On Ethnoerotism in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mythology, Poetics, and National Genesis in Latin America, Romania, and Ancient Rome

Abstract

The term “ethnoerotism” is advanced for expressing the attraction and union between two ethnic groups placed under the gender symbols—male and female—that contribute, with their specific energies, to the genesis of a new people or nation. By using some concepts as “myth” and “ethnosymbolism”, this outlook regarding the origin of nations is exemplified by Natividad Gutiérrez (with the descent of nations in Latin America), Vasile Pârvan (with a poem in prose about the genesis of the Romanian people), and Titus Livius and Plutarch (with the abduction of Sabine women after the founding of ancient Rome). These cases are presented in the framework of a vision about the “diachronic dimension of national identity” (Geană 2016). It also should be mentioned that (at least in the Romanian case) such a vision regarding ethnic genesis and continuity in time is passed on from generation to generation by a vivid folk tradition, as well as, in modern times, by the official system of education.

1. Introduction: The Diachronic Dimension of Human Identity

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Geană 2016), human identity—either at the individual or collective level—is built up according to a diachronic dimension. To reiterate: “The human being is not only what it is, but also what it has been. As individual, it concentrates in every moment of its life the results of the whole process of proper becoming until then. If so, an individual has much more in common with its photo images from childhood than with the ego of another individual of the same age, both of them having grey hair (let us say) but each having its own biography. The problem gets maximum of significance when a people is at stake; thus, as seen in their diachronic identity, the Romanian people are closer to their ancient forerunners—Dacians, or Daco-Romans—than to German, Swedish, or any other people of today” (Geană 2016, p. 131).

Obviously, the key point of this diachronic dimension is the moment when the nation is coming into being; however, I have in view not a nation in abstracto (as a reality reflected into a purely theoretical concept), but a certain nation that may be approached as an object of study regarding its concrete genesis in time and space, i.e., its ethnic profile, epic (historical and political) circumstances, sense of historical destiny, etc. In this way, some preoccupations (related to families but still more intense to the ethnic communities and nations) as the “passion for tracing the origins and pedigree, [or] the same quest to discover a true identity, to ‘know who I am’” (Smith 1999, p. 60) receive a reassuring answer. Equally relevant in this context is the following observation: “Every nation has its own understanding of its distinctive past that is conveyed through stories, myths, and history. Whether historically accurate or not, these memories contribute to the understanding of the present that distinguishes one nation from another. This component of time—when an understanding of the past forms part of the present—is characteristic of the nation and is called ‘temporal depth’” (Grosby 2005, p. 8).

It is most emphatically the genesis moment of a nation (what Smith has called ethnogenesis) that renders real the chance of measuring this “temporal depth”. Such an initial moment should not be confounded with the so-called illud tempus, which is situated in a kind of immemorial time; on the contrary, the moment of genesis participates in the memorial dowry of the collective existence. Consequently, it arouses the need for some representations regarding the concrete facts that—in the perspective of historical time—made up the primordial data for validating the national identity; the existence of a nation cannot be argued in the vague mist of time and space. As linked to events that happened in the remote past, these representations or accounts will be naturally imbued with mythical and poetical elements. Thus, the appropriation of the diachronic dimension of identity signifies for a nation the emblematisation of its origins and attainment of a high level of self-consciousness.

Such representations make the target of the present approach. In short, I have detected a special type of ethnogenesis in my studies of accounts of the birth of nations. These particular cases of ethnogenesis are very attractive by their spectacularity, but equally by a profound philosophy of life involved in their similar scenarios.

