I would say that there WAS a Roman nation, but it was destroyed by the Roman
Empire along with all other nations and tribes conquered by it. It is
reasonable to define as the Roman nation the original group of tribes that
formed the core of the city-state called "Roma".
When the Empire began making subject peoples, or non-ethnic-Romans into
Roman "citizens" it destroyed both those tribes conquered by the tyrants,
and the distinctiveness of the actual Roman tribes as a nation. Good for the
imperators and the bureaucrats, perhaps, but bad for the tribes... and in my
opinion, everyone in Western culture since then.
In any case, it is a chronological development from the Roman nation to the
Roman Empire. FYI - There have been retro-pagan attempts to revive the Roman
nation and its culture, though the validity of such attempts is questionable
if the ones making them are not descended from Roman Patrician families.
AFAIK, no such attempt has lasted, but I may be wrong.
As far as tribal terminology goes, it has been pointed out that there is a
wide range of words used for tribe and related concepts, as well as
different definitions of "tribe" as found in different fields. Those of
living in North America may have some specific influence from the native
tribes, or at least perceptions of them. Specifically, in a number of cases,
we find that several tribes together formed what white people have called a
"nation". Usually these nations were composed of several linguistically and
genetically related tribes. As two examples, there is the famous Iroquois
nation, the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations), and the less-well known Wabanaki
Confederacy directly to the east of the Haudenosaunee.
While we are at it, how many different words in PIE can list members come up
relating to the concepts of "tribe", "clan", etc.? It might even make sense
for IndoEuropeanists to adopt one such word as a standard term, easily
distinguishable from the "tribe" as defined in anthropology and other
specialized uses...
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at
http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp