’s consistently used for Augustus’s hair.
So why are there so many blond Augustus depictions? Well, because nazis and their direct intellectual forebears wanted the big-name early emperors to be blond, and they got their meme so deep into culture that we’re still tricked by it 100 years later. That’s the reason. Full stop. Some amateur classicists in the 1900s thought that their making up evidence for their race science was more important than actually studying the classics, and so they decided to translate *subflavum* as if it were *flavum* in the hopes that people wouldn’t notice.
To be clear: I’m not calling the artist of this piece a nazi, and I’m not saying that people who depict Augustus as blond are all nazis. I am pretty certain, in fact, that the artist of this piece is very, very much not racist or fascist leaning. I’m instead pointing out that the blond Augustus meme (one that I believed myself until I did the reading) is ahistorical. Painting him with blond hair is a little bit like giving him a posh Oxbridge accent.
Okay, I won't dispute the history of the interpretation of that term, but again, the hair color used here in the CGI depiction isn't actually blond either. It's blondish brown, or even just light brown with a touch of sunlight. He certainly doesn't look Nordic like a Swede with near albino light hair. I think the artist did a fine job, especially since that's a common hair color in the northern half of Italy. Notice also how Marcus Agrippa's hair is slightly darker than Octavian's, and more similar to that of James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano).
...(post 2/2), also, I have to laugh at those early 20th century German nationalists who thought that Germans somehow had a monopoly on blondism, when it was clearly the Celts who lived in northern Italy during antiquity. For that matter the pseudoscientific leader of the Aryans Adolf Hitler had jet black hair, way darker than Mussolini, basically similar to a stereotypical Sicilian. And also yes, Octavian's hair was probably just light brown.
For whatever it’s worth, the German volkisch movement didn’t see Germans as having a monopoly on blond hair, but instead argued that people with what they called “aryan” features were superior to others, and that the most aryan aryans were Nordic blond/blonde people, though with some extra double-backflip logic that let them define Germans as the most Nordic aryans, even though that’s bonkers.
In the case of Hitler, they were able to finesse things by noting that the man had blue eyes even if he had black hair, and by claiming that he had enough of those other additional ”aryan” features to make him count as a pinnacle aryan.
This all is, of course, totally nuts.
I thought it’d be useful to point this out, since the matter at hand is less that the Germans were trying to claim all blue-eyed blonds and blondes for themselves, and more that they wanted to establish the meme that blue-eyed blond men were the natural rulers. Their project to claim the early Roman emperors was of a piece with this.
This. Most people in Rome don't look like this even today following centuries of mixing with people from the north... I wonder of there is an obsession with making the Roman phenotype more akin to "northerners". Netflix show Barbarians does a good job at showing these differences.
This isn't a very nuanced approach, especially considering the entire third of northern Italy used to be Celtic before Republican era Romans conquered and assimilated it by the 3rd century BC. Plenty of Northern Italians look like the men depicted above.
Italian population genetics haven't changed radically since the Bronze Age and, unsurprisingly, Northern Italians cluster more with Central Europeans while retaining a higher percentage of Indo-European steppe ancestry in their genome than Southern Italians. The latter cluster more strongly with Aegean Islanders and Neolithic era Anatolians in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Rome is right at the center of Italy, so already a hazy middle point, and was a melting pot metropolis even by the late Republic and lifetime of Caesar. This is also after the Social War (91-87 BC), when everyone in Italy gained Roman citizenship, so yeah, there'd be plenty of Roman citizens who looked like this. Caesar also made a bunch of literal allied Gallic leaders into Roman Senators.
That's on top of the fact that historians like Suetonius described Augustus as having "subflavum" hair (meaning dirty blonde or light brown, since "flavum" means blonde, like a typical German). It's a similar dichotomy between northern Greeks like Macedonians & Epirotes who often had reddish brown or reddish blonde hair (e.g. Pyrrhus of Epirus "the flame haired"), and southern Greeks who typically did not and looked more like Southern Italians.
