Do u have any headcanons about Rome or the other ancients
i do! here are some of them:
Rome is the Italybros' father, not their grandfather. Children are sometimes bittersweet omens for nations; your beginning is a harbinger of someone else's end.
When he was still a republic, the Battle of Cannae during the Punic Wars against Carthage was the moment Rome most feared dying for real. As the Carthaginian general Hannibal proclaimed; "I swear to arrest the destiny of Rome with fire and steel"—that put some real fear into young Rome's heart.
Persia (aka the Achaemenid Empire) is at least 3,000 years old—they and modern Iran are the same person. Another ye olde helltalia, like China.
Germania's real name is not Germania: he is one of the many Germanic nations that existed; as historically, Tacitus' concept of "Germania" is more of a Roman construction—they didn't see themselves as a single unified "Germanic" cultural or political entity. So, Tacitus' Germania? Much like Herodotus: father of history, father of lies, perhaps...
Yao's earliest memory is of walking along the Yellow River. It's one thing he has in common with many other ancient nations; rivers feature heavily in their earliest sense of being: Rome (the Tiber), Sumer (the Tigris and the Euphrates), Ancient Egypt (the Nile) and Olmec (the Coatzacoalcos, in modern Mexico) being some examples. Yao thinks of the Yellow River as being both life and death; the fertile silt on the banks that would be the lifeblood of his civilisation, but also the source of devastating floods throughout his history.
Yao rather respected Rome, Persia/Iran and India a lot more than his other neighbours; Rome being called da qin（大秦）or "great qin". Almost a sort of "oh, there's another empire at the opposite end of the (then) known world just like me." Bit of a difference from how at various points, Yong-soo and Kiku got much less flattering names. Today, many things have crumbled under the sword of time, but there's still Roman glassware he has from that long-gone time of the Silk Road that linked Rome and China—as well as all the other cultures in between—together.