2. Natividad Gutiérrez on Nation Building in Latin America

Before any personal expertise, I feel obliged to make a confession: in my approach, I have been influenced by Natividad Gutiérrez’s studies of nations in Latin America (Gutiérrez 1999, 2007, 2018). In her turn, the Mexican authoress starts from Anthony D. Smith’s legacy, in which the emphasis was placed not so much on sovereign democracy as on the ethnic ancient past. As it has been observed, for Gutiérrez, “[t]he Mexican case illustrates how the antiquity of Aztec and Maya past has been adapted to a modern context. The ethnic myth of a stylised union between (Spanish conquistador) European man and (Aztec/Maya) Indigenous woman is a central feature of the country’s national identity” (Kaufmann 2018, p. 239).

As a rule, we are accustomed to the phenomenon of coupling the male and female individuals for making a family; this event is designated by the common term “erotism” (or the less euphonic “eroticism”). In the situation described by Natividad Gutiérrez, the two parts engaged in the complex process of attraction and union are large ethnic entities placed under the gender symbols—male and female—with their specific energies greatly amplified; for this phenomenon, the most suggestive term proves to be “ethnoerotism”. Perhaps it is not accidentally that in one of his most important books (The Ethnic Origins of Nations), after the interrogative title—“Are nations modern?”—of chapter 1, Anthony Smith begins the text with other five questions, the first two among them referring exactly to the gender composition of a nation: “Why are men and women willing to die for their countries? Why do they identify so strongly with their nations?” (Smith 1986, p. 6).

In these circumstances, the human being that results from this union within the current population seems to be a kind of hybrid entity, namely, the so-called “mestizo”, i.e., “mestizo (fem. mestiza) (pl. -os (or -as)) (in Latin America) a man (or woman) of mixed race, especially the offspring of a Spaniard and an American Indian” (Pearsall 1999, p. 894). Particularly, when writing about the building of the Mexican nation, Natividad Gutiérrez calls this type of collective union “miscegenation”; this meaning, the construction of a nation by the combination of two ethnic groups, consisting therefore in the union of natives and foreigners (Gutiérrez 1995, pp. 161–87). The identity of such an entity could be the ideal one provided that it be generally accepted. Overall, the actual data do not confirm this expectation. According to Gutiérrez, “the possession of this extremely important knowledge and information of symbolic and mythological content, such as narratives of origin or foundation, are not in the hands of indigenous peoples nor are they easily accessible to indigenous intellectuals and scholars. The study of Amerindian societies and their past is, categorically speaking, a specialised knowledge produced by experts and academics engaged in disciplines such as epigraphy, palaeontology, archaeology and history. Indian peoples have little access to this information; the school system does not promote this type of knowledge” (Gutiérrez 2018, p. 276). That is why there are plenty of “poets and writers, men and women, writing in indigenous languages, but there are a few ethnic experts on Amerindian antiquities” (Ibidem).

How can these (and still other) suppressions of this symbolic partnership be interpreted? It seems that lack of recognition of the ethnic and ethnoerotic mixing between European and Indigenous communities was at least partly due to the arrogance of the conquerors. It is also possible to say that, although the European conquerors engaged ethnoerotically with the Indigenous populations, the emerging “national elites opted for myths of ‘whiter’ European origins, as in the southern cone of South America” (Kaufmann 2018, p. 239).

Nevertheless, a subtle examination shows the contrary, or at least a variation. This variation in attitude can be detected within the mixed local aristocratic circles; otherwise, if the state of mind from the outside of such ethnoerotic spaces would be taken into account, the option would be different. A good example is Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), who lived mostly in Spain; the famous author of The Royal Commentaries of the Incas and the General History of Peru—himself a “mestizo”, as a son of the conquistador Don Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas and the Incan princess Isabel Palla Chimpu Ocllo (in Garcilaso’s epitaph: Elisabeth Palla)—felt proud of the Incan half of his genetic capital. Indeed, he annexed to his name, making it an integral part of his identity, “El Inca”, so that the complete signature on his writing is: Garcilaso de la Vega El Inca; sometimes the ethnic specification is placed at the beginning, as for instance, on his gravestone: “EL INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA DISTINGUISHED MAN DESERVING OF PERPETUAL MEMORY; OF ILLUSTRIOUS BLOOD; EXPERT WRITER; SON OF GARCILASO DE LA VEGA OF THE HOUSES OF THE DUKES DE FERIA Y INFANTADO, AND OF ELISABETH PALLA, SISTER OF HUAYNA CAPAC, THE LAST EMPEROR OF INDIAS; FLORIDA COMMENTATOR; TRANSLATOR OF LEONE IL EBREO; COMPOSER OF THE ROYAL COMENTARIES”.1 In any case, it is worth mentioning that his preferred ethnic identification is with his mother’s ethnie; in other words, his ethnic seal is maternal and so, we may see in this emphasis a subtle validation of Natividad Gutiérrez’s thesis that in what we have called “ethnoerotic” impact, the native matrix is feminine.