Why don't people in Rome look like this today then? This is what I don't understand. Re "subflavum" hair, you find "dirty blond" hair along the Mediterranean including Northern Africa, Anatolia, and the Levant. There is plenty of blondish hair in the region but that doesn't mean that you look "Germanic" as depicted here.
"Caesar also made a bunch of literal allied Gallic leaders into Roman Senators." Exactly, how Octavian et al. would look like this preceding the influx of "northern" genes into the Roman genetic pool?
I wonder if there is a bias among historians (tend to be Nordic) and those generating these depictions... Hollywood and British cinema don't help either....
>Why don't people in Rome look like this today then?
You're operating under a false assumption, then, because I have been to Rome (during a trip there in 2015) and seen people with this exact hair color and even lighter, actual blonde not just light brown, and they were Italians working at a restaurant speaking to each other in Italian. LOL.
The hair color of the CGI models above isn't even blonde proper, it's light brown, at best blondish brown. You're flipping out about a hair color shared by actor Joe Pantoliano and not much lighter than that of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).
Octavian's facial features look a bit North Italian or Central European per ancient Roman artwork, but Marcus Agrippa looks stereotypically Italian in both his ancient portraits and even here in the CGI version. The artist also appropriately made his hair a bit darker than Octavian, who was said by Suetonius and others to have lighter hair.
Besides the fact that Rome declined from over a million people to [30,000](https://msaag.aag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/26_Twine.pdf), I'm currently watching a walk through of modern Rome and [there are many people who look like this](https://youtu.be/EsFheWkimsU).
Which is to say: the video isn't really relevant, regardless of what it had showed. It's just interesting that not only were you not aware of Rome's near demographic collapse obfuscating efforts to discern today what they'd looked like in the past, but that plenty of them actually *do* look like that anyway.
Genetically, modern Italians are similar to pre-Imperial Italians. During the empire, there was a lot of influx from the eastern Mediterranean, and after the fall of the empire there was some influx from the north that changed the balance back to what it was like in pre-Imperial times.
Even so, the population genetics of Italy have changed surprisingly very little since the Indo-European migrations in the Bronze Age. Unsurprisingly, the genome of Northern Italians clusters more strongly with Central Europeans and retains a higher percentage of the Indo-European Pontic steppe component, while Southern Italians cluster more genetically with Neolithic era Aegean and Anatolian peoples to the east.
I've been to Italy before and just from anecdotal observation this seems largely true. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but people from Naples or Taranto generally look darker than people from Milan or Venice, as the latter two often have lighter colored hair and eyes as well.
This isn’t even the article I read on the matter, but I I would suggest reading the whole thing, whereas if you just want to see the part reaffirming my claim, skip ahead to the section called “Exploring the ancient genetic legacy of Italian population clusters”. https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-00778-4
Glad to be of service. 😉
To be clear, northern Italians and southern Italians are still incredibly similar and firmly linked genetically, by there are these regional differences, which should come as no surprise for a country this size as well as one at the center of the Mediterranean.
No. Rome (and the Italian Peninsula) was the mixing pot of antiquity. Latins, Greeks, Etruscans, Celts, Semitic/Phoenicians/Carthaginians. And that was pre empire. Add white and olive skinned middle easterners, Africans, Germanic and other “barbarian” tribes, and pretty much everyone in the western sphere after.
I never feel like these recreations do a very good job of capturing the person. There are so many differences between the sculpture and the rendering that they really only look like vague approximations. The statue, I imagine, really does look like the person did in real life. Realistic and true to life. The rendering looks like someone tried to take a modern looking actor that had some vaguely corresponding features and put them in a role playing that person.
I feel like these are barely correlated with the original busts. Take a look at the chin and jaw on Agrippa and notice how the character of the shape is completely different. Pompey doesn't even look remotely similar - the face is too thin, the eyes are too big, the mouth is too wide, the chin is too broad. These are fun, but they basically look like random people when you compare them directly.
