ROMAN
in the Provinces
Art on the Periphery of Empire
edited by Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoffman
ROMAN
in the Provinces
Art on the Periphery of Empire
edited by Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoffman
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College distributed by the University of Chicago Press
This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire held at the Yale University Art Gallery from August 22, 2014 to January 4, 2015 and at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College from February 14 to May 31, 2015. Organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and the McMullen Museum of Art, Roman in the Provinces has been curated by Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoffman. The exhibition has been underwritten by Sharon and Richard A. Hurowitz, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibition and Publication Fund, Boston College, the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, and Leslie and Peter Ciampi.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952353 ISBN: 978-1-892850-22-5
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Printed in the United States of America
© 2014 McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Designer: John McCoy Copyeditor: Kate Shugert
Cover: Detail of mosaic floor with geometric design, Gerasa, Church of Bishop Paul (Pro- copius Church), c. 526 CE, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale-British School Excavations at Gerasa, 1929.418 (see plate 4)
Figure credits (see captions for additional information): Map: Christopher Sleboda and Mike Krol/John McCoy; 1.1-2: Visual Resources Department, Yale University Art Gallery;
I. 3-5: Dura-Europos Collection, Yale University Art Gallery; 1.6-8: Gerasa Collection, Yale University Art Gallery; 2.1: John McCoy; 2.5: Dura-Europos Collection, Yale University Art Gallery; 3.1, 3.3: David J. Mattingly/John McCoy; 4.2, 4.4-5: The Trustees of the British Museum; 4.6: Granger Collection, New York; 5.1: Johannes Laurentius, Art Resource, NY; 5.2: The Trustees of the British Museum; 5.3: Vanni Archive, Art Resource, NY; 5.4: S. Van- ning DeA Picture Library, Art Resource, NY; 5.5-7: Kimberly Cassibry; 5.8: Alinari, Art Resource, NY; 5.9-10: Gilles Mermet, Art Resource, NY; 5.12: Gianni Dagli Orti, Art Re- source, NY; 5.13: SEF, Art Resource, NY; 5.14: Kimberly Cassibry; 6.1: Simon James; 6.2: Dura-Europos Collection, Yale University Art Gallery; 6.3-5: Simon James; 6.6: G. Petruc- cioli, New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias; 7.1-9: Elizabeth M. Greene; 8.1: Matthew M. McCarty; 8.2: Matthew M. McCarty/John McCoy; 8.4: Dura-Europos Collec- tion, Yale University Art Gallery; 8.6, 8.8: Matthew M. McCarty; 8.9: Alexandru Diacones- cu; 9.2-3: John McCoy; 10.5: Wikimedia Commons; 11.1: Jeremy Cole Miller/John McCoy;
II. 2-3: Radu Oltean, Wikimedia Commons; 11.4-5: Radu Oltean, Muzeul de Cercetari Eco-Muzeale Tulcea; 11.6: Creative Commons; 11.7-10: Andre Gonciar, Brukenthal Mu- seum, Sibiu; 12.1-2: John McCoy; 13.1-10: Nancy Netzer; 15.1-5: Gerasa Collection, Yale University Art Gallery; 15.7: Creative Commons; 15.8: Gerasa Collection, Yale University Art Gallery.
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Contents
Preface i
Nancy Netzer and Jock Reynolds
Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery 3
Lisa R. Brody
Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and
Investigations of Identities 13
Gail L. Hoffman
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity,
Hybridity, and Plurality 35
David J. Mattingly
Household Objects and Social Memories in Roman Spain and
Gaul 61
Andrew C. Johnston
Honoring the Empress Julia Domna on Arch Monuments in
Rome and North Africa 75
Kimberly Cassibry
The “Romanness of the Soldiers”: Barbarized Periphery or
Imperial Core? 91
Simon James
Impressions of Identity: Choosing a Signet Ring in the Roman Army 109
Elizabeth M. Greene
Local Idioms and Global Meanings: Mithraism and Roman
Provincial Art 125
Lucinda Dirven and Matthew M. McCarty
Provincial Cults of Mars in the Roman Empire 143
Tyler V. Franconi
The Fate of Serapis: A Paradigm for Transformations in the
Culture and Art of Late Roman Egypt 153
Ann M. Nicgorski
Dacian Riders: Transcultural Expressions of Religious
Identity in Roman Dacia in the Midst of War 167
Alvaro Ibarra
Struggling to Be Roman in a Former Roman Province 181
Robin Fleming
Displaying Roman Britain in the British Museum 195
Nancy Netzer
Roman Provincial Coinage 215
William E. Metcalf
The Geras a Mosaics of Yale: Intentionality and Design 221
Christine Kondoleon
Plates 235
Contributors
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Roman Empire at its greatest extent, 2nd century CE
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Preface
Nancy Netzer and Jock Reynolds
In June 2011 at the McMullen Museum, during the packing of Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, the previous collaborative exhibition between our institutions, the exhibitions co-curator Lisa R. Brody, Yale University Art Gallery’s Associate Curator of Ancient Art, mused about organizing a sequel exhibition. Its goal would be to focus on other works from the periphery of the Roman Empire — primarily from the collections of the Gallery — to ex- plore limitations of the concept of “Roman art” as it pertains to production in the far-flung provinces, each of which had its own indigenous culture and artistic tradition. Rather than seeking recognizably Roman elements in provincial objects, this exhibition would explore the various ways that people inhabiting the Roman Empire constructed and expressed their local social, religious, civic, and cultural identities. In other words, the exhibition and ac- companying publication would examine what the material culture reveals about how peo- ple in the provinces responded to being Roman. The McMullen immediately offered to be a partner in this endeavor, with Gail L. Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Boston College, once again serving as co-curator with Brody. Thus, the present exhibition and publication were born.
During the ensuing years, Brody and Hoffman chose and refined the list of works to be included from the Yale collection, adding several loans from public institutions and many textiles from a local private collection. They assembled an outstanding team of scholars from around the world to contribute essays to this volume, and Brody organized a two-day symposium in September 2013, hosted by Yale, for the scholars to share research and ideas and to study the works to be displayed.
Needless to say, it is Hoffman and Brody to whom we owe our greatest debt of gratitude. We thank them for putting their abundant disciplinary expertise and intellectual creativity into the service of organizing this exhibition and editing this volume. Their collaboration serves as a model of its kind. We also extend appreciation to the scholars who contributed essays to the book: Lisa R. Brody, Kimberly Cassibry, Lucinda Dirven, Robin Fleming, Tyler V. Franconi, Elizabeth M. Greene, Gail L. Hoffman, Alvaro Ibarra, Simon James, Andrew C. Johnston, Christine Kondoleon, David J. Mattingly, Matthew M. McCarty, William E. Metcalf, and Ann M. Nicgorski.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the wisdom and help of our colleagues. At the Yale University Art Gallery, we recognize especially Susan B. Matheson, Laurence Kanter, Pamela Franks, and Ian McClure for wise counsel and support of the proj- ect; Carol Snow, Anne Gunnison, Elena Torok, and Joseluis Lazarte Luna for conserving
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Nancy Netzer and Jock Reynolds
objects in the exhibition; Jason DeBlock, Laura Hartman, Robin Hodgson, Frank Johnson, Sue Kiss, Ashley Kosa, Lillia McEnaney, Sarah Norvell, Vicky Onofrio, Paul Panamarenko, Megan Salas, and Catherine Stevens for work on the Gerasa mosaic; Thomas Biggs, Amelia Eichengreen, and Benjamin Jerue for the exhibition didactics; Christopher Sleboda, Mike Krol, Tiffany Sprague, and Molly Balikov for graphic design and editing; John ffrench, Rich- ard House, Anthony De Camillo, and David Whaples for photography for the catalogue; Jeffrey Yoshimine, Anna Russell, Clarkson Crolius, and Christina Czap for assistance with the installation at the Gallery; Lynne Addison and Amy Dowe for overseeing loan arrange- ments; and Megan Doyon for help organizing the symposium and exhibition.
At Boston College, special acknowledgment is owed to John McCoy, who designed this publication and exhibition graphics; Kate Shugert, who copyedited all materials and man- aged this books production; Diana Larsen, who designed the McMullen installation; Kerry Burke, who photographed textiles for the catalogue; David Quigley, Patricia DeLeeuw, Mary Crane, Charles Ahern, Kendra Eshleman, and Brigitte Libby, who provided advice and support; and Chris Canniff, Andrew Gilbert, C. J. Miller, Logan Wren, and the students in the seminar on the exhibition, FA370, taught in the fall of 2013, all ofwhom assisted with organization and research.
We are grateful to several scholars for participation in the symposium and for sharing unpublished research: Jennifer Baird, Sebastian Heath, Thomas Morton, Marden Nichols, Candace Rice, and Ben Rubin. For their generous loans, we thank Donald and Barbara Tellalian; Malcolm Rogers, Christine Kondoleon, and Rita Freed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; James Christen Steward and Michael Padgett at the Princeton University Art Museum; and Julia Marciari- Alexander at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
As always, we could not have attempted such an ambitious project were it not for the continued generosity of the administrations of our respective institutions and the McMul- len family. For major support of the exhibition, we are indebted to Sharon and Richard A. Hurowitz, Leslie and Peter Ciampi, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Patrons of the McMullen Museum. This project would not have come to fruition without the collec- tive contributions of everyone mentioned here.
Nancy Netzer
Director and Professor of Art History, McMullen Museum of Art Jock Reynolds
Henry J. Heinz II Director, Yale University Art Gallery
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Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery
Lisa R. Brody
Yale University has a long and distinguished history of interest in excavating the ancient world. Its involvement during the 1920s and 1930s in two simultaneous archaeological projects — Dura-Europos, in modern-day Syria, and Gerasa, in Jordan — brought a signif- icant collection of artifacts and historical records to New Haven. As features of the per- manent installation of ancient Mediterranean art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and as resources for researchers, the objects and archives from these excavations provide valuable insight into life in the eastern Mediterranean in the Roman and early Byzantine eras. The exhibition Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire draws upon strengths of the Gallery’s entire ancient collection and archives, supplemented with important loans from collaborating institutions, with the goal of putting Dura-Europos and Gerasa into a broader geographical and historical context and showing how these provincial Roman cit- ies fit into the larger picture of the ancient world.
In 2011, while the Yale University Art Gallery was undergoing a major renovation and expansion, a special exhibition was organized by the Gallery in collaboration with the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, curated by Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoff- man. This exhibition, Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, brought artifacts out of the Gallery’s storage facilities, many of them newly restored, to show the amazing juxtapo- sition of cultures that existed in the ancient city. An accompanying publication, with the same title, contains scholarly essays by international specialists from diverse fields (archae- ologists, art historians, linguists, classicists, and theologians), focusing on the discovery, conservation, and interpretation of objects in the show as well as other aspects of life and identity in ancient Dura-Europos. The exhibition traveled to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University in the fall of 2011, where it appeared under the title Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos.
The new permanent installations at Yale officially opened to the public in December 2012 and include the Mary and James Ottaway Gallery of Dura-Europos, a thematic display that focuses on the history of the city, the site’s extraordinary preservation, and the evidence of multiculturalism and exchange in the archaeological remains (fig. 1.1). Objects from Gerasa are also on view, in the adjacent Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson Gallery of Ancient Art. The city mosaic from the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (plate 3), after decades in storage and an innovative conservation treatment, is now displayed on the central wall of the Gallery
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Lisa R. Brody
and is recognized as one of Yales greatest treasures (fig. 1.2). Following the open- ing, planning commenced for a logical next step: a special exhibition that would place these sites and others into much broader context and explore the multifac- eted identities within the provinces of the Roman Empire.
The vast success of Roman imperial- ism, which reached its greatest geographic expanse in the second century CE (see map, p. v), meant that regions as dispa- rate and far-flung as Syria, Turkey, Gaul, Britain, Egypt, and Tunisia became, to varying degrees, Roman. The concept of a Roman identity or identities and what that meant to inhabitants varied significantly in different parts of the empire. Earlier scholarship in this field used the term “Romanization,” but more recent research and analysis has shown the concept rep- resented by this word to be inadequate, as it implies a single- directional, top-down process. In fact, Roman provincial identi- ties resulted from a much more complex system of exchange and influence.
Identities in the provinces could also vary within a particular town or city depending on the specific context, includ- ing the home (both as a private space and as a space for hosting visitors) and the community (public religious spaces, areas of arti- san production or commerce, etc.). The exhibition explores each of these contexts through works of art that show how elements of Roman culture were juxtaposed with local tradition and what this reveals about Roman identities around the empire. Focusing primarily on the eastern Mediterranean in the Roman and early Byzantine periods, as this is the material that provides the most relevant context for Dura-Europos and Gerasa, the exhibition also looks elsewhere around the empire. Mechanisms of exchange and contact, including trade, manufacture, imperial influence, and military maneuvers, are explored through examina- tion of the archaeological record.
Dura-Europos
The ancient city of Dura-Europos, named Europos by the Macedonian (Seleucid) Greeks who founded it around 300 BCE and known as Dura (“the fortress” in Aramaic) to subse- quent local inhabitants, was as ethnically and culturally mixed as its modern compound designation would suggest. In many ways it was a Greek urban center, with Greek- influ- enced architecture, street plan, religion, and art. Much of its population, however, was of a local Syro-Mesopotamian origin, and these inhabitants clung firmly to various cultural elements, integrating them with imported Greek ones. In the second century CE, Dura was seized by the Romans, in their fight against the Parthian Empire, and an additional cultural and ethnic presence arrived strongly on the scene. Sub-groups within the pop-
1.1. Mary and Janies Ottaway Gallery of Dura-Europos at the Yale University Art Gallery.
i.2. Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson Gallery of Ancient Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.
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Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery
1.3. Franz Cumont and Michael Rostovtzeff in front of the Mithraeum at Dura-Europos, 1933-34.
ulation of Dura included Syrians (especially Palmyrenes), Mesopotamians, Greeks, Roman soldiers, conscripted “barbarians” from north- ern Europe, Jews, and Christians. All of these groups left their mark on the archaeological remains of the city, whose excavation and anal- ysis illuminates the deep cultural interactions that were common in the ancient Mediterra- nean world. The objects that survive from Du- ra-Europos date predominantly from the final phase of its history — the second century and first half of the third century CE — when it was a Roman garrison town on the eastern edge of the empire. In this period, the population in- cluded soldiers and civilians; Jews, pagans, and Christians; and natives as well as immigrants from as far away as Britain or Rome.
Archaeological investigation of Dura-Eu- ropos was undertaken in 1920, after British troops uncovered some wall paintings there and immediately requested a consultation by American archaeologist James Henry Breasted, who was working in Syria. The region was under French mandate at the time, and the first excavations in 1922-24 were sponsored by the French Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and directed by Belgian scholar Franz Cumont. After a four-year hiatus, the Academie agreed upon a collaboration with Yale, and 10 seasons of intensive investiga- tion followed — from 1928 to 1937 — overseen by Russian scholar and Yale classics professor Mikhail (Michael) I. Rostovtzeff (fig. 1.3). Suc- cessive field directors included French archae- ologist and architect Maurice Pillet (1928-31) and Clark Hopkins and Frank E. Brown, both of Yale (1932-35 and 1936-37, respectively)
(figs. 1.4-5). Funding for the project ran out after the tenth season, and little additional work took place at the site until the mid-1980s, when a new Franco- Syrian research project began under the direction of Pierre Leriche, involving a team of international scholars.
