History Summarized: The Roots of Rome

A lot of social creatures have some way of recognizing who's part of their group: bees can recognize who's genetically related to them, and of course a lot of animals have pack sizes that are just ... small enough that you recognize everyone who's in your pack. But humans have the ability to make cities, nations, movements, among people who have no prior relationship and in numbers much too big to recognize everyone. So how do you tell that someone's part of "your people", when you've never seen them before and you have nothing in common? In _Sapiens_, Yuval Noah Harari argues that it's because of our ability to share a common story: you know that someone is Roman because they speak Latin and they act like someone who understands the story of Romulus and Remus. OK, so they look nothing like you, but Rome has always been a mongrel empire -- just look at who Romulus admitted to the city! Although the story is definitely not real, the belief in the story has very real impacts on the material world. And I feel like this -- the ways in which beliefs in stories has a measurable impact on history, regardless of the accuracy of the stories (from founding myths to propaganda) -- is (a) a thing that society could really benefit from us talking about more, and (b) could be done better by OSP than by maybe anyone else on the internet. It's the perfect intersection of Miscellaneous Myths and History Makers, and I'd love to see more of it, if you guys felt inspired to do so.

Ah, no wonder werewolves seemed to have their origin story in the Greco-Roman period?