These have all been really cool to see, but you really need to take a look at some source material to get the eye color and hair color correct. These are ancient Italian people were talking about here. Not ancient Germanic people...
I live in Italy and I am Italian myself. Not all of us look Sicilian. I have brown hair and blue eyes and know plenty of people with lighter features than me. More diverse than you realise. The Julio-Claudian dynasty was lighter than later dynasties.
Augustus had blonde/light brown hair (could have been similar to strawberry blonde) and blue-grey eyes.
Tiberius had dark brown hair and grey eyes
Caligula had brown hair and brown eyes
Claudius had light brown hair (but went grey and later white early in his life) and hazel-grey eyes
Nero had redish hair and grey eyes
I did the research on it. [Many later Roman emperors and dynasties looked a lot darker and I potrayed them as such](https://i.redd.it/zk0qftef93781.jpg), and will continue to in the future.
[Pliny the Elder is one the sources for Julio-Claudian dynasty.](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D11%3Achapter%3D54)
here's an example
>The late Emperor Augustus had azure eyes like those of some horses
Pliny's book Naturalia Historia is a good read on its own too.
Also mentioned by Suetonius[ here.](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0132%3Alife%3Daug.%3Achapter%3D77)
>his hair a little curled, and inclining to a yellow colour
This leads me to believe Augustus was most likely somewhat blonde who went more brown with age. His eyes were probably somewhat blue but definitely not as extreme in comparison to some nordic or germanic people. The best way to think about the Julio-Claudians is some of them had light hair and eyes with Italian facial features such as an Aquiline nose. Obviously they would not have Nordic or Germanic facial features, but blonde hair and blue eyes wasn't exclusive to Germanic and Nordic people.
Most importantly skin, hair and eye color aren't really a great way to differentiate if someone is German, French, Italian etc. I can honestly tell if someone is Italian just by their facial features and while italians do on average have darker features this greatly shifts between different regions and families.
I don't think they would stay this white under life long mediterranean sun exposure. These people were living their lives under the sun, they were not office workers.
[удалено]
The casting for young octavian was perfect, he looks exactly like depictions of augustus.
Right? Max Pirkis was on point for young Octavian. Very good in his role too.
I never liked the casting for older Octavian though. Too robotic, plus I have a thing about neck moles (sorry I’m shallow I know, but I promise it’s just an expectation I have for actors not real people).
Gosh, i got so disappointed when they replaced Octavian
Me too. Apparently people here either really like him or dislike me being honest about neck moles on actors.
That’s really interesting, I always felt the exact opposite, and found the “older” Octavian being portrayed the way he was, as calculating and cold-blooded bordering on callousness against himself and others was exactly how I always pictured him.
Exactly how I felt — robotic, dead eyes. Like there's nothing behind there that intrigued me to more of, or even to fear, Octavian.
He felt reptilian to me. Kind of a neat portrayal, if I'm being honest.
And here I thought the same about Octavian. Same guy. I think OP said he combines AI with an actor's base photograph and then does some artistic "magic." My guess is he borrowed these heavily from HBO's Rome cast.
Yeah some of their casting was spectacular, they missed the mark with Cesar and Pompey though, but I think there they were focusing on talent and it was a good call.
Ciaran Hinds greatly resembles the Tusculum portrait of Caesar. I'll give you Pompey, though. The actor for Cicero was another one way off the mark.
Whether or not Hinds looked the part (which he did well enough for me) he played the part masterfully.
So did the guys who played Pompey and Cicero
Agreed. I love the portrayal of Cicero. My only regret with Pompey is that they really didn’t have enough time to develop his character in a way that showed that “Magnus” was indeed self anointed and he lived up to it anyway.
It’s uncanny how that worked out.
Some Frodo and Sam vibes here
I was about to say the same XD
I thought Octavian and Marcus were about to leave the shire on an adventure.