Because of Yales involvement in the criti- cal early investigations of Dura-Europos, the archives of the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contain a tremendously important col- lection of photographs, artifact cards, field notebooks, and other records from the excava- tion, in addition to the over 12,000 objects that represent Yales share of the objects found. Digitized photographs from the Dura-Europos excavations (as well as those from the Yale excavation of ancient Gerasa in Jordan) are available to scholars through collaboration with
1.4. Excavation team at Dura-Europos, 1931-32 (Clark Hopkins in front row, left, and Henry Pearson standing third from left).
1.5. Frank Brown and crew at Dura-Europos, 1934-35.
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Lisa R. Brody
the Artstor Digital Library.1 Plans are underway to make all of these images even more uni- versally accessible. Approximately 150 parchment and papyrus documents from Dura that are currently preserved at the Beinecke are also available online.2
The Mary and James Ottaway Gallery of Ancient Dura-Europos at the Yale University Art Gallery provides a thematic look at the ancient city and its archaeological explora- tion. This gallery presents to the public approximately 200 objects, numerous excavation photographs and drawings, and a computer kiosk with additional information, archival documents, and virtual 3-D renderings of the Mithraeum, the Synagogue, and the Chris- tian House-Church.3 Situated immediately adjacent to the Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson Gallery of Ancient Art, the Dura-Europos gallery explores themes of daily life, religion, military, and death, using the extraordinarily preserved material remains from the site to investigate how the arrival and conquest of Rome affected identities there, how its multi- culturalism manifested itself in various contexts, and how “being Roman” at Dura-Europos related to identities elsewhere in the Roman world.
Gerasa
In contrast to Dura-Europos, which was buried in the sands of the Syrian Desert from its conquest by the Sasanians until the twentieth century, the magnificent standing ruins of an- cient Gerasa have always been known. Also in contrast to Dura, Gerasa was occupied long beyond the Roman period, continuously into the Ottoman era. Sporadic surface explora- tion and soundings of the site took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the systematic excavation project that Yale participated in around the same time that a team from Yale was working at Dura-Europos.
Ancient Gerasa, located beneath the modern city of Jerash on the Chrysorhoas River in Jordan, is a site that contributes much to scholars’ understanding of the Roman and Byzantine Near East. As with Dura-Europos, the city’s long and significant history has been revealed by its high level of preservation and years of systematic archaeological explora- tion. The site was first explored in the 1920s and 1930s by the team of schol- ars from Yale University, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and the American Schools of Orien- tal Research (fig. 1.6).4 These excava- tions focused primarily on the early Byzantine churches and their asso- ciated pagan temples. The areas have been further investigated since 1982 by the Jerash Archaeological Project, sponsored by Jordan’s Department of Antiquities and involving a team of scholars from several countries. This project has expanded its focus to study other aspects of the Roman city, such as the hippodrome, as well as the site’s Islamic structures, including houses, shops, and a large Umayyad mosque.5
Gerasa is the best preserved of the Decapolis, a collective of 10 cities in Roman Judea and Syria.6 Due to its strategic position along ancient trade routes, it is considered to have been one of the most important cities in the Roman Near East. Although sources such as Pliny the Elder (HN 5.16.74) imply that the Decapolis was founded during the Hellenistic period (c. 323-63 BCE), excavations at Gerasa have found evidence of occupation as least
i.6. Excavation team at Gerasa, 1928-29.
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Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery
as early as the Bronze Age (second to third millennium BCE). The first and second cen- turies CE were a time of great prosperity for Gerasa, reflected architecturally by its paved and colonnaded streets (fig. 1.7), theaters, temples, baths, fountains, grand public squares, and a hippodrome. A monumental triumphal arch dedicated to the emperor Hadrian was erected to commemorate the rulers visit to Gerasa in 129/30 (fig. 1.8). The city is estimated to have housed a population of approximately 20,000 at this time. Gerasa’s wealth gradually diminished during the third century CE, as many of the overland trade routes that had con- tributed to its growth and prosperity were superseded by maritime routes.
By the fourth century, the population of Gerasa included a significant Christian community.7 The fifth and sixth centuries saw the construction of more than a dozen churches in the city, including a cathe- dral, most of them adorned with elabo- rate mosaic floors and architectural detail.
Although the Persian invasion of 614 and the Muslim conquest of 636 contributed to the city’s decline, recent excavations have revealed a still thriving city in the Uma- yyad period (661-750).8 Gerasa was hit hard by a series of earthquakes in 749, and its population decreased sharply. The site remained virtually abandoned, its ruins always a remarkable feature of the Jorda- nian landscape. Europeans rediscovered the site in the early nineteenth century.
It was first visited by the German traveler Ulrich Jasper Seetzen in 1806 and then by Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and James Silk Buckingham in 1812 and 1816, respec- tively, all of whom explored the area and recorded visible archaeological remains.
The joint Yale-British School expedi- tion to Gerasa was first proposed in Sep- tember 1927 at a meeting at the American Schools of Oriental Research. The project was twofold: to excavate the Church of Saint Theodore and other churches and to publish a series of inscriptions that had recently been found at the site. Yales primary interest was in the churches, the British School’s in the inscriptions. The expedition was approved and financial support obtained; work began in the spring of 1928 under the direc- tion of Yale’s Professor Benjamin W. Bacon and the director of the British School, John Winter Crowfoot (who also served as field director). In 1930, the British School withdrew from the collaboration and Yale continued the project with the participation of the Amer- ican School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, co-directed by Yale Professors Bacon and Rostovtzeff, on behalf of the Archaeological Committee of Yale University and the Execu- tive Committee of the American Schools. Clarence S. Fisher and Chester C. McCown of the American School in Jerusalem acted as field directors beginning in the 1930 season.
Reduced funding resulted in a small-scale excavation in 1931, no work at all in 1932, and another small-scale investigation in 1933 under Nelson Glueck, director of the Amer-
1.7. Via Antoninianus at Gerasa, 1931.
1.8. Arch of Hadrian at Gerasa, 1930-31.
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ican School at Jerusalem, while Fisher was temporarily occupied with the excavations at Antioch. The final season in which Yale participated in the Gerasa excavations, 1934, was led by Carl Kraeling, then acting director of the American School. As a result of this project, the Yale University Art Gallery received approximately 540 artifacts from Gerasa, over half of which are mosaic floor fragments and lamps. A select number of these objects, including two important mosaics, are now on view in the Gallery’s Isabel B. and Wallace S. Wilson Gallery of Ancient Art (plate 3 and fig. 15.6). The mosaic on display from the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, showing images of Alexandria and Memphis, underwent a major con- servation treatment that allowed it to be included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Byz- antium and Islam: Age of Transition exhibition in the spring of 2012 before being installed in Yale’s newly renovated gallery.9 The innovative conservation techniques that were devel- oped for the city mosaic10 were adapted for the treatment of the geometric mosaic from the Procopius Church; it is on display for the first time in this exhibition (plate 4).
Other Collections of Roman Provincial Art at Yale
Another strength of the Gallery’s collection of ancient art is an assortment of pottery, lamps, and figurines that were purchased from the American Colony Store in Jerusalem in 1914; it is now known as the Whiting Palestinian Collection.11 The objects had been acquired in Syria and Palestine by John D. Whiting and others, mostly between 1909 and 1912. Several objects in the exhibition belong to this collection (see plates 155-59). Although most of them were purchased from Arab farmers and dealers and lack precise excavated contexts, the members of the American Colony recognized the importance of trying to obtain as much provenance information as possible: “Full inquiries were always made as to the lo- cality and type of tomb or other position in which the objects were found.”12 The artifacts remain valuable documents of the eastern Roman provinces.
A large number of the Gallery’s ancient Greek and Roman vases belong to the Rebecca Darlington Stoddard Collection, named for the donor who gave Yale the money to acquire the collection in 191 3. 13 The vases were purchased from the German classical archaeologist Paul Arndt, who had bought the majority of them at a Paris auction, with others added in subsequent years to fill in specific gaps to create a comprehensive collection for teaching Greek and Roman art. The collection ranges from prehistoric Egyptian (c. 5000 BCE) to late Roman and Egyptian (third to sixth century CE) and includes lamps as well as vessels. It continues to be an essential core of Yale’s object-based courses in ancient art, and several of the vases are included in the exhibition (see, for example, plates 118-20, 123-27, 160-62, 166).
Another significant collection of objects, particularly featuring artifacts of the ancient Americas and late Roman Egypt, were donated to the Gallery in the 1950s by Frederick and Florence Olsen and their charitable organization. Of these, several Egyptian textiles and limestone relief sculptures have been selected for Roman in the Provinces (see plates 131-35, 138-39, 145, 149). Many of these objects were first shown in an exhibition called Coptic Art, which appeared in the Olsen’s Guilford, Connecticut home in November and December 1955. 14
Several other objects in the exhibition were acquired by the Gallery in the 1980s as part of a substantial gift of antiquities from William L. Eagleton Jr. (1926-2011), a 1948 graduate of Yale College. Eagleton served as United States Ambassador to several countries over the course of two decades (1967-88), including Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, and Syria. During his terms of service in Syria and Tunisia, he amassed a large and interesting collec- tion of Roman pottery, sculpture, intaglios, cylinder seals, lamps, and lamp molds. Several of these objects are in the exhibition and, together with related excavated examples, pro- vide clear evidence for trade and other means of cultural interaction in the Roman Empire
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Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery
(plates 121-22, 165, 167). The intaglios in particular, none of which has been published previously, provide instructive comparisons with excavated examples from Dura-Europos and feature images that are also seen on coins and other works of art from the Roman prov- inces (see plates 45-58).
Another gift to the Gallery in 2008 from Thomas John Crockett III (1921-2011), con- sisting primarily of pottery and terracotta oil lamps, significantly increased the Gallery’s holdings of objects from Roman North Africa (see plates 163-64). Though an alumnus of Harvard, Mr. Crockett was a native of Unionville, Connecticut, and chose to donate various portions of his private collection to Yale as well as to the Wadsworth Atheneum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Gallery of Art at St. Joseph College in West Hartford. Tike William Eagleton, Crockett had served as a diplomat in the US Department of State for 40 years (though not as ambassador), and he had purchased most of the objects in Tunisia while stationed there during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although none has known excavated context, several of the artifacts had been said by the sellers to have been found in or near the important Roman site of El Djem.
Objects Loaned to the Exhibition
Supplementing the Gallery’s permanent collection in the exhibition are significant, careful- ly selected objects from the Princeton University Art Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This wonderful assortment of objects, several of which have known archaeological provenance, provides a critical complement to the other works of art in the exhibition.
The exhibition features five objects from Princeton’s excavations at Antioch-on-the- Orontes (modern Antakya, in Turkey near the Syrian border), including two fragmentary funerary reliefs, both with banquet iconography (plates 179-80), and three portrait heads (two female, one male; plates 82-84). Archaeological investigation of Antioch began in 1932 by the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch and Its Vicinity, a collaborative proj- ect involving Princeton University, the Musees Nationaux de France (Louvre), the Balti- more Museum of Art, and the Worcester Art Museum. These committee members were joined in 1936 by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and Dumbarton Oaks.15 The objects from Antioch comprise a vital component of the exhibition, since the site provides a vivid case study alongside Dura-Europos: a large and sophisticated urban metropolis as compared to a remote garrison town.
The exhibition also includes another work of art on loan from Princeton: a high-quality portrait of a man wearing the distinctive crown that identifies him as a priest of the impe- rial cult (featuring busts of the emperor and his family; plate 79). This object coordinates with other pieces in the exhibition to illustrate the emperor’s influence on the identities of newly Roman regions, seen most strongly in public building programs, honorific sculpture, design of coinage, and, as here, imperial cult worship.
The Walters Art Museum loans two objects to the exhibition — a silver pitcher from Gaul decorated with Bacchic imagery and a bone plaque from Alexandria depicting a semi- nude female figure resembling Aphrodite (plates 171, 174). Both of these objects contribute in multiple significant ways toward the themes of the exhibition. The silver pitcher is a high-quality luxury work that would have adorned the household of an upper-class family in Roman Gaul. Such objects were imitated in glass and ceramic, for families who could not afford the originals. Prized possessions like these would have been in high demand, manu- factured and traded, and passed down as heirlooms within a family. The bone plaque is not as expensive an object, but it still represents a category of adornment that adopts images seen also in stone sculpture, mosaics, and textiles. As one of the most important and pop- ular divinities in the Greco -Roman world, Aphrodite is found throughout the empire, her
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attributes and iconography sometimes combined with those of local goddesses such as Isis, Astarte, or Atargatis. This Alexandrian example of a semi-nude female figure connects visu- ally with images of Aphrodite from Dura-Europos and other sites. Its fourth-century date also illustrates the continued significance of the pagan goddess into the early Christian era.
The Museum of Fine Arts contributes several key objects to the exhibition, including a fragment of a spectacular mosaic floor from a private home in the eastern Mediterranean (plate 182). 16 The fragment includes two figures identified by Greek inscriptions: Ploutos (Wealth) and Apolausis (Pleasure). The mosaic provides a strong counterpoint and bal- ance to the mosaic from Gerasa. Roughly contemporary, they are however from different contexts (domestic vs. public, religious) and feature very divergent art historical traditions (mythological figural imagery vs. intricate geometric designs). The theme of luxury and adornment represented by the MFA’s mosaic is continued in another of their loans: an ele- gant silver figurine of a dancer, possibly from eastern Greece (plate 172). The two portraits on loan from the museum come from Aphrodisias (plate 80) and from Athens (plate 81), complementing Princeton’s portraits from Antioch and providing a varied look at public honorific statuary erected around the Roman Empire over time.
Conclusion
Roman in the Provinces draws heavily on the Gallery’s permanent collection of ancient art, with the result that there is a strong focus on the eastern Mediterranean, particularly the Roman provinces of Syria, Judaea, and Mesopotamia. North Africa is another featured area, including the provinces of Aegyptus, Africa Proconsularis, Numidia, and Mauretania (see map, p. v). Objects from the excavations at Dura-Europos and Gerasa, as well as from the University of Chicago’s excavations at Kurcoglu (artifacts from which were transferred to the Gallery in 1940), are displayed and interpreted alongside other objects. The strong par- allels, for example, between military trappings found at Dura-Europos and those from Ger- many, Gaul, or Britain, speak clearly to the distinctive “culture” of the Roman military and its influence around the provinces. Loan objects from Antioch, Aphrodisias, and Athens provide glimpses into issues of self-representation at other important locations around the empire. Artifacts of daily use are displayed alongside luxury objects to present a full picture of life in the ancient world. Realities of self-representation and identity are explored among different contexts and geographic regions. How did individuals and cities in the eastern Mediterranean react to the spread of the Roman Empire and army, and how did that com- pare to the reactions in North Africa, Europe, or Britain? How strong were the preexisting local traditions, in religion, art, language, adornment, and how were these incorporated with or absorbed by Roman modes? Might we expect to find situations where provincials would don the toga and speak Latin in the streets, while maintaining old cults and dining practices in the privacy of their homes? This exhibition and publication aim to address all of these issues, presenting recent classical scholarship on Roman provincial identity and examining works of art within the varied contexts of public civic display, public religious space, and private households.
Excavations and Identities: Art from the Roman Provinces at the Yale University Art Gallery
1 http://www.artstor.org.
2 http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/research/library-catalogs-databases/guide-yale-papyrus -collection.
