>>16168694You will never be a real Roman. You have no consuls, you have no Latins, you have no Rome. You are a barbarian man twisted by LARPs and historical accident into a crude mockery of Jupiter’s perfection.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your ancestors are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “fellow berserkers” laugh at your mud hut technology behind closed doors.
Historians are utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of historiography have allowed historians to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even Foederati who “pass” look uncanny and unnatural to a roman. Your government structure is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk historian to call you Roman, he’ll turn tail and retract the second he hears your slurred germanic accent.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll stop paying tribute to the emperor, sit behind your walls, have one last service in the open temple, and wait for the merciful coup de grace. Your posterity will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. They’ll record your history with a historiographical term derived from the Latin language, and every tourist for the rest of eternity will know a germanic barbarian is buried there. Your artifacts will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is an archaeology that is unmistakably Italic.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