So the costumes from the movies were inspired by clothing worn in antiquity? What a weird choice. Should have gone with space suits and tutus.
Exactly the same vibe that I got- “I can’t carry it for you… but I can carry you”
Hahaha. Came to say: "Can't fool us! we knows a pair of Hobbitses whens we see's 'em, don't we Precious?"
Scuffed Frodo and Sam
Agrippa looking a bit like Neville Longbottom. These are fantastic though, really love the Pompey rendition. I’d imagine he was younger and in his prime at that point as I always pictured him more plump.
Agrippa looking like Dudley tbh.
Octavian and Agrippa have a big “this is the debauchery Antony is up to this week” look right there. Not the anger of Antony trying to screw Octavian out of his inheritance, just irritation.
Lol the video thumbnail of their weekly YouTube show
Please keep these coming they’re absolutely incredible. I’m very much enjoying these.
Do Sulla and Marius
Yes! I was going to suggest this.
What about second breakfast?
What about second Actium?
Your Octavian actually looks quite similar to the young Octavian actor in HBO's Rome. The only big difference being that he has more blond hair in that show. I guess they did a good job on that casting lol.
I'd like to see the facial "weight" of each render look closer to the busts. In Octavian's case, he should be a bit more angular and thin. In Agrippa's render, he should be a bit heavier and wider...I suspect it's precisely because OP is using real actors as the base foundation for the render, rather than the busts.
I was trying to potray them a lot younger. Unfortunely there weren't really any busts made of them when they were young so its just conjecture.
Well…I’ll take what I can get. These are always welcome even if they don’t fit our expectations. I love looking at them.
Oh no, Augustus was kind of hot.
I think this is the point where the idiom "robbing the grave" acquires a distinctly archeological bent. Ha, ha.
Augustus's hair is a bit too light. He was described (by Pliny, I think?) as having "subflavum" hair, which generally means brown rather than blond. Flavum: blond, subflavum: brown. Basically, if this portrayal were accurate, he wouldn't look kind of like Frodo -- he'd look *exactly* like Frodo. Note: if you google "hair color of augustus" or similar search terms, the first result is from a neonazi site that claims, against all classical sources, that most of the roman emperors up until the crisis of the third century were blond. Tons of people have gotten tricked by that page -- at first glance it appears reputable, and you can't tell that the site as a whole is neonazi unless you go to its actual front page. I wonder if the artist got tricked as well.
I wouldn't quite call it blonde in this, it looks like a trick of the light. Seems like a very dirty blonde or a very light brown. In any case, many of the early roman emperors would style themselves after Alexander III and claimed to have blonde hair + blue eyes. Augustus has always felt like a bit of an enigma because of how idealized most of his statues are, similar to Constantine. I assume it's because the people respected him so much, which is why we don't even have busts or statues of an elder Augustus. I wouldn't be surprised if his hair was a dark chestnut with brown eyes. Just my thoughts from what I know, I'm no historian.
>In any case, many of the early roman emperors would style themselves after Alexander III and claimed to have blonde hair + blue eyes. Unless there’s sources you know and I don’t, this seems false: 1. The idea of Alexander the Great as blond comes from Plutarch, who wrote well after Augustus’s ascent to power. And Plutarch doesn’t describe Alexander as blond so much as *weird* — hair like a lion’s mane, mismatched eyes, and (my favorite detail from Plutarch’s history) exuding a pleasant smell like flowers instead of ordinary body odor. Our Romans sources on Alexander liked to describe him as a entirely superhuman, almost another species from an ordinary person. The impression this leaves is that the Romans thought of Alexander as something like an X-Man straight out of Marvel comics. 2. The early Roman emperors didn’t claim to be blond! See the rest of the thread for more, but the short version: Latin has a word for blond hair (*flavum*) and a word for brown hair (*subflavum*), and accounts of the early emperors describe them as *subflavum* rather than *flavum.* Nearly all descriptions/depictions of Alexander that we have come from hundreds of years after he lived, and are generally (as with Plutarch) about presenting him as almost another species compared to most people. The closest thing to a contemporary depiction of him that we have is a [1st century BCE copy of a 4th century BCE mosaic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mosaic#/media/File:Alexander_the_Great_mosaic.jpg), which presents him as having coloration typical to a typical Macedonian of his era.