3 This project is accessible online at http://media.artgallery.yale.edu/duraeuropos/.
4 Surface surveys and very small-scale excavations were undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Continuous interest in the site led to more systematic exploration and conservation of the ruins after World War I, culminating in the expedition begun by Yale Uni- versity and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1928-30) and continued by Yale and the American Schools of Oriental Research (1930-31, 1933-34). See John Winter Crowfoot, Churches at Jerash: A Preliminary Report of the Joint Yale-British School Expeditions to Jerash, 1928-1930 (London: Beccles, 1931) and Carl H. Kraeling, Gerasa: City of the Decapolis (New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1938).
5 Fawzi Zayadine, ed., Jerash Archaeological Project, 2 vols. (Amman: Department of Antiq- uities of Jordan, 1986-89). See also Antoni Ostrasz, “The Hippodrome of Gerasa: A Report on Excavations and Research 1982-1987,” Syria 66 (1989): 51-77; Kristoffer Damgaard and Louise Blanke, “The Islamic Jarash Project: A Preliminary Report on the First Two Sea- sons of Fieldwork,” Assemblage 8 (2004), http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/issue8 / damgaardandblanke.html.
6 See Iain Browning, Jerash and the Decapolis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982).
7 For discussions of the later history of Gerasa, see Charles March, Spatial and Religious Transfor- mations in the Late Antique Polis: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis with a Case-Study of the City of Gerasa (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009); Annabel Jane Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
8 On the Umayyad mosque discovered at Jerash, see Alan Walmsley, “The Friday Mosque of Early Islamic Jarash in Jordan: The 2002 Field Season of the Danish-Jordanian Islamic Jarash Proj- ect,” Journal of the C. L. David Collection 1 (2003): 110-31; Walmsley, “The Newly Discovered Congregational Mosque of Jarash in Jordan,” Al-’Usur al-Wusta 15, no. 2 (2003): 17-24; Alan Walmsley and Kristoffer Damgaard, “The Umayyad Congregational Mosque of Jarash in Jordan and Its Relationship to Early Mosques,” Antiquity 79 (2005): 362-78.
9 Helen C. Evans and Brandie Ratliff, eds., Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th Centu- ry), exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 12.
10 Lisa R. Brody and Carol Snow, “History and Treatment of the Gerasa City Mosaic at the Yale University Art Gallery,” forthcoming.
1 1 Charles Alfred Kennedy, “The Whiting Collection of Palestinian Pottery at Yale” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1961).
12 Ibid., xiif, citing a letter from G. Olaf Matsson, July 6, 1960.
13 Paul V. C. Baur, Catalogue of the Rebecca Darlington Stoddard Collection of Greek and Italian Vases in Yale University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922).
14 Aleksis Rannit, Coptic Art: Exhibition of Coptic Art by the Olsen Foundation, exh. cat. (Guilford: Olsen Foundation, 1955).
15 Christine Kondoleon, “The City of Antioch: An Introduction,” in Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, ed. Christine Kondoleon, exh. cat. (Princeton: Princeton University Press and Worcester Art
11
Museum, 2000), 5-8.
Christine Kondoleon, “Celebrating Pleasure and Wealth: A New Mosaic at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” in ANAOHMATA EOPTIKA: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. Mathews, ed. Joseph D. Alchermes (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2009), 216-22.
iiMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMii
Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
Gail L. Hoffman
The Roman Empire has long fascinated the public and scholars alike. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when some western European countries engaged in their own empire-building or even earlier as Europeans fought to claim parts of the New World, Rome was cited frequently as a model and even as providing justification for these activities of conquest.1 Aspects of Roman culture (such as Roman law, triumphal arches and amphithe- aters, or the imperial symbol of the eagle) have been taken up and adapted as expressions of newly formed political entities eagerly seeking to link themselves with the long lasting power and success of the Roman Empire.2 Today as many formerly imperial nations join the European Union, Romes history and experience still interests us for what it reveals about global economic integration. The Roman Empire, then, has long been studied, analyzed, and interpreted through a lens of modern political and economic concerns. In the popular imagination, Rome and its empire has been seen as glorious though it has also been por- trayed as decadent or even brutal; scholarly focus, however, has tenaciously favored a more benign view of Romes empire.3 What was the Roman Empire actually like and how do scholars approach its study today?
Definitions and Descriptions of the Roman Empire
One could define the Roman Empire as “a period in history when a mixture of military pow- er, political authority, patronage, fiscal control, mercantile activity, cultural and linguistic hegemony held together a single domain through time and space.”4 Such a definition encour- ages a descriptive focus on specific aspects of empire and so can yield a static, monolithic vision of the Roman Empire. Indeed, its size (see further below) and duration (typically dated from 27 BCE to 476 CE with the fall of the western empire)5 are just two of the many features which have been found remarkable.6 The trajectory of such a monolith was long ago described in terms of growth (or rise), decline, and then fall (as in Gibbons famous work).7
Other descriptive characteristics include the ancient terms applied to the Roman Empire and its leaders. For example, the Latin word imperium designated a special kind of power to command that could vary over time and place. Virgil (Aen. 1.278-79) famously gave expression to a divinely sanctioned “ imperium sine fine” with Jupiter prophesying that Roman power or rule would be without physical or temporal constraints and that this was a peculiarly Roman right,
Gail L. Hoffman
You, Roman, remember by your empire to rule the worlds peoples, for these will be your arts, to impose the practice of peace, to be sparing to the sub- jected, and to beat down the defiant ( Aen . 6.851-53). 8
The reign of Augustus (27 BCE- 14 CE) marks a watershed both for ancient and modern understanding of the Roman Empire.9 Augustus chose as his title of rule princeps, which roughly translates as “first citizen.” Other terms were used by or applied to the princeps, including augustus, caesar (often for a designated heir), and imperator. Through the many centuries of the empire different titles were used. Diocletian (r. 285-305 CE), the creator of the tetrarchy (a joint rule of four) who split the empire into eastern and western halves, took the title dominus or lord. Later, in the eastern Roman Empire, rulers adopted a Greek title, basileus (a type of king). The eastern emperor Justinian (r. 527-565 CE) reconquered much of the territory (Rome, Italy, North Africa) once included in the western empire and some scholars now label the period from about 250 to 750 CE as late antiquity10 (others would call this early Byzantine). Although the word imperator, then, can be found among the titles for the ruler of Rome, extending the term imperium to describe the geopolitical entity of Rome as an empire conflates a form of government with the entity being governed.
Expanse of Empire
The territory of the Roman Empire began to grow well before the time of Augustus. Al- ready during the republic (509-27 BCE), Rome was expanding, adding Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Spain during the third century BCE then Greece, Asia Minor, and Gaul (part of France) by the first century BCE. During the early empire the lands controlled reached their greatest extent under the emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 CE). Hadrian (r. 117-138 CE) moved the borders back slightly and marked some of the boundaries more emphatically (i.e., with construction of his wall in Britain).11 It has been estimated that the Roman Empire was over 3.5 million km2 in expanse and may have contained 50 million inhabitants or more (see map, p. v).12 (Today a similar area includes 30 to 40 different nation-states.) The Romans divided their lands into provinciae (provinces), assigning them to various magistrates to administer. Most provinces included a mosaic of territories each with a different political status ranging from complete subjection to nominal independence. During the time of Au- gustus there were about 35 provinces, yet a policy of dividing them into ever smaller units meant that by about 315 CE there were well over 100 provinces.
The degree of connectivity of this massive political and geographical structure, particu- larly as far as its economy and communications are concerned remains uncertain13 as does the meaning for any individual of being a resident or member of this entity.14 Recent study and reconsideration of the purposes of the walls built on some of the borders (the most famous of course is Hadrians Wall, but there were also walls of varying length and thickness in North Africa, Germania, and Dacia) suggest that rather than protecting the territory inside, they may have served to monitor interactions in zones extending in both directions from the wall.15 During the second century CE military legions were stationed strategically throughout the borders zones. The role of the army both as an important driver of the econ- omy and as a potentially distinctive and separate Roman identity is now being explored (see especially James and Greene this volume).16 Also being explored is the possibility that the movement of soldiers long distances around the empire might provide an important avenue for the transport of objects and so possibly also for the transmission of iconography and technological expertise.
The provinces were also a key ingredient of the Roman economy, providing necessary resources for Rome and its armies.17 Most scholars imagine the Roman economy not as a single integrated one, but rather as a series of interlocking regional exchange systems
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
in which market trade operated alongside redistributive systems. Thus, one might find instances of individual gift exchange, elite redistribution, and even barter systems;18 yet one would also find markets, movement of goods (especially grain, olive oil, wine, fish sauce, textiles) over long distances, and fairly widespread use of coinage.19 It has been estimated that the cost of running the empire during the mid- second century CE was approaching 1000 million sestertii.20 In addition to these general costs of empire, according to Pliny, between 50 and 100 million sestertii were spent annually by Roman elites in order to satisfy their desire for luxuries imported from outside the empire — mainly China, India, and Ara- bia.21 Some of these imports included silk, precious gems, ivory, spices, and exotic animals. Petronius’s Satyricon, especially the section called “Trimalchios Banquet” provides an over- the-top description of a feast given by a wealthy freedman striving to show that he belongs to the uppermost stratum of elite Romans and has access to all the benefits of empire.22
Scholarly Study of the Roman Empire (Romanization and Beyond)
Undoubtedly, then, the Roman Empire was impressive and noteworthy in many of the features described above, yet to understand this empire more fully modern scholars must move beyond descriptions to deeper analysis and interpretation. This book and the accom- panying museum exhibitions attempt to do this. In particular they seek to explore how close study of material culture and its contexts can provide a more nuanced view of what it meant to be Roman in the provinces during the later empire. Through their use of objects, people and communities can express varying identities in public, private, and semi-private contexts. By examining this evidence scholars are trying to move beyond studies focused especially on the elite to consider how the majority (the other 97%) of people lived in the Roman communities of antiquity and also to move beyond a focus on Rome to see how life was experienced on the periphery.
The transition from republic to early empire provides a natural place to start as the rule of Augustus began a long period of relative peace within the empire (often called the pax Romana or pax Augusta).23 A Greek inscription with a dedication “for the preservation of the pax Augusta ” from Gerasa dating to 66-67 CE provides an example of this from the provinces (plate 6). 24 This was a time when the benefits of empire were imagined as extend- ing to all.25 And so, scholars, following ideas expressed by Augustus and writers of the early empire, looked for the benefits of Rome as they were extended from the center to the prov- inces (or periphery). Previous scholars at first imagined such a process as under the control of those at the center, that is, as emanating from Rome and its elite toward the provinces. Ronald Syme observed, “we watch in awe the ripples by which citizenship, membership of the senate, access to imperial power, and domination of the lucrative Mediterranean-wide markets spread to Spain, North Africa, the Illyrian provinces and the East.”26 And it has been observed that, “Augustan ideology and propaganda set models that diffuse spectacularly.”27
Searching for the effects of Rome and its culture on the provinces, scholars envisioned a process termed Romanization and they sought to describe how imperial Roman culture was stamped onto the native cultures of the regions that were brought into the empire.28 Such research tended to create a strong dichotomy between Roman and native cultures (and identities) and generally viewed actions unilaterally, as moving from Rome outward in a process that was orchestrated and controlled from the center. People in the provinces (in particular those described as “native” elites) were believed to desire above all to emulate Rome and so to be accepted fully into the power structures of empire. In studying material remains, then, scholars focused on architectural forms or artistic styles that were thought or claimed to be distinctively Roman (for example, triumphal arches [see Cassibry in this volume], amphitheaters, fora, public baths and aqueducts, the use of architectural brick, or more abstractly, expressions of imperial cult). Also, because cultural and artistic elements
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of Rome were generally better known than the local, provincial cultures, it was easier to study and interpret this material against a standard set from Rome.29 How closely did the sculptural style of a statue or relief in the provinces match that of works produced and used in the imperial center?30 Much important work continues along these lines.
Yet, in reality, not everything came from the center out to the provinces and the empire was also not a static entity, rather it was continually changing.31 Increasingly scholars are reconsidering and broadening their views of the Roman Empire. Greg Woolf in a recent book describes a shift in the Roman Empire from a “conquest state” to a “tributary empire” around the time of Augustus.32 Literary studies are often turning to consideration of later writers (Statius, Apuleius, Fronto) who experienced and engaged with the empire in differ- ent ways than the Augustan authors (Horace, Ovid, Virgil). Scholars studying material cul- ture have noted other shifts; they observe that Roman material culture in its earliest forms was drawn especially from Italian Iron Age roots, but already by the late republic this mate- rial culture was becoming Hellenized, drawing ever more widely on Mediterranean sources. In the early empire, Augustus created a material culture of empire using a “distinctive range of images and styles.”33 Yet scholars have observed, “it is no longer possible to implicitly assume that Rome and Italy were the focal points of a pure and undifferentiated ‘Roman culture.”34 Even in Rome what it meant to be Roman changed significantly over time. In other words, the center was changed and changing as a result of participation in the empire and the imperial cultures it helped to create (see Mattingly in this volume).
Also, scholars have noted that local or provincial elites did not passively receive (through acculturation or assimilation) elements of culture emanating out from a center at Rome, but rather any process of Romanization would require their active participation and desire in order to engage with Rome and react to Roman culture.35 In other words, some control of any process of interaction necessarily existed in the provinces with the provincials them- selves. In the provinces, too, there was never a static material culture. Indeed, much of what has been labeled Roman culture in the provinces (for example redware pottery or glass) does not come from Italy or Rome but rather from elsewhere across the empire. A sense of this complexity (multi- directionality of exchanges, continuing mutability of forms) appears in modern studies, including those focusing on the republic and early empire, but this becomes ever clearer as study moves into the later empire and on into late antiquity (third-sixth cen- turies CE, a particular focus of the objects found in the color plates of this book).
Dissatisfaction has grown with using Romanization as a primary means of analysis and so scholars are seeking to look at other facets of the experience of empire.36 One way this has begun is with studies initiated and centered in the provinces that explore expressions of local identities in these regions and then ask how these areas and their material culture may have been affected by inclusion within the Roman Empire.37 This approach introduces new terms and ideas, such as discrepant experiences and hidden transcripts, creolization, hybridity, middle ground, bricolage, and resistance.38 These terms seek to describe some of the experiences of people in the provinces or on the peripheries and so to help in attempts to explore alternate identities. This approach, however, may risk replacing one kind of “-ization” with another, a concern since terms of this type (Hellenization, Romanization) describe both the process and the outcome (hence they may become their own explana- tions).39 It is hoped, however, that the end result of such studies will be to view the process of cultural interaction and change as, at the very least, bilateral and maybe even as multi-lat- eral and multi-directional.40 So it would be acknowledged that cultural interactions moved in many different ways: from Rome and the empire to the provinces; from the provinces back to Rome; and indeed all around in the areas of the empire. In addition, those initi- ating exchanges could be either people within the provinces or people from or in Rome. Finally, this altered perspective could reveal that the same artifact might be valued, used, interpreted in several and possibly differing ways. One goal of newer research, then, is to
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
study and understand these interactions as encompassing a whole spectrum (from Roman elite, local elite, imperial army, free and freed peoples in the provinces, and slaves) of people with as wide a variety of responses and reactions (from emulation, to a middle ground or hybrid response, to a full and complete resistance). In other words, to begin to look at the material culture from the perspective of local identities rather than to compare it always to a standard set in Rome.