3. The Masculinised Rome and Dacia the Virgin

3.1. Dacia Felix Under the Spectrum of Imperial Rome

Another fascinating illustration of our theme is the founding of the Romanian people. According to the historical record, the ancestors of the actual Romanians were the inhabitants of ancient Dacia. In the more precise words of an ancient historian, “I call the people Dacians, the names used by the natives themselves as well as by the Romans, though I am not ignorant that some Greek writers refer to them as Getae, whether that is the right form or not” (Cassius 1925, LXVII, 6.2).

To the people living in the Carpathian and peri-Carpathian space, the name Dacia has been always—since immemorial time until today—a symbol of the primordial paradise; as a matter of fact, the complete and significant name is Dacia Felix. It must be noted that the attribute “Felix”, meaning ”Happy”, was given to the region by the Roman conquerors. Although they “pretended to be immortal” and were admired for being “the bravest and most law-abiding of all Thracians” (Herodotus [1921] 1928, Book IV, 93), the Dacians (ruled by the legendary king Decebal) were eventually vanquished by the overwhelming Roman troops.

Historically, there were two wars between the Dacian and Roman armies: the first in AD 101–102, and the second in AD 105–106. After the Dacians were finally defeated, a process of Romanisation took place. Indeed, once Dacia was conquered, it was absorbed into the cosmopolitan Roman world and “both were utterly transformed” (Hitchins 2014, p. 9). As it was observed with regard to the Romans, “more than conquerors, they were organizers and legislators. After a conquest, if the occupied territory was annexed to Rome, a general pacification followed in an attempt to encourage the native population to cooperate. (…) That is why Dacians gradually began to live together with Romans and, after some time, to live like them. Archaeologists have discovered over 150 settlements and graveyards in which Dacian relics were mixed with the Roman ones, thus proving that the two lived together” (Pop 2018, p. 36).

The process of Romanisation was accomplished by adopting the Latin language. The Dacians had reached an appreciable level of culture; outside their distinctive customs and religious rituals, they also possessed their own writing and, despite their adoption of Latin, linguists have detected in the fundamental lexicon of contemporary Romanian language not less than 560 (that is 37.33%) words of Dacian etymology (Dincă 2020, p. 6). This aspect sets the Romanian language apart from the other neo-Latin languages and justifies it to be considered not a Roman but a Daco-Roman language. The natives were bound to adapt themselves to the Roman dominance all the more, as the official communication was carried out in Latin. Nevertheless, “even by learning Latin, the Dacians imposed to the newly crystallized language—Romanian—a great number of words from their own language”. This was possible, first, because “a large part of their country was not conquered”, and second, because it was only for “a short while that Romans remained in Dacia”. Moreover, “as people free of any constraint, the Dacians from the free territory spoke Latin only for communicating with their compatriots who were living in the occupied and intensely Romanised provinces” (Dincă 2020, p. 7).

Dacia was thus a special case of Romanisation that involved the active participation of the conquered people in cultural evolution; in Greece, for example, a similar phenomenon of synthesis was not possible because the Greek culture was seen as superior to the Roman.