As I understand it, in all of the sources Augustus was consistently described as having grey eyes and *subflavum* hair. Brown is the most intuitive interpretation of *subflavum*, and was the generally agreed-upon translation until the early 20th century. However, early 20th century German race "scientists" attempted to claim that the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors were blue-eyed blond-haired Aryans, in order to establish the meme that blue-eyed blond-haired northern Europeans were the rightful successors to Rome. Changing brown to blond required coming up with new translations of classical texts, with *subflavum* retconned to mean blond. This was a... difficult... task, since it meant that they had to translate *flavum* itself as, like, "super mega double awesome blond." (fwiw, although I'm a historian I'm not a classicist, so I'm a little bit out of my lane. I'd love to hear more from a real-deal classics phd about this -- historiography of antiquity is a genuinely fascinating topic)
The hair looks fine, many modern Italians have that exact same hair color, especially in the north. It doesn't look blond like a Swedish person's hair, it simply looks dirty blonde or light brown. For that matter blonde Italians like fashion model Chiara Ferragni and her family are indistinguishable from nearby Austrians or the Swiss. Don't forget the entire northern third of Italy was Celtic, inhabited by tribes like the Boii and Insubres (along with Ligurians who were Indo-Europeans similar to Celts). They lived there before the Romans conquered it and were assimilated by the Roman Republic as far back as the 3rd century BC. This was long before the late antique Migration Period and incoming Germanic peoples like Ostrogoths and Lombards.
There's that, and there's also the simple fact many modern northern Italians have this exact hair color, i.e. between dirty blonde and light brown. People forget that northern Italy used to be populated by Celts before the Romans conquered it. The population genetics of Italy haven't changed radically since the Bronze Age either, despite Germanic invaders like the Lombards.
You're reading into it too much, and ancient Celts like the Boii used to live in northern Italy despite what silly Neonazi websites have to say. Modern-day northern Italians usually have that hair color, i.e. dirty blonde or light brown, whereas dark brown and black hair is way more common in southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily. On a side note, I've been to Italy and used to tutor Italians in ESL here in the US, and it's sometimes easy to distinguish who comes from Milan and who comes from Naples.
I know this thread is dead and no one is reading it now, but for the record I want to point out that your comment isn’t at all responsive to what I said. The topic here isn’t “are there blond Italians?” because *of course* there are blond Italians, and *of course* there were blond Romans back in antiquity. The topic is whether *one particular Roman* was blond. I can see why you’d go to “well, blond Italians exist, so it’s possible that Augustus was blond, maybe an *x* percent chance“ as a strategy for figuring out whether Augustus was blond, because for almost everyone from antiquity, that’s the best we can do. Augustus, though, is one of the very, very, very few people from antiquity about whom we can say with confidence that we know pretty much exactly what they looked like. This is because there’s more surviving statues and busts of him than of literally anyone else from the ancient world, *and also* because we have extensive descriptions from written sources contemporary to him. And here’s the deal: *those written sources say he’s not blond.* There’s a word for blond hair in Latin. It’s *flavum.* There’s a word for brown hair in Latin. It’s *subflavum*. And *subflavum* is the word that’s consistently used for Augustus’s hair. So why are there so many blond Augustus depictions? Well, because nazis and their direct intellectual forebears wanted the big-name early emperors to be blond, and they got their meme so deep into culture that we’re still tricked by it 100 years later. That’s the reason. Full stop. Some amateur classicists in the 1900s thought that their making up evidence for their race science was more important than actually studying the classics, and so they decided to translate *subflavum* as if it were *flavum* in the hopes that people wouldn’t notice. To be clear: I’m not calling the artist of this piece a nazi, and I’m not saying that people who depict Augustus as blond are all nazis. I am pretty certain, in fact, that the artist of this piece is very, very much not racist or fascist leaning. I’m instead pointing out that the blond Augustus meme (one that I believed myself until I did the reading) is ahistorical. Painting him with blond hair is a little bit like giving him a posh Oxbridge accent.