This, too, can have its challenges and limitations. Care must be taken not merely to replace Romanization with another monolithic identity or even several identities. If this were to happen the change might reveal lots of variability in the objects but not necessarily tell us more about the lives and habits of people in the Roman Empire, especially those on the periphery.41 Labels of specific identities, then, should not be applied directly to mate- rial culture without also considering the context and use of an object.42 Used appropri- ately, however, there could be significant benefits. It might help move thinking and writing away from a narrow Roman-native dichotomy. It could focus more attention on regional, sub-ethnic, gender, non-elite aspects of communities and reinforce that culture does not exist as some pure form of material expression. In addition, such an approach can accom- modate complex and multi- directional processes and encourage consideration of the conti- nuity of pre-Roman culture within the many areas added to and removed from the empire.
Material Culture, Identities, and Changing Perspectives
To be most effective, such approaches need to focus on how objects are used. Sometimes the appearance of single categories of objects (nail clippers, oil lamps, wine vessels) are telling and sometimes a focus on assemblages is more beneficial. In all cases, their archaeological contexts become critical.43 Sometimes, however, materials lacking such use contexts can be brought into discussion through analogies and other forms of comparison; and individual objects can also tell important stories through reconstruction of cultural or social use biographies.44 Taking one object in the exhibit (plate 178) as a focus can show how such work might begin. This painting of a banquet scene was excavated at Dura-Europos (fig.
2.1), a site on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria which over its roughly 600-year history (300 BCE-256 CE) belonged successively to the Hellenis- tic, Parthian, and Roman worlds be- fore the Sasanians besieged and sacked it (see Brody in this volume for Yales excavations at Dura-Europos). At the time of its destruction, the site was home to numerous Roman soldiers (many from the 20th Palmyrene co- hort), who in preparation for the siege buried buildings along the western part of the site in an earthen embank- ment designed to strengthen the city wall. The longterm effect was to im- prove the archaeological preservation in this section of the town. Along this
2.i. Plan of Dura-Europos showing excavated areas.
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Gail L. Hoffman
2.2. Watercolor reproduction of banquet wall painting (plate 178) from south wall of House M7-W6 at Dura-Europos.
western wall, for example, an early Christian House-Church, a Synagogue, and a Mithrae- um were excavated, all with well-preserved wall paintings (fig. 2.1).45 The fragment of a wall painting discussed here (plate 178, fig. 2.2) also benefited from this ancient burial (though the room which it decorated sat at the edge of the embankment and so portions of the paintings are lost).
This painting fragment from the south wall shows (at the right) a woman seated on a folding chair. Her face and torso are fron- tal, while her lower body turns right toward the men on a banquet couch. She wears a
2.3. Drawing of banquet (left; fig. 2.2 and plate 178) and hunt scene (right; now in the Louvre, AO17310) wall painting from south
wall of M7-W6 at Dura-Europos.
red cloak and veil over a black and white tunic; her right hand reaches toward the banquet couch, the left hand is in her lap, both hands have forefinger and little finger extended.46 Two four-petaled flowers (one above the other) and a hanging garland appear between the woman and six partially preserved men. The men rest on cushions placed under their left elbows while balancing ribbed bowls filled with liquid on the fingertips of their left hands. In their right hands they may have held an oval pink object (as in a similar banquet scene from the west wall). The men are bearded (but lack mustaches) and wear tunics and cloaks with bands at the neck, cuff, forearm, and two vertical stripes on the chest. They also wear fillets on their heads. Between each figure at the top of the scene hangs a garland and beneath that a flower with four petals fills the space between each mans head.47 The couch on which the men recline has sections of vertical lines with scale patterns and alternating background colors of pink and white. Illusionistic rectangles create a dentil-like pattern as a border along the bottom of the scene and below this some of the participants names were painted in Greek.48 Only the names of Addodana and 0[ub]beos remain at the lower left.49 Below the border of this scene (and opposite the doorway into the room) was a painting of the evil eye. A serpent attacks from the left, a bird (perhaps an ibis) attacks from the right while a scorpion in between grabs with its claws and raises its tail to strike. At the far left, a cock only partially preserved also attacks; a sword and two daggers are stuck into the eye from above.50
There are other portions of preserved paintings from this room. Immediately adjacent to this painting another section of the scene (now in the Touvre) contained a nude cross- legged figure of a winged Eros (labeled below the border in Greek); he leans on a down-
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
turned torch and holds a wreath in his left hand (fig. 2. 3). 51 Further to the right an archer on horseback (wearing pants and tunic) hunts three onagers, or wild asses (one has been hit and collapses to the ground). The archers name, painted in Greek and Palmyrene (a dialect of Aramaic) is Bolazeos. There are two Greek graffiti in front of his horse which translate, “Addudanes owed Mokkimos 21 [denarii], the term of payment being the month Daesius” and “May [Ijmedabous be remembered.”52 At the corner with the west wall a fur- ther painted inscription in Palmyrene reads:
May be remembered and blessed the men who have been painted here, before Bel and Iarhibol and Aglibol and Arsu; and may be remembered Elahshamsh, the son of Selat, and T[aim]a, the son of Iah[iba], who have painted this painting in [the month] Tebe[th] of the year 505 [194 CE].53
On the west wall were two other banquet scenes, one with women and one with men.54 The details of the banquet scenes are similar to those already described. Participants are labeled in both Palmyrene and Greek and the painter asks (in Greek) to be remembered.55
The painting discussed here (and the others preserved from the western and southern walls of House M7-W6) attracted immediate attention in the preliminary reports (as did other paintings found at Dura-Europos, see plates 77-78 for paintings from the Roman Bath in Block E3). Many of the paintings were included in subsequent discussions about Parthian art.56 Over time attention focused especially on the paintings of the Synagogue (now in Damascus), the Mithraeum, and the Christian House-Church. The origins of the style of the Dura-Europos paintings puzzled nearly all commentators who observed certain shared characteristics — frontality; isocephaly; lack of interest in human form or in ren- dering three-dimensional space; as well as the stiff postures, lack of movement, and an emotionless quality of many figures. They were often judged against standards of Greek and Roman art and found lacking57 or claimed as examples of Mesopotamian or Parthian art.58 James Henry Breasted, one of the first to write about them, saw the Dura paintings as important links to later stylistic developments; his book was titled Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting.59
The combination of banquet and hunt subject found in the south wall painting as well as its location in a building presumed to be a house also caused confusion.60 As Rostovtzeff asked:
Was the room the banqueting-room of a Palmyrene thiasos (religious asso- ciation) and did the frieze record outstanding incidents in the life of the de- ceased and heroized founder of the thiasos ? The figure of a funeral Eros with a lowered torch. . .so typical a feature of. . .funeral stelae of Roman times. . . supports this interpretation. Or should we suppose that the house belonged to Bolazeos and that the paintings represent the funeral banquet held in his memory. . .such as we find so often in the painted and carved tombs and on funeral monuments of Asia Minor.61
Rostovtzeff raises many interesting and as yet unresolved questions about the interpretation of the painting, the room, and the house it decorated. His suggestion of a heroized founder for a thiasos or a funeral banquet for the house owner Bolazeos both rely on a determina- tion that the Eros figure with downturned torch located between the hunt and banquet scenes has a funerary intent and meaning. In addition to early discussion of the paintings, the texts on the wall (especially the Palymrene ones) also received attention.62 The bilingual text underscores the strong ties between Palmyra and Dura-Europos as does the dedica- tion to the Palmyrene gods Bel, Iarhibol, Aglibol, and Arsu. The names of the participants,
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Gail L. Hoffman
painters, and the parties to the debt contract (the borrower s name is identical to one of the banqueters) all suggest local backgrounds.
As a group the wall paintings of Dura-Europos are fascinating. They were discovered in all the religious buildings (pagan, Christian, and Jewish), in some larger (presumably) residential structures,63 and also in two of the four baths. The paintings from Dura-Europos can be dated approximately (often through dedicatory inscriptions in the buildings or on the paintings themselves) from the second half of the first century CE to about 244/5 CE (near the final destruction of the site). This chronological range would include parts of the Parthian and then the Roman occupation of Dura-Europos to 194 CE. The painting from House M7-W6 dates to 194 CE, which places it during the Roman period of the site. In some of the dedicatory inscriptions, the artists are named. All of the preserved artist names are Semitic and may suggest that these wall paintings (as well as other portable paintings on wood and parchment from the site) were created by local or regional artists working for local patrons.64 More recently the paintings have been interpreted as part of a hybrid (or mixed) culture visible at Dura-Europos65 and it has been emphasized that the use and function of paintings at Dura-Europos was more than purely decorative.
Maura Heyn, who looked at the contexts of the painting of Terentius (fig. 6.2) within the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods (also called the Temple of Bel), observed that a great variety of scenes were painted in the temple rooms. The creation of the scenes was dynamic as paintings were added one by one over nearly 200 years and she noted that the paintings themselves apparently served as votive offerings. This is not ornamental decoration, then, with an emphasis on aesthetically pleasing forms or a large coherent decorative program designed to tell a story. Painting these scenes was itself part of a ritual act and the images were probably also accompanied by ex votos on shelves. Many of the paintings in the Tem- ple of the Palmyrene Gods covered or were themselves covered with graffiti (both scratched inscriptions and drawings).66 This dynamic process of creation as well as a function extend- ing beyond simple decoration carries over to the house paintings as well. The south wall scene in House M7-W6 has a painted graffito that records a debt owed by Addudanes to Mokimos and another to remember [Ijmedabous.67 In other houses at the site, for example, the House of the Roman Scribes (L7A) or the House of Nebuchelus (B8H), there were astro- logical charts, calendars, business records, painted ceiling tiles with images of individuals, animals, and plants, as well as wall paintings of figures like Aphrodite and Eros.68
As scholars have continued to study the materials from Dura-Europos, newer approaches to its analysis are taking hold. One example is the work of Jennifer Baird who has reconstructed many of the household assemblages from the site. About House M7-W6 she observes,
Strangely, the unique interest of the paintings from M7W, and particularly their Palmyrene connection, has never provoked a more thorough study of the structure. [...] The nature of the finds combined with the paintings and texts is evocative of more than a house; as is the position of the structure immediately inside the main gate of the city.69 (italics mine)
Recent archaeological studies of ancient houses have sometimes attempted to write mi- cro-histories of their use, by analyzing all the objects and their find locations. These efforts seek to understand better the activities that took place in the architectural spaces.70 Al- though this sort of analysis was not undertaken at the time of its discovery, the excavators did keep extensive log books. This legacy data permits some reconstruction of the objects found within particular rooms and, thus, further consideration of the building’s use.71
House M7W is part of a block of buildings located between the main (Palmyrene) gate and Bath M7 along a street that continues to one edge of the central market space of the city
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(fig. 2.1). This building M7W, also called the “House of the Banquet,”72 presented a blank facade to the street (fig. 2.4). (Once the rampart was built against the city wall, a staircase ran in the street along the northern wall of M7W to give access to the upper parts of the rampart.73) The house was entered down a narrow cor- ridor or alleyway which extended to the courtyard (W4) from which there were entrances to the other four rooms (W3,
5/7, 6).74 There were stairs in the south- eastern corner of the courtyard probably giving access to a flat roof (or perhaps a second story). One could also enter the building more directly from the west, through Room W3 (tentatively identified as a stable in the excavation reports).75 The painted room, W6 (located at the southern end of the building), was reached up two low steps and through an elaborate double-wide central doorway. The door lintel was supported by jambs with decorative plaster capitals. Inside, low plaster platforms (roughly a meter wide) were built along the walls (fig. 2.5). Near the western side of the door an oblong basin preserved with traces of burning served as a brazier for warming the room. The paintings were excavated from parts of the western and southern walls though they probably origi- nally covered all four walls.
This basic plan (fig. 2.4) is quite typical of houses at Dura-Europos, which in Bairds opinion most resemble other Mesopotamian houses (not Greco-Roman houses to which they are sometimes compared).76 Although their main rooms (like W6) tend to be located on the south side of the court and sometimes have platforms (indicating they were probably used for dining and entertaining guests among other household activities), Baird objects to a label either of andron or diwan for this space; she calls these spaces instead principal rooms. As Baird observes, to use the word andron (even though some papyri at Dura-Europos do use this term) might mislead readers into thinking that the house was built in adherence to a Greco-Roman plan or that this was a special dining room space for use by men. The term diwan is anachronistic, referring to a private audience room in later Islamic architecture.77
Still, although the plan in general resembles other houses at Dura, there are unusual features of this structure and its associ- ated finds, including the paint- ings (of banqueting and hunting scenes).78 These unusual features include: entrances directly from the street (more typically there is an L- shaped entrance into the courtyard); recessed amphorae and other storage vessels found in the long alleyway and courtyard; and an unusually high density of coins from some of the rooms. Room 3 entered from the street
2.5. View of M7-W6 showing low platform benches during excavation.
2.4. Plan (block and house detail) of M7W at Dura-Europos (John McCoy from j. A. Baird, after originals by Van W. Knox and A. H. Detweiler, Dura-Europos Collection, Yale University Art Gallery).
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at the west, for example, had around 81 coins recorded during its excavation as well as pot- tery and lamp fragments, animal figurines, a bone weaving tool, bronze toilet instruments, a fibula, a finger ring, and iron arrowhead (quite a surprising haul for a room described in the preliminary reports as possibly a stable). Elsewhere in the structure many more coins, figu- rine fragments, stamped pottery, lamps, glass fragments, S-fibulae and other bronze objects were excavated. In the main room (W6), in addition to the paintings described above, there was a gypsum statuette of a goddess seated on a cone (perhaps related to Mesopotamian cone figures);79 two plaster blocks with molded boys heads in relief are mentioned in the preliminary reports;80 many coins; parts of clay lamps, vessels, and figurines; and bronze, bone, and glass objects. There are also many niches built into the walls of the various rooms.
The artifact assemblage, some features of the plan, as well as the paintings and bilingual inscriptions in the main room may indicate that this structure was not simply a home. Could this building have served for the meetings of a Palmyrene religious group (as Ros- tovtzeff proposed)? Could some of the rooms of M7W have been used as a type of commer- cial establishment (as considered by Baird)? Is it possible that stable space (as suggested in the preliminary excavation reports) was rented to visitors arriving at the nearby Palymrene Gate? We may never know for sure; but one path forward in the research and analysis would be to explore what this structure and its finds might tell us of the identities of those living in and using it.81 Details rendered in the paintings or objects found in this building provided opportunities for those living in (or using) this space to display or negotiate various iden- tities (social, religious, gender, cultural). For example, the elements of the banquet (who attends, gender, dress, food, postures, gesture, objects);82 the food served and vessels used; the choice of dress and adornment83 (which would include toileting and grooming prac- tices84); the languages of the painted inscriptions; and even the presence of numerous coins all could indicate something about the identities of the people who once lived here or used these spaces. Such analysis requires posing a different set of questions about the material remains and also suggests how different approaches to the study of objects and their con- texts might prove beneficial.