3.2. Daco-Roman Ethnoerotism (I): Trajan’s Cult Among Romanians

The Roman occupation in Dacia lasted until AD 271, when, under the so-called “barbarian” threat and eventual invasion of Rome, the Emperor Aurelianus decided to retreat from this territory, withdrawing both military troops and civil servants.

The symbol of Dacia Felix would outlast Roman domination.2 It would be woven into the great cult of Trajan, the Emperor who had personally participated in the two campaigns against the Dacians. Trajan (53–117 AD) was an outstanding historical figure, and one of the “Good Emperors”. Here are only a few words from the elaborate portrait dedicated to him by Cassius Dio: “Trajan was most conspicuous for his justice, for his bravery, and for the simplicity of his habits. He was strong in body, being in his forty-second year when he began to rule, so that in every enterprise he toiled almost as much as the others. (…) To slanders he paid very little heed and he was no slave of anger. (…) he took more pleasure in being loved than in being honoured. (…) there was no quality which he did not possess in a high degree” (Cassius 1925, LXVIII, 6 & 7). Overall, Trajan was highly esteemed as “optimus princeps”. Later on, Dante inserted in Purgatorio, X, 82–93, the medieval story of the widow standing in Trajan’s way (who was riding on horseback to fight the Dacians) and demanding vengeance for the unjust killing of her son. Trajan would interrupt the preparations for the Dacian campaigns and make time to settle her case and administer justice:

The wretched woman in the midst of these	82
Seemed to be saying: “Give me vengeance, Lord,
For my dead son, for whom my heart is breaking.”
And he to answer her: “Now wait until	85
I shall return.” And she: “My Lord,” like one
In whom grief is impatient, “shouldst thou not
Return?” And he: “Who shall be where I am	88
Will give it thee.” And she: “Good deed of others
What boots it thee, if thou neglect thine own?”
Whence he: “Now comfort thee, for it behoves me	91
That I discharge my duty ere I move; duty ere I move;
Justice so wills, and pity doth retain me”3
(Dante 1867, p. 280; see also Figure 1 and note 3 in final Notes)

But (hic et nunc) as a kind of “survival”—in the anthropological meaning of the term—Trajan’s cult perpetuated with the passage of time within the Carpatho-Danubian space4. There is, for example, in Romanian traditional folklore a largely extended poem, recited as a carol on New Year’s Eve: Plugușorul (The Little Plough). Another common title is, simply, Plugul (The Plough). Nevertheless, the diminutive version—The Little Plough—is more frequent because, usually, the singers of this carol are children (in groups of 4–6 boys). One of the children recites, while the others set in motion the auxiliary sonorous instruments that reproduce symbolically the atmosphere of ploughing: a cattle bell, a snapping whip, but mainly the “buhai” [bu’hai] (a small bottomless wooden pail covered with skin and having a tuft of hair by means of which the bellowing of a bull is imitated). Plugușorul is a carol specifically associated with an agrarian society. It is meant to bless the new year to stimulate the fertility of the land by magical incantation in order to bring a rich harvest. I quote below the beginning of this carol (practically spread over the whole territory of the country), dominated by the imposing figure of Trajan. He is represented by the most diligent among the members of the community:

Ho, whoa, kids and brothers,5

Stop a little time from going,

Gather next to these big oxen

And listen to my word:

Trajan, our elder fellow,

Waked up at the start of year;

He mounted on a horse

With a golden saddle

And a rein of silk

Braided in six threads.

He raised in the stirrups,

Looked over the fields

To choose a clean place

For ploughing and sowing.

(quoted from living memory and translated by the author—G. G.)

Not less suggestive is the mentioning of Trajan’s name in the Romanian patriotic poetry from the nineteenth century until our days. The best example is the poem Un răsunet (A Resound) by Andrei Mureșianu.6 Known also under the title Deșteaptă-te, române! (Wake up, Romanian!) and accompanied by music of Anton Pann, it was the song of the Transylvanian revolutionaries in 1848, who rebelled against the Habsburg rulers:

Wake up, Romanian,7 from your sleep of death

Into which you’ve been sunk by the barbaric tyrants.