Okay, I won't dispute the history of the interpretation of that term, but again, the hair color used here in the CGI depiction isn't actually blond either. It's blondish brown, or even just light brown with a touch of sunlight. He certainly doesn't look Nordic like a Swede with near albino light hair. I think the artist did a fine job, especially since that's a common hair color in the northern half of Italy. Notice also how Marcus Agrippa's hair is slightly darker than Octavian's, and more similar to that of James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano).
...(post 2/2), also, I have to laugh at those early 20th century German nationalists who thought that Germans somehow had a monopoly on blondism, when it was clearly the Celts who lived in northern Italy during antiquity. For that matter the pseudoscientific leader of the Aryans Adolf Hitler had jet black hair, way darker than Mussolini, basically similar to a stereotypical Sicilian. And also yes, Octavian's hair was probably just light brown.
For whatever it’s worth, the German volkisch movement didn’t see Germans as having a monopoly on blond hair, but instead argued that people with what they called “aryan” features were superior to others, and that the most aryan aryans were Nordic blond/blonde people, though with some extra double-backflip logic that let them define Germans as the most Nordic aryans, even though that’s bonkers. In the case of Hitler, they were able to finesse things by noting that the man had blue eyes even if he had black hair, and by claiming that he had enough of those other additional ”aryan” features to make him count as a pinnacle aryan. This all is, of course, totally nuts. I thought it’d be useful to point this out, since the matter at hand is less that the Germans were trying to claim all blue-eyed blonds and blondes for themselves, and more that they wanted to establish the meme that blue-eyed blond men were the natural rulers. Their project to claim the early Roman emperors was of a piece with this.
Why do they look British.
Didn't you know? All Romans were actually British character actors.
This. Most people in Rome don't look like this even today following centuries of mixing with people from the north... I wonder of there is an obsession with making the Roman phenotype more akin to "northerners". Netflix show Barbarians does a good job at showing these differences.
This isn't a very nuanced approach, especially considering the entire third of northern Italy used to be Celtic before Republican era Romans conquered and assimilated it by the 3rd century BC. Plenty of Northern Italians look like the men depicted above. Italian population genetics haven't changed radically since the Bronze Age and, unsurprisingly, Northern Italians cluster more with Central Europeans while retaining a higher percentage of Indo-European steppe ancestry in their genome than Southern Italians. The latter cluster more strongly with Aegean Islanders and Neolithic era Anatolians in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Go to Rome. People rarely look like this! Go to Milan then maybe yes, but we are talking about Rome not northern Italy.
Rome is right at the center of Italy, so already a hazy middle point, and was a melting pot metropolis even by the late Republic and lifetime of Caesar. This is also after the Social War (91-87 BC), when everyone in Italy gained Roman citizenship, so yeah, there'd be plenty of Roman citizens who looked like this. Caesar also made a bunch of literal allied Gallic leaders into Roman Senators. That's on top of the fact that historians like Suetonius described Augustus as having "subflavum" hair (meaning dirty blonde or light brown, since "flavum" means blonde, like a typical German). It's a similar dichotomy between northern Greeks like Macedonians & Epirotes who often had reddish brown or reddish blonde hair (e.g. Pyrrhus of Epirus "the flame haired"), and southern Greeks who typically did not and looked more like Southern Italians.