Returning to the south wall painting from M7- W6 (fig. 2.3) , one might begin by question- ing Rostovtzeff s claim that the Eros figure with downturned torch should be interpreted as funerary because of its similarity to images on Roman burial stelae. Such an interpretation belongs to approaches based in ideas of Romanization that analyze and interpret elements of artistic images primarily through reference to those found at Rome. Yet there is little evi- dence that Dura-Europos had strong artistic links with that city. Closer (geographically and chronologically) to the Dura painting, Eros with a downturned torch appears on the reverse of Roman provincial coins (figs. 2.6a-b) from the reigns of Commodus through Caracalla and Geta (the sons of Septimius Severus and his Syrian wife Julia Domna).85 Although the meaning of this image on the coins is also uncertain, it seems unlikely that it was funereal. Similarly, suggesting the banquet scene in M7-W6 might be a funeral feast because of the presence of the Eros and by comparison to dining scenes in the funerary art of Asia Minor privileges interpretation of the painting through a Greco-Roman lens.
A closer place to look for comparative material would be at Dura-Europos itself and perhaps its near neighbor Palmyra (as suggested by the inscriptions in Palmyrene). Indeed, banqueting and hunting scenes appear frequently in other buildings at Dura (for exam- ple, the Mithraeum contained both types of scenes). Banqueting appears often as part of religious scenes from the site, while paintings of the hunt are also found at Dura in the Temple of Azzanathkona,86 in the House of the Frescoes (C7F),87 and are frequent also in graffiti.88 At Palmyra, banquet scenes are also common particularly in relief sculpture placed in tombs (plate 181); yet these scenes are not interpreted in that context as funer- ary banquets, but rather as images of Palmyrene religious banquets. This Palmyrene relief sculpture of a male banqueter shows a very similar posture and gesture to the figures in the
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
Dura-Europos painting (reclining with his left elbow on a cushion and balanc- ing a bowl on his fingertips, his right hand holds an object) (figs. 2.2-3).89 In the Palmyrene relief, however, the man wears a different garment, a short tunic with long sleeves and loose pants while in the Dura painting the reclining men all wear long tunics and cloaks.90 Recent study of the Palmyrene sculpted reliefs has commented on both the banquet subject (suggesting it identifies the por- trayed individual as a priest or ritual host for religious banquets) and on the cloth- ing and gestures of the figures.91 These would be interesting avenues to pursue for future research on the Dura painting.
Indeed recent work on clothing and attire has begun to explore its significant relation- ship to expressions of social and cultural identity.92 Dress, which has been likened to a non-verbal language, provides an excellent medium in which to observe cultural identity and possible changes to it. On the one hand dress choices are both public and personal permitting an individual to use clothing in reaction to surrounding social and cultural pro- cesses. Dress can be used to express complex and multiple identities (e.g., gender, class, age) and yet it can “also reflect a combination of cultural allegiances in the same person when garments are mixed.”93 These qualities as well as the performance aspect of wearing clothing make it an ideal source of information about hybrid identities, yet (as Ursula Rothe observes) “in terms of pursuing cultural identity in the Roman provinces, dress is as yet an underused resource.”94
The garments worn by people in the Dura-Europos wall paintings as a whole include a variety from a long loose tunic and cloak (frequent in the Synagogue paintings, images painted in the pagan temples, and the reclining banqueters here in M7-W6) to pants and short tunic with set-in sleeves (garments found in the Mithraeum and Synagogue paintings, and the archer in the hunt scene from M7-W6) to a military tunic and cuirass (for example on the Palmyrene gods represented in the painting of Terentius, fig. 6.2). Although dress can provide a means for expressing cultural identities, no consensus yet exists on its signif- icance in the art of Dura-Europos.95
Finally, in building M7W, 153 coins were listed in the inventories from Rooms W3-7 (the main rooms of this structure). Sadly the specific coins found in these rooms can no longer be identified. This information was not kept or published with the coins which were analyzed using the standard methods and procedures of the time. Yet coins and their anal- ysis provide another interesting example of how a change in perspective might expand our understanding and interpretation of material culture and its potential uses in the prov- inces.96 Of all objects, coins perhaps seem most closely linked to Rome and its empire. Fergus Millar describes coins as “the most deliberate of all symbols of public identity” and “the most explicit symbols of a city’s identity and status.”97 It has long been suggested that “people learnt about their emperor — who he was, what he looked like, the attributes of his power — through his portrait on coins which circulated on all social levels throughout the empire.”98 In addition, coins have traditionally been studied through the lens of Rome, for what they tell us about the Roman economy and its effects in the provinces. Indeed, mone- tization is sometimes viewed as part of Romanization." But what other stories might coins be able to tell?
2.6a-b. Reverses of copper coins depicting Eros with downturned torch, early 3rd century CE. Yale University Art Gallery, 3:2004.6.444, Ruth Elizabeth White Fund; b: 2005.6.131, Gift of James H. Schwartz.
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Gail L. Hoffman
A long-term project is underway through the auspices of the British Museum to cata- logue coins from the Roman provinces.100 This provides a crucial beginning (indeed, the fact that imperial coinage has been catalogued first reminds us of the tendency to focus on the imperial center). In this volume Metcalf s essay explores some of the essential informa- tion about such provincial coin production (authority, circulation, motives for striking). By looking further at the use of coins within the provinces, other topics might also be explored: what language(s) were used in a region (is there evidence of bilingualism);101 what evidence is there about local cults and monuments; is there evidence for competition and interaction among areas on the periphery? Even these questions, however, emphasize analysis of coins from the perspective of Rome and its reasons for coin production.
Joris Aarts has proposed that Roman coins (of all forms imperial as well as provincial) should be studied in a much broader way by including their possible functions in social or ritual exchange.102 In other words, coins are not solely indicators of monetization and the spread of a Roman economy or perhaps military. Examining coin use among the Batavians (a people living in the Rhine delta at the edge of the empire), Aarts has shown that the coins reaching this area were placed into hoards, were offered in ritual contexts, and might also have been used in market exchange. Indeed, coins “were being used by the same people [local Batavians] but for different purposes in different contexts.”103 (For a similar observa- tion about differing uses of Roman pottery in fifth-century Britain, see Flemings essay in this volume.) The people living in this area knew how to use coins in market exchanges yet they also used them for other purposes (to store as valuables and to make votive offerings). Aarts observes that any difference between Roman and native was non-existent and pro- poses that “the life of Roman coins can better be described in terms of a social history of a class of object as suggested by Appadurai.” Further he emphasizes that “when talking about the function and use of Roman coins, we should look at their role in the whole system of exchange.”104
Returning to Room M7-W6, then, we might wonder about the significance of the many coins discovered there. On the one hand they might suggest commercial or business trans- actions or perhaps the presence of Roman soldiers, but can we rule out the possibility that these coins were used like tesserae at Palmyra for ritual banquets? Similarly the image of the Eros with downturned torch at first linked to Roman funerary imagery might instead reference an image found on the reverse of provincial coinage. Similarly looking at textiles and dress in the images and through preserved objects at Dura-Europos or broader consid- eration of the significances of banqueting and the hunt for the residents of Dura-Europos might provide a fuller understanding of how these people were negotiating various identi- ties, including perhaps, “being Roman” on the periphery of the empire.
Conclusion
“‘Being Roman was not a standard process or recipe”;105 neither was choosing not to be Ro- man. Rather these choices and expressions of identities varied over time, within provinces from place to place and among different groups (e.g., the military, traders and shopkeepers, everyday residents, religious leaders, wealthy administrative personnel, etc.), and across the expanse of the empire. Because what we label Roman culture (itself a problematic term — do we mean any material culture created and used within the borders of the empire?) was dynamic, flexible, geographically widespread, and attainable by different groups of people; it existed on a different level than regional identities and in fact could coexist with them. As a result the empire possessed various mixed or hybrid cultures. Experiences of empire were likely both positive and negative. The responses people had to their conquerors and to the conqueror s language, religion, and material culture no doubt varied widely and so then did what these people brought into the empire. One important step in understanding
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this process is to better characterize and understand the local responses and identities in the provinces themselves.106 It may then be possible to ask other questions about the impacts of the peripheries or provinces on the center, Rome itself. How did the conquest of empire affect and change its material culture? Studies that examine provincial art and material cul- ture more broadly then and so seek to explore and understand the large variety of reactions to empire are just starting to reveal the myriad of ways in which people negotiated and performed the many identities in the Roman provinces.
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1 Richard Hingley, ed., Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001). For an exception to this see Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princ- eton: Princeton University Press, 2007) which examines a writer (De las Casas) condemning at the time the Spanish conquest of South America.
2 Imperial eagles were consistently used as symbols of power. Yet the types of groups using this image varied dramatically from the American Founders to Napoleon as well as the Nazis in Ger- many and fascists in Italy.
3 On the dichotomy between public and scholarly views of empire, see David J. Mattingly, Impe- rialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3-5.
4 John C. Barrett, “Romanization: A Critical Comment,” in Dialogues in Roman Imperialism: Pow- er, Discourse and Discrepant Experience in the Roman Empire, ed. David J. Mattingly (Ports- mouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1997), 51-64, esp. 52. For other definitions and further references, Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 6; Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiii-ix.
5 Some date the “classical” empire from 27 BCE to 476 CE, while others consider the end of the Roman Empire to be 1453 CE when Constantinople (and so the eastern empire) fell to the Otto- mans. For others, the period from 330 CE to 1453 CE is termed the Byzantine Empire (though its own rulers and people called it Roman). More recently, some scholars have labeled the period 250 to 750 CE “late antiquity.” These choices of dates and designations, of course, signal interpre- tive biases and can lead to separation and division of materials into scholarly silos.
6 The Romans themselves counted from the traditional foundation date of Rome in 753 BCE and so celebrated a 900th anniversary in the year 147 CE and a millennium in 247 CE.
7 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1776-89).
8 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 17.
9 David J. Mattingly, “Vulgar and Weak ‘Romanization,’ or Time for a Paradigm Shift?,” review of Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization, ed. Simon Keay and Nicola Terrenato, Journal of Roman Archaeology 15 (2002): 536-40, esp. 538; Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Rome’s Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989): 157-64; Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro, eds., The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provin- cial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 174-75.
10 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) is cred- ited with beginning this process.
1 1 Thorsten Opper, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict, exh. cat. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) for a recent museum exhibition on this emperor. Hadrian traveled through this vast ter- ritory visiting many of its regions, issuing sestertius coins in honor of different provinces and creating sculptural images of various provinces. See ibid., 20, fig. 4 for a map; Helmut Halfmann, Itinera Principum: Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im Romischen Reich (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1986). He and his troops spent the winter of 129/30 CE in Gerasa where an arch was built to celebrate his visit. Carl H. Kraeling, Gerasa: City of the Decapods (New Haven: American
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
Schools of Oriental Research, 1938), 49-52, 73-83, inscr. 58.
12 Population estimates are notoriously difficult and in the ancient world vary widely David J. Mat- tingly, “The Imperial Economy,” in A Companion to the Roman Empire, ed. David Potter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 283-97, esp. 285 for these numbers.
13 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Mattingly, “Imperial Economy,” 285.
14 C. R. Whittaker, “Mental Maps and Frontiers: Seeing Like a Roman,” in Rome and Its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), 63-87. Whereas in the early years of the empire Roman citizenship conferred significant benefits to a select minority, after the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 CE this privilege was extended to all freeborn men within the empire.
15 For the lively scholarly discussion about borders and frontiers, see among others: Rob Collins and Matthew Symonds, eds., Breaking Down Boundaries: Hadrians Wall in the 21st Century (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2013); Peter S. Wells, ed., Rome beyond Its Fron- tiers: Imports, Attitudes and Practices (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2013); Jan W. Drijvers, “Limits of Empire in Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae’,’ in Frontiers in the Roman World: Proceedings of the 9th Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Durham, 16-19 April 2009), ed. Olivier Hekster and Ted Kaizer (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 13-29, esp. 17, 26; John Richardson, “ Fines provinciae’,’ in Frontiers in the Roman World, 1-10; and Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers. Some recent maps rather than using a solid line for the border create a border zone by overlaying two color patterns.
16 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 221: “use of material culture within the army, which... developed a separate version of ‘Roman’ identity”; Simon James, “The Community of the Soldiers: A Major Identity and Centre of Power in the Roman Empire,” in TRAC 98: Pro- ceedings of the 8th Annual Theoretical Archaeology Conference, Leicester 1998, ed. Patricia Baker et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999), 14-25; Simon James, “Soldiers and Civilians: Identity and Interaction in Roman Britain,” in Britons and Romans: Advancing an Archaeological Agenda, ed. Simon James and Martin Millett (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2001), 77-89.
17 C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 98-130.
18 As with frontiers, a lively discussion exists about the nature of the Roman economy. The two poles of discussion are how relatively modern (Michael Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957]) or how primitive (Moses Finely, The Ancient Economy [London: Hogarth Press, 1985]) it was. For more recent views in between the poles: Mattingly, “Imperial Economy,” 283-97; William V. Harris, “Trade,” in The Cambridge Ancient History 1 1 : The High Empire, AD 70-192, ed. Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Dom- inic Rathbone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 710-40; J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, eds., The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). On the changing economy of the later empire: L. de Blois and J. Rich, eds., The Transfor- mation of Economic Life under the Roman Empire (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 2002); Peter Garn- sey and C. R. Whittaker, “Trade, Industry, and the Urban Economy,” in The Cambridge Ancient History 13: The Late Empire, AD 337-425, ed. Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 312-37.
19 Christopher Howgego, “The Supply and Use of Money in the Roman World 200 BC to AD 300,” Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 1-31; David J. Mattingly and John Salmon, eds., Economies
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Gail L. Hoffman
beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London: Routledge, 2001).
20 Mattingly, “Imperial Economy,” 287 gives between 832 and 983 million and cites Richard Dun- can-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 187-210; Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 132-33; David J. Mattingly, “Sup- plying Rome and the Empire: Some Conclusions,” in Supplying Rome and the Empire, ed. Eman- uele Papi (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2007), 219-27. Any modern comparison is difficult; a sestertius could buy two loaves of bread.
21 Pliny, HN 6.101; 12.84; Mattingly, “Imperial Economy,” 287. See also, Andrew Dalby, Empire of the Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000).
22 Jas Eisner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 48- 50.
23 An idea developed by Gibbon, it refers to the roughly two centuries of relative calm/peace in the empire from 27 BCE to about CE 180.
24 Kraeling, Gerasa: City of the Decapolis, 396, no. 46. The inscription translates: “To Good For- tune. In the year 129. For the preservation of the Pax Augusta, under the chief magistracy of the president, Apollonius, son of ‘Hephaition,’ and Malchaios, the dekaprotos of the city, son of Demetrius and Antiochus, one of the magistrates, son of Ariston, and Xerxes, secretary of the senate and the popular assembly, son of Chaireas, this wall was set up at the city’s expense by the curators Meliton, also called Nicanor, son of Apollonides, and Timarchus, son of Lysimachus” (R. Boecklin and J. P. Hyatt, “A New Inscription of Jerash,” American Journal of Archaeology 38, no. 4 [1934]: 511-22, esp. 512).
25 During his reign Augustus closed the gates of the Temple of Janus three times, a signal of peace throughout the empire, while monuments, most importantly the Ara Pacis, gave visible expres- sion to his ideas about the Roman state. See Zanker, Power of Images for a discussion of Augus- tus’s use of monuments and images to promote a particular ideology about the empire.
26 Quoted from Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “The Creation and Expression of Identity: The Roman World,” in Classical Archaeology, ed. Susan Alcock and Robin Osborne (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 355-80, esp. 372; Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958).
