Some Romans did too. In the late first or early second century CE, the satiric poet ‘Juvenal’ – Decimus Junius Juvenalis – who loved to pour scorn on Roman pretensions, lambasted the snobbery that was another side of life at Rome, and he ridiculed those aristocrats who boasted of a family tree going back centuries. He ends one of his poems with a sideswipe at Rome’s origins. What are all these pretensions based on, anyway? Rome was from its very beginning a city made up of slaves and runaways (‘Whoever your earliest ancestor was, he was either a shepherd or something I’d rather not mention’).