Now or never, sow a new fate for yourself

To which even your cruel enemies will bow!

 

Now or never, let us show the world

That through these arms, Roman blood still flows;

And that in our chests we still proudly bear a name

Triumphant in battles, the name of Trajan!

(Mureșianu [1848] 2024; Anonymous trans.; my italics, G. G.)

In the next verses, with a pathos based on a kind of co-national genealogy, the mighty spirits of the great medieval voivodes—Michael the Brave, Stephen the Great, Corvinus—are invoked and asked to be proud of their “great-grandchildren” who are building the modern Romanian nation.

Similar invocations of the past were made in the annus mirabilis of 1989 with the poem Wake up, Romanian! This poem, that had been set to music in the nineteenth century, was adopted as the Romanian national anthem. Thus, the ideas of Daco-Roman ancestors and their ethnosymbolic representatives are reiterated constantly in all kind of contexts: not only political and festive, but also diplomatic, sporting, educational, etc.

The cult of Trajan that became central in the Romanian national movement of the nineteenth century is of special significance to the present article. This is because it placed Trajan at the centre of the genesis, and indeed, the ethnoerotic genesis of the Romanian people. Oriented as it was towards folk motifs, the nineteenth-century Romanian national movement, that was rooted in European Romanticism, was fascinated by the auroral epoch of Dacia Felix. Outstanding poets and writers created embellished stories about Roman soldiers engaged in love games with Dacian girls. The best example is the epopee Traianida (1870) by Dimitrie Bolintineanu, with characters of middle social rank. Usually, the feminine character in such stories bears the name Dochia (literally close to Dacia). Nevertheless, in an ad hoc episode from his poem Panorama deșertăciunii/The Panorama of Vanity (1870), Eminescu8 describes Trajan pursuing the virgin shepherdess named Dacia through a wild Carpathian landscape:

Dacia runs off with her sheep and golden horn rams,

She has fair hair, blue eyes, and gentle tender face.

 

And Trajan pursues her on difficult narrow paths,

Broken trees, fallen down stones and rocks lie across his way.

But, drawn by bells and pastoral sweet sounds, he runs,

Comes near to her… She sees him… And at his burning sight

In stone she turns and can be seen today under the woods’

                        shadow,

While Emperor’s great traces are as alive, too, on Pion.

(Eminescu [1870] 1958, p. 86; my free trans., G. G.)

In this fragment, behind the epic thread of the (unfulfilled) love story, a complex geocultural detail should be taken into account. In fact, these poetic lines describe an ethnoerotic story that marked in an allegoric—ethnosymbolic—manner a toponymical as well as a spiritual reality. Concretely, the word “Pion” (see the last quoted line) is a toponym, but it is not fixed as such in the scientific geography; in exchange, it does figure in the mythic geography. In the actual geography, Pion is Ceahlău [tcheah’lǝu]—a mountain in the chain of the Eastern Carpathians. It was venerated by the ancient Dacians as Mount of the Sun and as the sacred location of their god, Zalmoxis. In the Middle Ages, it became a place where hermits sought the ascetic life, so that Pion attained the fame of a sacred centre of Orthodox Christianity, being compared in this respect with Mount Athos. The story of the love of Emperor Trajan for Dacia is only one among the many legends related to Mount Ceahlău; and the detail when the shepherdess “in stone she turns” is reflected in the mythic local toponym Stânca Dochiei/the Stone of Dochia.