27 Wallace-Hadrill, “Expression of Identity,” 372 referencing Zanker, Power of Images. On signifi- cant shifts in coinage at this time, Christopher Howgego, “Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces,” in Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, ed. Christopher Howgego, Volker Heuchert, and Andrew Burnett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1-17, esp. 13.
28 Some recent discussion of this issue: Simon Keay and Nicola Terrenato, eds., Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000); Elizabeth Fentress, ed., Ro- manization and the City: Creation, Transformations, and Failures (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2000). The usefulness of Romanization for understanding the Roman Empire is hotly contested. For reviews of this, Jane Webster, “Creolizing the Roman Provinces,” American Journal of Archaeology 105, no. 2 (2001): 209-25, esp. 210-17; Louise Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), x; Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 38-41.
29 Similar approaches and emphases are found also in museum exhibitions, e.g., Opper, Hadrian: Empire and Conflict.
30 For a succinct summary of the study of Roman provincial archaeology from the nineteenth cen-
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tury onward, see Revell, Roman Imperialism, 5-10. Natalie Boymel Kampen reviews this trend from an art historical perspective, “On Writing Histories of Roman Art,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 371-86. She reminds us that what was termed “native” art always looked stylistically like the art of late antiquity, 376.
31 A point argued consistently by Mattingly, “Dialogues of Power,” 9; Imperialism, Power, and Iden- tity, 6-8.
32 Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story.
33 “In evaluating cultural change in Italy after its conquest by Rome, we must recognize that the identities that emerged were in a constant state of flux. [...] For a variety of reasons, there are phases in Roman history when profound redefinition of what it meant to be Roman (or what the empire was about) created cultural pulses that emanated out from the capital. The ripple effects could extend beyond imperial territory. [...] One might think of these large scale cultural shifts as ‘global trends’” (Mattingly, “Vulgar and Weak ‘Romanization,’” 539).
34 Simon Keay, “Part 2: The Provinces, Introduction,” in Italy and the West, 113-16, esp. 113.
35 Particularly noted for this approach is Martin Millett, “Romanization: Historical Issues and Ar- chaeological Interpretation,” in The Early Roman Empire in the West, ed. Thomas Blagg and Mar- tin Millett (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1990), 35-41; and Millet, The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
36 Woolf, Becoming Roman, 5-7; Mattingly, “Vulgar and Weak ‘Romanization,’” 537-38; David J. Mattingly, “Being Roman: Expressing Identity in a Provincial Setting,” Journal of Roman Archae- ology 17 (2004): 5-25, esp. 5-7; Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC-AD 409 (London: Penguin, 2007), xii, 14-17; Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 38-41, 271; Revell, Roman Imperialism, 6-10.
37 For an example, Mattingly, “Being Roman” (among other works); Revell, Roman Imperialism-, Tim Whitmarsh, ed., Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Susan E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
38 Mattingly, Dialogues in Roman Imperialism (discrepant experience and hidden transcripts); Webster, “Creolizing the Roman Provinces,” 209-25; Mattingly, “Vulgar and Weak ‘Romaniza- tion,”’ 538; Nicola Terrenato, “The Romanization of Italy: Global Acculturation or Cultural Brico- lageV,’ in TRAC 97: Proceedings of the 7th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Not- tingham 1997, ed. Colin Forcey, John Hawthorne, and Robert Witcher (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998), 20-27.
39 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 207.
40 Mattingly, “Dialogues of Power,” 9, who cites Jane Webster, “Roman Imperialism and the ‘Post-Imperial Age,”’ in Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives, ed. Jane Webster and Nick Cooper (Leicester: School of Archaeological Studies, University of Leicester, 1996), 1-17, esp. 11.
41 Ursula Rothe, “Dress and Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire,” in Dress and Identity, ed. Mary Harlow (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), 59-68, esp. 59.
42 As argued by Martin Pitts, “The Emperor’s New Clothes? The Utility of Identity in Roman Ar- chaeology,” American Journal of Archaeology 111, no. 4 (2007): 693-713.
43 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 235.
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44 Jody Joy, “Reinvigorating Object Biography: Reproducing the Drama of Object Lives,” World Ar- chaeology 41, no. 4 (2009): 540-56; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169-78; Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-94.
45 For discussion and bibliography see Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoffman, eds., Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, exh. cat. (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2011).
46 Michael Rostovtzeff et al., eds., The Excavations at Dura-Europos: Preliminary Report of the 6th Season of Work, 1932-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), 154-55 for a detailed de- scription.
47 This four-petaled flower appears in other paintings from Dura-Europos, most noticeably be- tween the two Tychai in the painting of Terentius dating to 239 CE from the Temple of Bel or the Palmyrene Gods (fig. 6.2), but also on painted ceiling tiles, on the camel rider relief, and on preserved textiles (YUAG 1933.276, 1935.44, 1933.487). Perhaps in this painting it indicates tapestries or textiles hanging from the wall?
48 This border is best preserved in photographs of the hunt side of the painting now in the Louvre, AO 173 10, http://cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visite?srv=car_not_frame8ddNotice=21170.
49 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 172.
50 Ibid., 155 for a description. For an image, J. A. Baird, “Housing and Households at Dura-Euro- pos: A Study in Identity on Rome’s Eastern Frontier” (PhD diss., University of Leicester, 2006), fig. 380.
51 For discussion of the Eros figure and its possible funerary connections L. Kahil et al., eds., Lex- ikon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) 3 (Zurich: Artemis, 1986), 1:939; Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 153-54.
52 Lucinda Dirven, The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 285-86. Infra note 88 for references to graffiti at Dura-Europos.
53 Ibid., 282; Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 151, 167-69.
54 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 147-51. For images, YUAG 1938.5999.1 144 and 1 148.
55 Ibid., 169-72.
56 Ann Perkins, The Art of Dura-Europos (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 65-68; Rostovtzeff et al., Pre- liminary Report 6, 146-167; Rostovtzeff, “Dura and the Problem of Parthian Art,” Yale Classical Studies 5 (1935): 155-304, esp. 273-79; J. B. Ward-Perkins, “The Roman West and the Parthian East,” Proceedings of the British Academy (1965): 175-99, esp. 187n2.
57 Perkins, Art of Dura-Europos, 33. “As is to be expected in a garrison town located on a frontier, the paintings show both an eclecticism of subject and style, and a provincialism manifested in the generally mediocre level of execution.”
58 Michael Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and Its Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), 95; Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 166-67.
59 James Henry Breasted, Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting: First-Century Wall Paintings from the Fortress of Dura on the Middle Euphrates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924).
60 Perkins, Art of Dura-Europos, 66-67.
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
61 Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and Its Art, 94; Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 158-59 (pos- sible funerary banquet).
62 Dirven, Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos, 281-93.
63 J. A. Baird, “The Houses of Dura-Europos: Archaeology, Archive, and Assemblage,” in Cross- roads of Antiquity, 241 discussing the House of the Frescoes.
64 A wooden panel forming the door of a shrine carried a painted winged Nike (YUAG 1929.288).
There were also preserved five painted oval wooden shields (YUAG 1935.551 with Iliad scenes;
YUAG 1935.552 an amazonomachy; YUAG 1935.553 an image of a military god; and YUAG 1938.5999.1120 and YUAG 1938.5999.1123) and the rectangular scutum (YUAG 1933.715).
65 Baird, “Houses of Dura-Europos,” 235-50, esp. 241.
66 Maura K. Heyn, “The Terentius Frieze in Context,” in Crossroads of Antiquity, 228 referencing Annabel Jane Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61, “The frescoes of the naos are not ornamental as in the triclinium of a Roman house, but active.”
67 Dirven, Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos, 286.
68 Paul Baur, Michael Rostovtzeff, and Alfred Bellinger, eds., The Excavations at Dura-Europos:
Preliminary Report of the 4th Season of Work, 1930-1931 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1933), 39, 79-145, 222; Michael Rostovtzeff, ed., The Excavations at Dura-Europos: Preliminary Report of the 5th Season of Work, 1931-1932 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 47-49,
90-97; Kai Ruffing, “Die Geschafte des Aurelios Nebuchelos,” Laverna 1 1 (2000): 71-105 (House of Nebuchelus); Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 265-308 (House of the Roman Scribes).
69 Baird, “Housing and Households,” 83.
70 Baird, “Housing and Households” reconstructs these assemblages for many of the houses at Du- ra-Europos. On the Dura-Europos houses in general, see also, Baird “Houses of Dura-Europos”;
J. A. Baird, The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses: An Archaeology of Dura-Europos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Anny Allara and Catherine Saliou, “Constitution d’un repertoire de Farchitecture domestique a Doura- Europos,” in Doura-Europos Etudes 4, 1991-1993, ed. Pierre Leriche and Mathilde Gelin (Beirut: Bibliotheque archeologique et historique, 1997), 145-54.
For a recent example of a micro-history for two ancient Egyptian houses (one elite, the other non-elite) see Anna L. Boozer, “Housing Empire: The Archaeology of Daily Life in Roman Am- heida, Egypt”(PhD diss., Columbia University, 2007).
71 See Baird, “Housing and Households” and Inner Lives of Ancient Houses with references for much of this work.
72 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 140-72; Baird, “Housing and Households,” 483-89;
Baird, Inner Lives of Ancient Houses.
73 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 142.
74 There are some problems reconciling the room numbers on the published plans with the room numbers for finds listed in the register. Rooms Wl, 2, 10, 1 1 appear in the register but not on the final plans (Baird, “Housing and Households,” 472).
75 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 141.
76 Baird, “Houses of Dura-Europos,” 238.
77 Ibid., 239, 239n25; J. A. Baird, “The Bizarre Bazaar: Early Excavations in the Roman East and
31
Gail L. Hoffman
Problems of Nomenclature,” in TRAC 2006: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Cambridge 2006, ed. Ben Croxford et al. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007), 34-42, esp. 37.
78 Baird, “Housing and Households,” 483.
79 Susan B. Downey, Excavations at Dura-Europos 1928-1937: Final Report 3, Part 1, Fasc. 2; The Stone and Plaster Sculpture (Los Angeles: University of California, 1977), no. 90; F322; Ros- tovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 144-45, plate 27.2.
80 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 144; Baird, “Housing and Households,” 485 says painted ceiling tiles. Artstor Digital Library image dura-fc35~01 shows a carved relief head during exca- vation.
8 1 Baird, Inner Lives of Ancient Houses.
82 Nicholas F. Hudson, “Changing Places: The Archaeology of the Roman Convivium’,’ American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 4 (2010): 663-95; Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, The Roman Ban- quet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
83 Wallace-Hadrill, “Expression of Identity,” 356 observes, “Clothes are the material correlate to language, an expression of identity that depends on choice: you speak Latin or Greek, you wear the toga or the pallium.”
84 Nina Crummy and Hella Eckardt, “Regional Identities and Technologies of the Self: Nail-Clean- ers in Roman Britain,” Archaeological Journal 160 (2003): 44-69; Crummy and Eckardt, Styl- ing the Body in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain: A Contextual Approach to Toilet Instruments (Montagnac: Editions Monique Mergoil, 2008); Eckardt, “Heating and Lighting,” in Artefacts in Roman Britain: Their Purpose and Use, ed. Lindsay Allason- Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2011), 180-93.
85 LIMC 3, 1:931, nos. 986-87. A similar image (identified as Amor, Cupid) appears on a gem in Hamburg, LIMC 3, 1:977, no. 170 and on a Roman sarcophagus in the Sirmium museum, LIMC 3, 1:690, no. 169.
86 Ward-Perkins, “The Roman West,” 186n2 and Rostovtzeff, Preliminary Report 5, 157 plate 35, 3-4.
87 Baird, “Housing and Households”; Inner Lives of Ancient Houses.
88 Bernard Goldman, “Foreigners at Dura-Europos: Pictorial Graffiti and History,” Le Museon 103 (1990): 5-25; also J. A. Baird, “The Graffiti of Dura-Europos: A Contextual Approach,” in Ancient Graffiti in Context, ed. J. A. Baird and Claire Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2011), 49-68.
89 Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 147 observed this as a common posture for banqueting figures on Palmyrene tesserae.
90 An interesting study of a Roman gravestone for a British woman at Arbeia (South Shields in England, fig. 3.2) shows how analyses of garments may be significant, Maureen Carroll, “‘The Insignia of Women’: Dress, Gender and Identity on the Roman Funerary Monument of Regina from Arbeia Archaeological Journal 169 (2012): 281-311.
91 Maura K. Heyn, “Sacerdotal Activities and Parthian Dress in Roman Palmyra,” in Reading a Dynamic Canvas: Adornment in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Cynthia S. Colburn and Maura K. Heyn (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 181; Heyn, “Gesture and Identity in the Funerary Art of Palmyra,” American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 4 (2010): 631-61 has
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Being Roman in the Provinces: Experiences of Empire and Investigations of Identities
explored the significance of gesture in funerary sculpture at Palmyra.
92 Rothe, “Dress and Cultural Identity,” 59-68; Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow, and Lloyd Llewel- lyn-Jones, eds., The Clothed Body in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005); Jonathan Edmondson and Alison Keith, eds., Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Kelly Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society (New York: Routledge, 2008).
93 Rothe, “Dress and Cultural Identity,” 61.
94 Ibid., 60.
95 Efforts to link these forms of dress to particular groups of people, special identities, or to dress for specific activities in the scenes have not yet proven successful. For some of this discussion: Rostovtzeff et al., Preliminary Report 6, 161; J. A. Baird, “Everyday Life in Roman Dura-Euro- pos: The Evidence of Dress Practices,” in Religion, Society and Culture at Dura-Europos, ed. Ted Kaizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) where she notes that dress in art may be different than dress in day-to-day practice; Bernard Goldman, “The Dura Synagogue Costumes and Parthian Art,” in The Dura-Europos Synagogue: A Re-evaluation, 1932-1992, ed. Joseph Gutmann (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 52-77; Goldman, “Graeco-Roman Dress in Syro-Mesopotamia,” in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bon- fante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 163-81; Simon James on military dress in this volume. Heyn, “Terentius Frieze in Context,” 221-33. For discussion of dress at its possible significance at nearby Palmyra: Heyn, “Gesture and Identity”; “Sacerdotal Activities,” 170-93.
96 Sebastian Heath, “Trading at the Edge: Pottery, Coins, and Household Objects at Dura-Europos,” in Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos, ed. Jennifer Y. Chi and Sebastian Heath, exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 63-73; Kevin Butcher, Coinage in Roman Syria: Northern Syr- ia, 64 BC-AD 253 (London: Royal Numismatic Society, 2004).
97 Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD 337 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 230, 257.
98 Eisner, Imperial Rome, 12.
99 Joris Aarts, “Coins, Money and Exchange in the Roman World: A Cultural-Economic Perspec- tive,” Archaeological Dialogues 12, no. 1 (2005): 1-44, esp. 8 citing Hopkins for this view.
100 Print volumes have begun to appear. Roman Provincial Coinage is under the general editorship of Andrew Burnett and Michel Amandry of the British Museum and the Bibliotheque nationale de France respectively. The Antonine coins are available online, http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/.
101 Howgego, “Coinage and Identity,” 13-14.
102 Aarts, “Coins, Money and Exchange,” 9. Another important examination of coins in the prov- inces is: Howgego, “Coinage and Identity,” 17nl47 for brief consideration of use. Also, George Williamson, “Aspects of Identity,” in Coinage and Identity, 19-27.