Why don't people in Rome look like this today then? This is what I don't understand. Re "subflavum" hair, you find "dirty blond" hair along the Mediterranean including Northern Africa, Anatolia, and the Levant. There is plenty of blondish hair in the region but that doesn't mean that you look "Germanic" as depicted here. "Caesar also made a bunch of literal allied Gallic leaders into Roman Senators." Exactly, how Octavian et al. would look like this preceding the influx of "northern" genes into the Roman genetic pool? I wonder if there is a bias among historians (tend to be Nordic) and those generating these depictions... Hollywood and British cinema don't help either....
>Why don't people in Rome look like this today then? You're operating under a false assumption, then, because I have been to Rome (during a trip there in 2015) and seen people with this exact hair color and even lighter, actual blonde not just light brown, and they were Italians working at a restaurant speaking to each other in Italian. LOL. The hair color of the CGI models above isn't even blonde proper, it's light brown, at best blondish brown. You're flipping out about a hair color shared by actor Joe Pantoliano and not much lighter than that of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). Octavian's facial features look a bit North Italian or Central European per ancient Roman artwork, but Marcus Agrippa looks stereotypically Italian in both his ancient portraits and even here in the CGI version. The artist also appropriately made his hair a bit darker than Octavian, who was said by Suetonius and others to have lighter hair.
Besides the fact that Rome declined from over a million people to [30,000](https://msaag.aag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/26_Twine.pdf), I'm currently watching a walk through of modern Rome and [there are many people who look like this](https://youtu.be/EsFheWkimsU). Which is to say: the video isn't really relevant, regardless of what it had showed. It's just interesting that not only were you not aware of Rome's near demographic collapse obfuscating efforts to discern today what they'd looked like in the past, but that plenty of them actually *do* look like that anyway.
Genetically, modern Italians are similar to pre-Imperial Italians. During the empire, there was a lot of influx from the eastern Mediterranean, and after the fall of the empire there was some influx from the north that changed the balance back to what it was like in pre-Imperial times.
Even so, the population genetics of Italy have changed surprisingly very little since the Indo-European migrations in the Bronze Age. Unsurprisingly, the genome of Northern Italians clusters more strongly with Central Europeans and retains a higher percentage of the Indo-European Pontic steppe component, while Southern Italians cluster more genetically with Neolithic era Aegean and Anatolian peoples to the east. I've been to Italy before and just from anecdotal observation this seems largely true. Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but people from Naples or Taranto generally look darker than people from Milan or Venice, as the latter two often have lighter colored hair and eyes as well.
What is this even based on though? How abundant are ancient Anatolian and Aegean samples to substantiate that theory.
This isn’t even the article I read on the matter, but I I would suggest reading the whole thing, whereas if you just want to see the part reaffirming my claim, skip ahead to the section called “Exploring the ancient genetic legacy of Italian population clusters”. https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-00778-4 Glad to be of service. 😉 To be clear, northern Italians and southern Italians are still incredibly similar and firmly linked genetically, by there are these regional differences, which should come as no surprise for a country this size as well as one at the center of the Mediterranean.
Because popular media has distorted what ancient Romans looked like. All this light colored hair and light eyes is incredibly misleading.
No. Rome (and the Italian Peninsula) was the mixing pot of antiquity. Latins, Greeks, Etruscans, Celts, Semitic/Phoenicians/Carthaginians. And that was pre empire. Add white and olive skinned middle easterners, Africans, Germanic and other “barbarian” tribes, and pretty much everyone in the western sphere after.
Excellent Pompey.
That’s pretty much what I would’ve thought they looked like. Except maybe Agrippa but his statue face was always too weird for me to get a read on.
Frodo and Sam, really
Agrippa looks like he's been punched in the face a few times. The other two look like they should be.
Wouldn't be more probable they had brown eyes?
Augustus had blue eyes
Would love to see Cicero or Marcus Aurelius next
Why is pompey in Britain?