As to the content of the story, we have in this situation two characters, Trajan and Dacia, each of them endowed with a representative symbolic capital. The whole scene represents Trajan’s ethnoerotic imaginary involvement in the genesis of the Romanian people.9

3.3. Daco-Roman Ethnoerotism (II): Romul’s Pre-Emption

In this section, I examine what seems to me to be the most spectacular case of the phenomenon of ethnoerotism. It is brought to the Romanian cultural scene by Vasile Pârvan, a very influential scholar and an unusual regisseur of ideas.10

Vasile Pârvan combined—both in writing and in teaching—the scientific method with a poetical rhetoric. By combining these styles and subordinating them to an ardent patriotism, he exerted a strong influence on the Romanian young intellectuals of the “interwar period”. This was a crucial moment in the history of Romania, marking the birth of modern Romania in 1918 through the unification and independence of Romanians from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. This period of independence and unification of its historic regions—Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania—has been seen as a period of Romanian apokatastasis.11

Highly impressive from a stylistic point of view is Pârvan’s (1923) book Memorials. It is a collection of some of his lectures delivered on various occasions, either commemorative or festive. In the context of this article, one of these lectures is particularly revealing, beginning with its very title: “Parentalia. A bow to the Emperor Trajan, 18 centuries from his death. 26 September 1919”. The whole text is a kind of poem in prose, but a special episode must be examined here. The love story with the girl Dacia is revived and placed at the centre of this episode. However, and as in a theatrical scenario, the regisseur changes the characters. Pârvan casts Romul instead of Trajan. Who was Romul? We shall examine this later. For the time being, let us present the episode in its new version.

Like Homer invoking his own Muse at the beginning of the Iliad,12 the author addresses himself to Euterpe, the Muse of the flute and of music in general:

“Sing, Euterpe, the song of Dacia.

«Dacia, the virgin maiden, was disturbing your peace, o, divine Romul. Beautiful and cruel, she was devastating your country like the heat of the summer, with rushes of fire and wailing. That was the destiny of the wild maiden: to defy, to set on fire, to sow terror all around her. Your brightness, your power, your beauty, Romul, made you so attractive to her; yet, while you, from your clouded peace, were reaching out to her, she, like Diana, in her wildly conceived freedom, was always retreating in her impenetrable woods. And suddenly, your soul as well caught fire, lured by the cruel maiden. And you wanted to take her. With her Atalantean force, the unobtainable fairy put you down, making you bleed from your wounds. You did not love her enough, and could not break her.

[At this point, Pârvan marked the failure of Roman force to defeat Dacia by a single tentative (101–102 AD); only after a second war (105–106 AD) could the Romans extend their domination over Dacians, and Pârvan reflects this as follows:]

“Then, Aphrodite, smiling at her own killer joke, ordered Eros to dart at you with his arrow. Your soul caught fire like the sun in the middle of the day. You seized her, you fought with her, you got wounded and you wounded her, you gazed lingeringly at each other, two sworn enemies, you kissed her, but did not overtake her. From passionate shame for being conquered, from spite at the power with which you broke her, from fierce rage at being kissed, she prepared herself to kill you. And Aphrodite was divinely smiling: how else could two gods kill each other if not through love? And you, oh invincible one, you conquered her. Your embraces were blazing from all the heat of your fiery summers, your kisses full of the sweetness of your melodious italic songs, your words gentler than the caress of your warm winters, your eyes shining from the serene brightness of your transparent seas. And the maiden who had hated you like no one, man or god, hated you before, she loved you like no woman had loved you before. She became yourself, and to her children, she alone among all the women loved by you, she gave them your name.13 And they fought, and they died, but century after century they preserved: your name, your likeness, your mind, your voice, your brightness, your glory.

O, Dacia, Romul,

Glory to you!»”

(Pârvan 1923, pp. 182–83; assisted trans., G. G.)

Now let us examine Romul. Who was Romul? Let us try to decode the enigma. The real name is, in fact, Romulus—none but the founder and the first king of Rome. But does not this substitution come against the historical truth? A few subtle factual elements confer logical and psychological coherence on the whole situation.