103 Aarts, “Coins, Money and Exchange,” 12.
104 Ibid.
105 Mattingly, “Being Roman,” 22.
106 Revell, introduction to Roman Imperialism and Mattingly, “Being Roman.” See also note 37 above for additional bibliography.
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Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
David J. Mattingly
Introduction: Ways of Seeing and Ways of Being in the Roman World
The rise of the nation state and the triumph of the great monotheisms have helped shape a modern world in which our identity affiliations are often founded on one or other of these primary cultural bases. Yet the world has not been ever thus, and plural identities and multiple cultural associations have generally been much more common in human societies than sin- gular affiliations.1 A prime argument of this essay is that this natural tendency toward plural expressions of identity in human society was further amplified in the Roman Empire by the operation of colonial power networks.2 This approach produces a different picture and new understanding of Roman provincial societies from the conventional one that focuses predom- inantly on the degree of Romanness and the elite end of society. In place of an agenda that has prioritized the commonalities and similar cultural practices across this vast empire under the paradigm of Romanization, I argue instead that the study of the heterogeneity and hybridity present in Roman provincial societies offers a complementary and potentially more interest- ing perspective on the Roman world.
My sub-heading, “Ways of Seeing and Ways of Being,” draws attention to the fact that I suspect many classicists still subconsciously assume that people in antiquity generally per- ceived their world through the colonizer s eyes and desired to be Roman to the best of their abilities or means. We have thus been accustomed to giving Roman identity priority, leading us to emphasize a process of “becoming Roman.”3 However, a fundamental point about iden- tity in the past is that such high level group denominators were not necessarily as self-evident or appropriate then as they seem to us today. It is pertinent to question the size, coherence, and ubiquity of a pan-empire group of people who identified themselves as “Romans.” I recall the consternation in a packed room at the first Roman Archaeology Conference in Reading in 1995, when the prehistorian John Barrett had the temerity to ask, “Upon what grounds do we believe something called the Roman Empire actually existed?”4 Barrett went on to say, “To regard the Empire as the product of discourse is not to question its existence. . .what it does is lead us to doubt that the Empire was ever a single reality, a totality whose truth can be reduced to a basic set of organising principles of coercive forces. [...] The Roman Empire as some reified totality is the historians construct.”5 His point was that the Roman Empire was the product of a range of historical forces interacting across time and space with many different
David }. Mattingly
peoples, whose experience and knowledge of the empire varied enormously. The historical model of the Roman Empire embeds knowledge into a discourse that smooths off the rough edges and idealizes its structures in an essentialist fashion.
Despite the massive erosion of knowledge about the Roman Empire through loss of doc- umentary records and destruction of sites and material culture over time, the reality is that ancient historians today know far more about the history, geography, and functioning of the empire than the average subject would have in antiquity. However, the opposite is true of the individual experience of empire, which was highly personal. A similar argument can surely also be extended to the idea of what it meant to be Roman. Modern scholarship has reified its understanding based on a mass of fragmentary information to project an image of average Romans. These are the people we tend to encounter in museum pictorial displays and popular books: dining on couches, walking on mosaic floors, wearing togas or Mediterranean-style stolas, erecting statues to the living, tombstones to the deceased, and dedications to Lati- nized gods, or being stereotypical soldiers and gladiators. Yet how close were these imagined Romans to the everyday realities of provincial life?
My sense is that there were many types of Roman lived experience. Nor should this be difficult for us to countenance. We live in a postcolonial age, increasingly in polyglot, mul- ticultural, and multi-ethnic communities, practicing a wide array of religions. My home city of Leicester in the UK has a minority white Anglo-Saxon population living alongside large groups of people whose families originated in parts of South or East Asia, in Africa, and in the West Indies, to consider just the major groups. The religious landscape there comprises not only a wide variety of buildings relating to Christian denominations (Catholic, Anglican, non- conformist, Quaker, etc.), but also many temples of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains, Islamic mosques, and Jewish synagogues.6 The experience of and participation in British society varies dramatically for locational and generational reasons. Children in schools readily cross bound- aries of race and religion and indulge in common interests and activities, but at home or after school they may speak different languages and participate in activities that closely bond them to distinctive sub-communities (attending Koranic school at the mosque and so on). In some respects, this sort of code switching in twenty- first- century Leicester has more in common with Roman antecedents, in that the Roman period was characterized by enhanced migration and social diversity and plural identities. Insoll explicitly identifies the city of Rome as “an earlier experiment in multiculturalism.”7 Although comparative historical studies will always be difficult across ages with radically different sources of information available, the well-es- tablished discipline of postcolonial studies can assist classical scholarship by demonstrating a different model of the dynamics of colonialism to that prevailing in Roman studies.8
“Omnes Romani facti sunt et omnes Romani dicuntur”
Groupness can be constructed in many different ways in human societies, including ethnicity, language, religion, communities (real and imagined), gender, age, and so on.9 Ethnicity was weakly evolved in the ancient Mediterranean,10 with political boundaries even in pre-Roman times often cutting across ethnic or linguistic groupings. This lack of a strong correlation of ethnic identity with political units— such as in Egypt, the Hellenistic Kingdoms, or Italy it- self—is often assumed to have fostered the emergence of a cross-provincial “Roman” identity. This idea is strongly evoked by the comment from St. Augustine that provides the sub-title of this section: “Who now knows which nations in the Roman Empire were what, when all have become Romans, and are called Romans?”11 While this might at first glance seem conclusive evidence of a uniform sense of Roman identity, we should be cautious. For one thing, Augus- tine was writing about the early fifth-century position, when it is indeed logical to assume that pre-Roman ethnic identities had been diluted after many centuries of imperial rule. But we
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Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
should be careful how far we retroject the idea of a commonly perceived Roman identity that was more or less ubiquitous across the empire.
In any case, Roman identity was more a matter of law than of culture. Roman citizenship was part of a package of status and privileges that might have facilitated such a development, but its cultural significance is easily exaggerated. In the western provinces, enfranchisement of the Italian peoples, and later elite members of the conquered communities, auxiliary vet- erans, manumitted slaves of citizens, and even some entire (particularly compliant and mer- it-worthy) communities added significant numbers to the body of Roman citizens; similar processes operated to a lesser extent in the eastern provinces too. However, before the Consti- tutio Antoniniana in 212 CE, Roman citizens remained an influential and privileged minority within the empires overall population. The Roman citizen body comprised people of radically different status groups— at one extreme aristocratic oligarchs, at the other ex-slaves, along with soldiers, veterans, and families who had enjoyed close relations with the empire, or com- munities fortunate to live in the favored Italian heartlands. Legal status and tax breaks were important perks of citizen rank, but there were many more factors that divided the ranks of Roman citizens into regional or social groups than there were reasons to promote their Roman identity as uniquely important to them as a monolithic group.
Even with the eventual wide spread of Latinity and Roman citizenship after 212 (and we should remember that Latin was always a language spoken by a tiny minority in the East), centrifugal forces remained as strong as centripetal ones among the polyglot and regionally diverse peoples assimilated within the imperial structures of Rome. Bilingualism was com- mon across the empire, and linguistic mixes and competences were key elements in defining regional and social differences.12 Groupness was more commonly associated with lower order political units— city states and towns, clans, tribes and petty kingdoms, military units, and so on. There is no evidence that people in the British archipelago thought of themselves as Brit- ons or that the diverse inhabitants of North Africa had a common sense of African identity in opposition to Rome. The Roman sources sometimes referred to provincial populations in these broad terms, but these were surely externally observed groupings, imposed as a short- hand way to characterize peoples encountered by Rome. The territories annexed to Rome were in general a patchwork— racially, linguistically, and culturally. The Germans beyond the Rhine remained a multiplicity of regional peoples; Germania was a Roman construct and to some extent an ideological fiction.13 While it is true that enfranchisement as Roman citizens did create a legal identity that over time came to rival local political affiliations, it is striking that Roman provinces were little used as a marker of an individual’s identity, notwithstanding Moderans recent attempt to identify provincial identity as the “troisieme patrie.”14 There is little evidence that people badged themselves as say Tripolitanians or Byzacenans, to use two African provinces as examples. Where a geographically related identity was expressed it con- tinued to be most commonly the town or place of birth or a regionally defined entity (native civitas or pre-existing ethnic name).
Commonalities: The Romanization Approach
The Romanization paradigm has had its problems dissected, to the point of dismemberment, by British Romanists across the last 20 years.15 There have been several announcements of the demise of Romanization, yet it continues to display some signs of vital functions, especially in Roman scholarship emanating from other European and North American countries. The journey I took from initial acceptance of Romanization as a key construct of the discipline, to something that needed special nuancing to be useful, to outright rejection of the paradigm can easily be traced in my published work.16 1 do not propose to go over the argument in detail here. It will suffice to summarize my main objections to Romanization and to explain why I have decided to abandon it as an explanatory device.
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David }. Mattingly
Romanization places emphasis above all on elite sites, Roman state structures, monumen- tal public buildings, and elite culture, and universalizes the experience of this culture and the valuing of it across Roman society, whereas there are good reasons to see access to these Roman markers as being much more restricted in Roman society.
The preceding point shows how Romanization has led us to take a fundamentally pro-Ro- man and top-down view of the empire. This is also partly affected by the choice of monuments to excavate and display for public consumption— which reflect the elite and state- focused agenda (public monuments in towns, villas, and urban domus associated with artworks, forts, etc.).
Meanwhile, field survey and rescue archaeology in many countries, especially in Europe, but also in other parts of the empire, have started to publicize a more random cross-section of archaeology, including lesser rural settlements and lower order urban habitation. The new data produced by this sort of work stretches the Romanization paradigm to the limit.
Romanization can also be said to focus to a greater extent on the degree of sameness within and across provinces, rather than on the degree of difference or divergence. As we shall see, when we seek to examine identity, it is the diversity of culture and behavior that is potentially most revealing about social attitudes across the full spectrum of society.
Romanization also suffers from being an intellectually lazy shortcut in that it is commonly used to describe both the process and the result of cultural change, introducing a strong ele- ment of circularity to the argument.
It is an unhelpful term in that it implies that cultural change was unilateral and unilinear, prioritizing the Roman aspect of complex cultural interactions and encouraging the use of binary oppositions such as Roman : native.
It is part of a modern colonial discourse on the nature of empire, being formulated in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century heyday of modern European and American empires. Quite apart from the issue of whether the term has continuing practical utility is the issue of whether the modern colonial associations render it unsuited (and potentially damag- ing to our subject) in a postcolonial age.17 It is worth reflecting on the differing fate of the study of eugenics in the twentieth century.
Through long and varied use in different scholarly traditions, Romanization has multiple meanings and understandings, making it a flawed paradigm.
A final point about Romanization is that it has generally been more central to studies of western than eastern provinces. Its application to the cultural complexity of Egypt or the Asian territories of the empire, for instance, has always been unconvincing lip service to a dogma developed in the European lands.18 Seen from Yale, the incongruity of the concept of the Roman East has long been evident. Dura-Europos is a classic instance, in fact, of a city that pushed cultural boundaries in different directions, spatially and chronologically.19
There has been a trend in the last years to repackage Romanization through the use of terms like Romanitas or Romanness.20 1 am not sure this solves the problem entirely as it still places the main emphasis on measuring the degree of adherence to supposed Roman cultural norms. I think a more radical approach to the issue is desirable, though I need to be clear that I am not advocating that Romanists abandon the study of the phenomenon formerly referred to as Romanization. Rather I am suggesting that we approach the issue of cultural change from other directions, allowing us to reach new understandings of the mass of data already accumulated and informing the agenda of future study.
Diversity and Difference: The Potential of Identities
Identity is very much the Zeitgeist of archaeology21 and classical studies at present.22 While some of the recent work invoking identity reveals the strong imprint of works by Bourdieu (on praxis), Foucault (on power, sexuality), and Giddens (on structuration), much of it
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Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
is theoretically unsophisticated.23 The transference from Romanization to identity can be graphically illustrated by the UK Roman Archaeology Conference, where the numbers of papers and sessions mentioning Romanization and identity have moved in inverse direc- tions over the last 20 years.24 While there has been evident enthusiasm for the concept, there have also been doubts and questions about its application. Indeed there is a possibility that classics has arrived at the party late, when other guests have departed the scene. In the social sciences, some serious concerns have been raised about the continuing utility of “identity” as an underlying concept of those disciplines. The arguments overlap in several respects with the critique I have just advanced of Romanization: 1) “Identity” is so broadly defined and applied as a concept that it loses “analytical purchase”; 2) “Identity” is an essentialist construct that reifies understanding by giving solidity to what is actually fluid and ill-de- fined; 3) “Identity” is both a category of practice and a category of analysis; and 4) “Identity” is increasingly put in inverted commas or qualified by strings of adjectives in attempts to disguise its analytical shortcomings. No doubt some of the difficulties relate to the semantic looseness with which the term is employed.25
The uses of identity cover a wide range of social situations. Following Brubaker and Coo- per, identity can be defined as: 1) The basis of social or political action; 2) A collective phe- nomenon, relating to the sense of sameness within groups or categories; 3) A core element of individual or collective “selfhood”; 4) The product of social or political action (where it relates to the processual development of groupness); and 5) The product of multiple and competing discourses, highlighting the dynamic, fragmented, and plural nature of sense of self.26
Part of the problem is that use of the term “identity” in academic publications often elides these distinct categories or leaves undefined the precise sense in which it is intended. The analytical value of the concept is much reduced when its meaning is so ambiguous or when the interpretational emphasis is focused on the essentialist construction of a primary affiliation for an individual or group. Such criticisms do not to my mind invalidate the analytical potential of “identity” provided that the manner in which it is to be employed is clearly defined and that the concept is used in an analytical manner, rather than as a mere tool of description.27 My own approach combines aspects of points 4) and 5) in the above list, with the emphasis on the fluid and shape-shifting nature of multiple identity formu- lations operating within society. Clearly there is a need for other practitioners in classical studies also to be explicit in their theoretical and methodological approaches to identity, to minimize ambiguity in the employment of the term. Despite the criticisms of “identity” in the social sciences, from the evidence of the last decades of Roman research, I believe the advantages of studying cultural change via the identity agenda outweigh the negatives, at least in contrast to Romanization. In this light, we can see that Romanization has tended to produce a reified view of a Roman identity, which is smoothed and averaged across chrono- logical, spatial, and social boundaries to the point where it in fact does not correspond to the precise evidence on the ground at any particular place or moment.
My approach to the use of identity in relation to the Roman Empire can be summa- rized in a few brief points. A key theme of my work is to explore evidence for different broad identity groups in provinces under Roman rule. In a world of potentially infinite identity presentations, it is preferable to seek to delineate some broad communities rather than atomization to the level of individuals. My initial work has focused on detecting gross differences between these groups in terms of material culture and behavior patterns. For instance, in studies of Britain and Africa, I have delineated large differences between the identity markers of urban, rural, and military communities.
There were evidently many ways of constructing a “Roman” identity (and by “Roman” identity I mean a presentation of self that reflected the place of an individual within the power structures of the Roman world). Identity studies also allow us to access and assess differing levels of social conformity in Roman society. It is increasingly clear that identity strategies
39
David }. Mattingly
were not simply about emulation (as Romanization has tended to suggest). Rather the desire to create a sense of differentiation and distance from other groups in society often seems to have been a crucial factor in material and behavioral choices. Identity lends itself to explora- tion of both inter- and intra- communal difference. It has also become apparent that within the broad communities I defined there was lots of internal variability in the use of material culture and that there was dynamic change across time (leading to a plurality of identities).
