all of those peoples did not kill on the same

level at all with what the romans carried out. And their warriors were not professional killers, they were made up of the people. Surely, pushed to attack and kill if there was a true need, but they did not set out on long invasions seeking to commandeer large territories and seed a kind of colonialism that persists today. My but you do have such an elementary grasp of these things. Can i suggest some world history to you, that might actually truly liberate you (and provide ammo for your BL side!). The stuff i read has shown how tribal societies were not killing societies (except when invade); but even this was self-defensive only, not offensive. The romans were offensive. They went on the offensive. What tribal societies most wanted from warfare was to express displeasure. So a spear or three might be thrown. Someone might get hurt. Or killed. But it was not mass slaughter. That's the difference that teachers of elementary (up to high school and likely community college as well) history don't parse out. But mass schooling is not what you think it is, after all. "Alien values are implanted into the lives of the people, precisely through the children; alien, not merely in the sense of foreign or exotic, but alien to humanity: a commerciogenic identity is formed. At first it was partly resisted, but with time, it became more and more acceptable, until it has now become a major determinant on the lives of the young, displacing all earlier forms of acculturation, other ways of answering need, other ways of being in the world. This process of forgetting, beyond recall, but perhaps not quite beyond reclamation, is a form of colonialism far more effective than that which held so much of the world in thrall in an earlier empire." ----Jeremy Seabrook in 'The Metamorphoses of Colonialsm'