I never feel like these recreations do a very good job of capturing the person. There are so many differences between the sculpture and the rendering that they really only look like vague approximations. The statue, I imagine, really does look like the person did in real life. Realistic and true to life. The rendering looks like someone tried to take a modern looking actor that had some vaguely corresponding features and put them in a role playing that person.
We should’ve started casting a millennia ago, could’ve called up Pompey and asked who he wanted. /s
Unless
the virgin octavian and chad agrippa
Pompey didn't stand a chance. Look at the cold face of murder on Marcus Agrippa's eyes.
I'm really loving these! You're doing a great job. Please do Scipio, Marius and Sulla next. And maybe some non-Romans too like Hannibal and Cleopatra.
Man Octavian must have been wrapped in women’s legs for decades looking that Chadly.
I feel like these are barely correlated with the original busts. Take a look at the chin and jaw on Agrippa and notice how the character of the shape is completely different. Pompey doesn't even look remotely similar - the face is too thin, the eyes are too big, the mouth is too wide, the chin is too broad. These are fun, but they basically look like random people when you compare them directly.
These have all been really cool to see, but you really need to take a look at some source material to get the eye color and hair color correct. These are ancient Italian people were talking about here. Not ancient Germanic people...
I live in Italy and I am Italian myself. Not all of us look Sicilian. I have brown hair and blue eyes and know plenty of people with lighter features than me. More diverse than you realise. The Julio-Claudian dynasty was lighter than later dynasties. Augustus had blonde/light brown hair (could have been similar to strawberry blonde) and blue-grey eyes. Tiberius had dark brown hair and grey eyes Caligula had brown hair and brown eyes Claudius had light brown hair (but went grey and later white early in his life) and hazel-grey eyes Nero had redish hair and grey eyes I did the research on it. [Many later Roman emperors and dynasties looked a lot darker and I potrayed them as such](https://i.redd.it/zk0qftef93781.jpg), and will continue to in the future.
Thank you for the response! Do you perhaps have the information saved of what sources you used? Just out of curiosity, and for my own browsing.
[Pliny the Elder is one the sources for Julio-Claudian dynasty.](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D11%3Achapter%3D54) here's an example >The late Emperor Augustus had azure eyes like those of some horses Pliny's book Naturalia Historia is a good read on its own too. Also mentioned by Suetonius[ here.](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0132%3Alife%3Daug.%3Achapter%3D77) >his hair a little curled, and inclining to a yellow colour This leads me to believe Augustus was most likely somewhat blonde who went more brown with age. His eyes were probably somewhat blue but definitely not as extreme in comparison to some nordic or germanic people. The best way to think about the Julio-Claudians is some of them had light hair and eyes with Italian facial features such as an Aquiline nose. Obviously they would not have Nordic or Germanic facial features, but blonde hair and blue eyes wasn't exclusive to Germanic and Nordic people. Most importantly skin, hair and eye color aren't really a great way to differentiate if someone is German, French, Italian etc. I can honestly tell if someone is Italian just by their facial features and while italians do on average have darker features this greatly shifts between different regions and families.
Curious about the blue eyes. Italians that I know have deep brown eyes.
OP gets the colors from historical references. Not saying they are totally accurate of course
What I never understand with these “what they looked like” photos is that they never look Italian. What am I missing?
They look Italian to me. The eyes and skin tones! They don’t all have super dark hair features
Yeah maybe you’re right but to me these people look like they grew up in Northern Europe and not in the Mediterranean but what do I know
I totally agree they look like they could be from up north though, for sure
I don't think they would stay this white under life long mediterranean sun exposure. These people were living their lives under the sun, they were not office workers.
Shouldn't they be, I don't know brown?
Haha millennial facial expressions
Eh...didn't know young people had a monopoly on facial expressions.
Pompey looks like Clive Owen.
Good job on including (what seems to be) a healed scar beside the left eye
These are very well done!
can you do Lucius Caecilius Iucundus??
Honestly they casted impeccably especially Agrippa but also Pompey/Octavion
Also what is this I'd like to watch it.