It must be noted that Daco-Roman relations were a favourite theme in Pârvan’s rich repertoire. As a scientist, he never doubted the leading role of Trajan in conquering Dacia. Even the proso-poetic cameo about the love between Romul and Dacia is placed in the context of a eulogistic oration devoted to Trajan (Pârvan 1923).

On the other hand, his own researches revealed to the scholar that Dacia had been Romanised a few centuries before it was conquered by Rome’s two war campaigns14. Certainly, it is exactly this idea that Vasile Pârvan expressed by substituting in this scenario—only in this scenario—the figure of Trajan with that of Romul. He could write, directly, Romulus—the founder and the first king of Rome. However, surely, the “regisseur-of-ideas” he was, wanted to create a mytho-symbolic character: Romul, that is, a masculinised Rome! With this male identity, Romul is made by his creator—equally a scholar and an artist—to engage in a wondrously fair ethnoerotic action.

If so appears the state of things, a last question arises: can a symbol be exchanged ad libitum15 with another one (in our case: Trajan with Romul)? As the experts say, “symbols, once created out of the ebb and flow of life, ‘take on a life of their own’, that is, they can no longer be reduced to the circumstances of their creation. In this sense, the symbols are ‘objective’; however, they are only relatively objective, for their continued existence as symbols requires recognition. This subjective component of the collective self-consciousness—the requirement of recognition (affirmation) of the objective symbol—may also result, given changing historical and socioeconomic conditions, in a modification of the meaning borne by the symbol, thus, as Herder observed, the unavoidable malleability and variation of the symbolic complex of any nation” (Leoussi and Grosby 2007, p. 6; my italics, G. G.).

4. Ancient Rome and the Abduction of Sabine Women

The name of Romulus (the full alter ego of Romul) is linked to perhaps the oldest case of ethnoerotism: the abduction of Sabine women by Romans. The story is well known—it is even famous. In short, Romulus has just founded Rome when he is confronted with what in terms of today is called a “demographic crisis”: the king is proud of his brave soldiers, but realises that the number of women in the population of the city is so small that Rome is about to disappear in one generation or two. His diplomatic attempts to get from the neighbouring tribal communities the accord of asking in marriage their young women failed. Then, Romulus organised a great feast in honour of Neptunus Equester, the god of knights. A lot of participants—especially young people—from the surroundings of Rome attended the entertainment enthusiastically. At a signal of Romulus, the Roman young men fell upon the Sabine group and abducted the women, particularly teenage girls. After a while, the Sabine men set about to revenge. Nevertheless, in the meantime, the Sabine women—abducted, but highly respected by their Roman husbands—had adapted themselves to their new way of life. Consequently, when their parents and brothers came to Rome looking for vengeance, the wise Sabine-Roman wives took position between the two camps and asked them to make peace. Here is the event—of an ineffable emotional intensity—as described by Plutarch: “The ravished daughters of the Sabines were seen rushing from every direction, with shouts and lamentations, through the armed men and the dead bodies, as if in a frenzy of possession, up to their husbands and their fathers, some carrying young children in their arms, some veiled in their dishevelled hair, and all calling with the most endearing names now upon the Sabines and now upon the Romans” (Plutarch [1914] 1967, pp. 147–49). However, still more passionately and heart-burningly, they addressed themselves to their co-ethnics amongst whom they were born and risen: “For ye did not come to avenge us upon our ravishers while we were still maidens, but now ye would tear wives from their husbands and mothers from their children, and the succour wherewith ye would now succour us, wretched women that we are, is more pitiful than your former neglect and abandonment of us. Such is the love which we have here enjoyed, such the compassion shown to us by you. Even if ye were fighting on other grounds, it were meet that ye should cease for our sakes, now that ye are become fathers-in-law and grandsires16 and have family ties among your enemies. If, however, the war is on our behalf, carry us away with your sons-in-law and their children, and so restore to us our fathers and kindred, but do not rob us of our children and husbands. Let us not, we beseech you, become prisoners of war again” (Plutarch [1914] 1967, pp. 149–51; see also Figure 2).

