>>512673289
>like Italics have always been
“Everything was now in the hands of freedmen; the senators were mere shadows, their voices drowned out by those who had once been slaves.” - Tacitus, Annals 13.27
“The Quintii, the Valerii, and the other ancient patricians have perished, and in their place you see freedmen from the East, with their swarthy skins, wearing the toga.” - Augustus, Cassius Dio, Roman History 56.1
“Many of those who claim the name of Romans are not of our blood but are foreigners who have taken refuge here. If we do not encourage our own citizens to multiply, then soon the city will be theirs, not ours.” - Cassius Dio, Roman History 56.7
average.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi7673
“Despite comprising diverse individuals of central European, northern African, and Near Eastern ancestry, the local gene pool is largely maintained across the first millennium BCE. This drastically changes during the Roman Imperial period where we report an abrupt population-wide shift to ~50% admixture with eastern Mediterranean ancestry."