[joey-bob]

I can't read Greek or Latin so I don't have access to the primary sources, but it is my understanding that nationalism was a prevalent part of political life in antiquity, particularly from the death of Alexander through to the end of the Roman empire, and reemerged in Europe around the same time as absolutism. In many ways, the United States, and to a larger extent the West, has significantly more in common with the late roman republic than it does with any point in it's own modern history.

[zanny]

Almost all great empires to some degree planted the roots of their legitimacy of conquest in their own self superiority. Nationalism is as old as the first man who thought some other culture as "uncivilized". Like how, say, the Romans called all the European peoples that weren't Roman barbarians.