5. Concluding Considerations

Before any conclusion, a preliminary note is needed: among the three cases of ethnoerotism that I examined (the Mexican, Romanian/Dacian, and Roman), I devoted more time and space to the story of Dacia. I did this because this story is less known. Furthermore, the case of Dacia, because it is unfamiliar, and has therefore received less analytical attention, is all the more challenging.

Now, the quest for origin as well as its representation are defining attributes of human identity—either at the individual or collective level. In itself, the concept of history means the objective course of events and facts, but also the account or representation of those lived events and facts. These events and facts are stored in collective memory to be re-lived by successive generations; this collective memory is submitted to the action of a marvellous mythomoteur (Smith 1986, pp. 58–68). The ethnosymbolism (to which the ethnoerotism is associated) seems to be an epiphenomenon of such a mythomoteur, i.e., of a myth-generating agent. According to Smith, the mythomoteur is a “political constitutive” factor, but perhaps beyond the “dynastic” and “communal” types, we should look at the identitary (namely ethno-identitary) function of this factor; in this sense, the ethnoerotism reveals how the mythomoteur generates ethnic identity.

Some historians (e.g., those of positivistic orientation) reject these mytho-poetical visions as being fanciful and useless products of imagination. Nevertheless, these visions are brought about by the human way of living history from generation to generation, perennially. Historical truth consists in the complementarity between the objective course of events and its representation in the collective mind. This representation includes usually some mythical elements. The status of history among the Inca civilisation is relevant: “Lacked of writing but not also of the sense of history, the Inca people handed down their chronicle from parents to children by supporting the memory with concrete marks kept in special ‘quipus’.17 Obviously, in time, all kinds of confusions, gaps, or distortions slipped in this strange archive. Some of them were, surely, intentional for rendering reality compatible with myth [or adapting myth to new circumstances]. In some way, any narrative about the first Inca kings might be taken rather for mythology than history” (Busuioceanu 1974, p. 19).

The ethnoerotism—in its realistic aspect, as far as this is acceptable—is a phenomenon that cannot escape scrutiny by demographic anthropology. Indeed, from this scientific point of view, ethnoerotism offers an exceptional illustration of what can be called mass exogamy. As it is known from John McLennan (Primitive Marriage, 1865), exogamy means a marriage outside a given group, or, largely, a marriage union in which the two partners come from different communities. Practically, exogamy is a solution for avoiding consanguineous18 marriages. As a rule, in demographic studies, the phenomenon of exogamy is identified and statistically measured at the scale of a community; structurally, however, it is based on the individual relationship between a man and a woman. The phenomenon of ethnoerotism operates at a different level, expressing the flux of collective emotions and energies, which cannot be adequately described but as mass exogamy. As regards our context, in the first two cases here presented (regarding ethnogenesis in Latin America and ancient Dacia), exogamy appears as a secondary phenomenon (the main being the fight); in the third case (regarding the revival of Rome), exogamy is just the stake of the conflict.

As a mytho-poetic-symbolic perspective regarding the genesis of a nation or ethnic community, ethnoerotism expresses the most beautiful among the human feelings: love. While this feeling is universal, as ethnoerotism it can be applied especially to pre-modern times, when a certain Zeitgeist (“spirit of time”) propelled in the forefront of social life the “civilising heroes”. Thus, the ethnoerotic spirit shaped languages, created frames of social order, and contributed to the building of nations.

According to a general perspective, love radiates as a state of spirit imbued with the essence of a cosmic principle that moves “il sole e l’altre stelle” (Dante), then puts together the masculine and feminine energies into the primordial unity of human individual being; in our approach, we have seen how these energies apply to interethnic relationships, entailing the emergence of new nations and new cultures. There is a lesson in this whole performance: a lesson about how from the struggle of opposites arises love, and from love, even life arises and feeds itself!