Identity and Material Culture
A major problem in the archaeological application of identity studies concerns the use of material culture as evidence.28 There are, of course, also problems in utilizing textual evi- dence, since written testimony is not immune to bias and misdirection. However, at least the study of texts can be regulated by the rigor of “source criticism.” Artifacts have rarely been considered as active agents of culture, as opposed to passive objects.29 When arti- facts are identified as having been imbued with special value as identity markers, not much thought is given to the way in which they were used in society or consideration of the fact that the same artifacts could have varied uses and diverse significance to different groups.
Some artifacts convey clear information about associated behaviors. For example, the distribution of amphorae and the incidence of graffiti on pots at sites in Britain illustrate different consumption behaviors among the military community in comparison to urban and rural communities.30 The military diet in Britain favored wine/oil over the north Euro- pean norm of beer/butter, despite the inconvenience and expense of shipping Mediterra- nean amphora commodities across vast distances. Graffiti on pots also speaks to us of the emphasis on literate behaviors in the military. While the adoption of shiny red pottery fine wares has sometimes rather simplistically been equated with Romanization, the spread of similar styles of pottery in many areas was more likely a consequence of the globalization of the Roman world (such as the vessels from Gaul and Tunisia in the present exhibition, plates 161, 166).31 Close analysis again reveals different patterns of consumption among the three broad communities. Identity patterns are more concealed and pertain to different usage made of pottery by various groups in society, by the emergence of different types of vessels at a regional level, or the preference for certain vessel types by different sectors of the provincial community.32 When historical archaeologists of the Americas recognized the potential of material culture to play a larger role in the tracing of lifeways and social identity, this led to the development of artifactual studies covering a wide range of mundane artifacts.33
One of the problems impeding studies of Roman material culture is that the recording of artifacts is often highly selective and favors the more “Roman” or “elite” classes. In North Africa, for instance, there are comparatively few excavated sites with comprehensive pub- lications of all classes of pottery and small finds, whereas in Britain not only are excavated assemblages published in detail (backed up by grey literature reports in other cases),34 but there is also a major national cataloguing and mapping program related to surface and met- al-detected finds (the Portable Antiquities Scheme).35 The full potential of finds is revealed in cases not only where they have been well catalogued but also where the depositional context has been carefully recorded, allowing a proper assessment of the use behavior to be assessed.36 From such bodies of data new types of analysis are becoming possible. Hella Eckardt s work has revealed very different levels of engagement with a range of artifact types across my three communities (military, urban, and rural). Lamps (and by implication arti- ficial light) were overwhelmingly connected with the military community and the largest cities, while a range of toilet implements reveal a distribution much more focused on smaller urban centers and rural communities.37 The remarkable dossier of artifacts, paintings, relief carvings, and inscriptions relating to the Roman army at Dura-Europos (see for example the painting of Terentius, fig. 6.2; and bronze artifacts in the present catalogue, plates 60, 62-65)
40
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
provides remarkable insights into the creation of a package of material and behavioral mark- ers of a Roman military identity that was widely diffused within the empire.38
It is also important to remember that Roman culture spread far beyond the frontier.39 The possession of artifacts from the Roman world in Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, India, or the central Sahara did not mean that people in these remote regions were perceived or saw themselves as “becoming Roman.” The adoption of some of the material trappings of a powerful neighboring civilization was potentially a strategy to reinforce or to transform local power structures. What is clear is that the associated behaviors and use context of material culture beyond the frontiers often followed unusual patterns, creating distinctive expressions of indigenous identity, not pale imitations of Rome. Why might this not also apply to some instances of uptake of Roman material culture within the provinces?
Artifacts that are perceived as artworks are a particularly well studied subset of Roman material culture, though the tendency is often to correlate discoveries within an established canon of classical art, with less attention paid to regional peculiarities and distinctiveness or to pre-existing traditions of art.40 There is also sometimes a tendency to elide the stylistic and iconographic characteristics of a huge range of material, which reflects pre-Roman traditions, cosmopolitan art of the Roman Empire, and distinctive regional provincial art forms as though this vast corpus was part of a single continuum. The art of the Roman Empire was a product of the colonial environment in which it was created and more work is needed to draw this out.41 Dura-Europos is an exceptional example of this, but detailed regional studies of almost any corner of the empire will produce surprising patterns. To cite one example on which I have worked, the funerary iconography of tombs at Ghirza in the Libyan desert can be linked in part to “Roman” norms, but are more appropriately seen as a localized response to new ways of expressing Libyan cultural ideas about power, ancestor worship, fertility, and so on.42
I want to end this section with a few general reflections on how archaeologists use mate- rial culture to define identity. In part because artifacts, especially art objects and precious items, are divorced from their use context, some of our interpretations are a bit relativist. In fact, Romanization theory has encouraged us to sum and amplify the main material culture markers and draw conclusions about the degree of Romanness present. I have encapsulated this approach in an imagined equation (perhaps devised by Einsteinorix as his Theory of Social Relativity):
I = me2
(I = Identity, me = material culture)
Put crudely, Romanness has tended to be determined by the amount of Roman “stuff” that people had, with its importance multiplied and other material cultures present ignored.
As I have been arguing, however, a fundamental point about the analysis of artifacts is that it was not generally the artifacts that defined identity; rather it was the specific associ- ated behaviors and contexts of use. I argue that identity is the product of a complex set of interactions involving structure and agency, material culture and behavior. These relation- ships can be imagined as an alternative equation to the one above:
I = Ss/Sa + B(mc)
(I = Identity, Ss = Social structures, Sa = Social agency, B = Behaviors, me = material culture)
I am not suggesting that either equation is of any practical value in exploring identity, and I present them simply as a heuristic device to illustrate the over-simplifying emphasis of the Romanization approach when compared with the complexity I believe we need to intro- duce to discussions of the linkage between material culture and identity. What I am trying to
41
David }. Mattingly
convey here is the complex interplay between artifacts, behaviors, and aspects of individual agency and social structure that should be considered in defining identity. While it may not always be possible to delineate all these factors in full from the archaeological material avail- able, we should at least attempt to keep all these in mind.
Discrepant Identity
A further key ingredient of my approach to identity is the recognition that the social behav- iors witnessed across Roman society were to some extent contingent on the colonial context.43 It is for this reason that I favor the use of the word “discrepant” in relation to the range of identities that I have delineated, as this term conveys more effectively than “different” or “plu- ral” or “hybrid” that such outcomes were achieved in a world of colonial power networks.44 Identity has a harder edge in such drastically unequal societies and many behaviors are con- strained or distorted by the realities of where political, social, or economic power resided. In the early days of Romanization theory there was a common assumption that Rome had a deliberate and evolved cultural program, designed to make the provinces more Roman and thus easier to govern. In more recent times, the emphasis has shifted to native agency as an explanation for the patterns of adoption of Roman identity.45 My preference is to see the complex cultural combinations as the result of highly varied colonial situations in which key intentional acts of the state (such as imposing garrisons, raising taxes, redistributing land, and exploiting resources) elicited a range of responses from subject peoples, which were also affected in repeated feedback cycles by the systemic effects of empire (fig. 3.1).46 This relates to the generally unintended consequences of imperial power imbalances. These create condi- tions in which individuals charged with delivering elements of imperial rule (from governors, to soldiers, to councilors, to tax collectors) had the opportunity, or the latent potential at least, to exceed their brief. The perception of how power operated or could operate was thus a factor in guiding behavioral choices and further consequential acts.
|
Intentional acts (structure) |
Systemic effects (unforeseen consequences) |
Consequential acts (native agency) |
|
Garrison deployments |
Brutality |
Behavior modifications |
|
Census taking |
Surveillance and intrusion |
Resistance (economic) |
|
Tax settlements |
Abuses/corruption/ extortion |
Tax payment/ avoidance |
|
Legal frameworks |
Legal inequalities |
Reinforced social hierarchy |
|
Urban promotions and encour- agement of monumentalization |
Fiscal over-commitments of towns |
Elite competition for imperial favor |
|
Land confiscation, survey, and reassignment |
Incentives and penalties |
Emergence of greater regional and commu- nity differences |
|
Creation of imperial estates and exploitation of natural resources |
Conflicts of interest between locals and officials/ chief tenants |
Loss of valuable resources to community |
|
Language of government |
Exclusive nature |
Linguistic choices |
|
Enslavement |
Individual exploitation |
Increase in slave ownership |
|
Recruitment |
Loss of men to community |
Recruits absorbed into military community |
|
Operation of imperial economy |
Unequal economic opportuni- ties and consequences |
Investment in province from outside and inside |
3.1. Chart illustrating effects of imperial power structures.
It is commonly stated in Roman studies that the empire was an overall good thing for its subject peoples and that incorporation into the provincial structure brought tangible
42
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
improvements in the lives of millions.47 The Roman conquest was a short-lived unpleas- antness, before subjected peoples were able to settle down to “sensible” life in cities and enjoy the benefits of membership of the Roman club.48 The parallelism between this and both what Roman writers said of their imperial destiny to rule benevolently and the “white mans burden” argument elaborated in the late nineteenth century to justify the activities of European empires is striking.49 All are part of separate imperial discourses intended to provide the ideological backbone for colonial rule. The Roman world was a drastically unequal society and it is worth reflecting on the characteristics of such societies before we conclude that Rome was uniquely accommodating and inclusive among empires and that her subject peoples were uncommonly consensual. One of the most interesting books of recent years on the formation of complex societies and the emergence of kingdoms and empires has focused on the way in which such societies are built on progressively more dramatic exploitation of underprivileged members, through the emergence of hierarchies of inequality.50
Are unequal societies consensual and happy ones? Detailed statistical analysis of Wilkinson and Pickett on modern societies has demonstrated the opposite may be the case. They have assessed the levels of equality of modern countries in terms of the relationship between the wealth of the richest 20% and the poorest 20%. Across a huge range of social markers, what they have found is that the performance of unequal societies significantly lags behind that of more equal ones. This effect shows up not only in things like life expectancy, violence, and social mobility, but also in health and mental illness, educational attainment, social problems and anti-social behavior, happiness, and other measures of human wellbe- ing.51 There are serious obstacles to demonstrating if this holds true for the Roman world, most obviously we lack the sort of statistical data that Wilkinson and Pickett have used. But the strong modern correlation between inequality in societies and a range of negative social markers should surely give us pause for thought about our default view of the Roman world. To play a thought game for a moment, if we did have unlimited access to Roman census data from a range of provinces (and their predecessors) would those data actually uphold the assumed picture of a benevolent and beneficent empire raising the standard of living of the vast majority? Just as the great colonial era buildings of London and Paris do not represent a time of universally improved living conditions, life-expectancy, incomes, and social cohesion in those cities, so we should avoid the temptation to equate the monu- mental achievements of Roman architecture with the greater good in provincial societies.52 This highlights for me why the conventional focus in Romanization studies on elite groups in society creates a false image of the generality of social wellbeing under Roman rule.
There is in fact some archaeological evidence from human skeletal analysis to suggest that life expectancy in some areas of the Roman Empire was lower than in pre-Roman times. The work of Rebecca Redfern has been particularly impressive in this regard, as she has been able to work with groups of both late Iron Age and Roman inhumations from south- ern England and thus to compare data on human stature, longevity, disease, and a range of health markers.53 Interestingly, the results suggest, just like the Wilkinson and Pickett analysis, that children, adult men, and the elderly faced an increased risk of mortality and a number of adverse health markers (including enamel hypoplasia related to malnutrition) under Roman rule. The assumed universal benefits of membership in the Roman Empire were thus in all probability far less apparent to the majority of its inhabitants than they have been to generations of modern scholars.54 These issues remind us of the non-consensual nature of imperial power and the inherent probability that alongside the participation and collaboration, there was always resistance — albeit primarily cultural or passive.55
Religion and funerary practices are areas of life where the underlying behaviors can be studied as well as the material culture in use and are thus particularly fruitful ones for the exploration of identity. Funerary practices are one of the most useful ways to expose
43
David }. Mattingly
such variations and local/social patterning in identity.56 This is also one of the most obvious points of departure from the (incorrectly) assumed norms of the Roman Empire. The idea that funerary practices were characterized by cremation burial in the early Principate, with this being increasingly replaced by inhumation in mid-late imperial times is at best a partial truth even in the western provinces where the pat- tern is most commonly encountered. For the East, Egypt, and Africa the patterns were much more varied.
The first stage of my analysis of discrepant identity has been to explore the distinctiveness in material culture and behaviors of the military community, town dwellers, and rural populations in two provinces, Britain and Africa. Here I have expanded on the work of specialists on the Roman army, such as Simon James, who have constructed an impres- sive picture of the army as a distinctive community, with organizational structures, dress, linguistic practices, and an array of distinctive behaviors that set soldiers apart from the majority of civilians in the provinces.57 What is interesting is that there are perceptible differences in a range of key social behaviors that also effectively discriminate between urban and rural communities. A good example concerns the inci- dence of Latin tombstones in Britain (fig. 3.2). This has gen- erally been assumed a normative Roman practice that was widely adopted across Britain, among soldiers and civilians alike. Adams and Tobler, for instance, assumed an even split between military and civilian use of tombstones (fig. 3.3a).58 However, the location map of tombstone findspots shows that the vast majority come from the militarized part of the province; further analysis leads to the suggestion that erecting tombstones was primarily a social practice of the military community, extending to the special categories of civilians closely connected with them (families, veterans, merchants, and craftspeople living alongside garrison settlements, other imperial officials, including imperial slaves and freedmen) (fig. 3.3b). At the same time,
tombstones from rural districts are extremely rare and the exceptions appear to be associated with extraordinary circumstances (suspected imperial estates, the territories of veteran colo- niae, and so on), while finds from towns for the most part can be attributed to the military community (soldiers on secondment or in transit, imperial officials, veterans and their families) or to foreigners (i.e., non -Britons who went to the trouble of stating this fact on the stone). The British civitas center towns are notable for the absolute paucity of tombstones recovered (other than those relating to these exceptional and external groups). Most of these towns have produced either one or zero tombstones. This surely reflects a non-partici- patory cultural choice on the part of the vast majority of native Britons.59
a. Classification of Romano-British tombstones after Adams and Tobler
Unknown 25% Military 33%
Civilian 41%
b. Classification of the same dataset after Mattingly
Urban/rural communities 10%
Military community 90%
3.3. Alternative classifications of the corpus of Romano-British tombstones: a) Adams and Tobler separated women and children at known military sites from soldiers, boosting the numbers of “civilians”; b) my reworking of the dataset, assigning men, women, and children at known garrison sites entirely to the military
3.2. Tombstone of Regina from South Shields Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall. Arbeia Roman Fort and Museum, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, T765.
44
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
I have argued that a prime reason to abandon the concept of Romanization is that it allows us to shift attention away from issues of cultural commonality and homogeneity toward heterogeneity and hybridity. That is not to imply that the issues of commonality lack con- tinuing relevance, but merely to reflect that after more than a century of the Romanization agenda those aspects of cultural change are quite well exposed. Colonial “soft power” and the creation of a globalized socio-economic zone can help account for much of the similar patterning we trace across the empire. There is a further impact of the neglect or de-em- phasis of evidence of heterogeneity and long-continued pre-Roman traditions in that such evidence sits uncomfortably with conventional notions of an inclusive and consensual Ro- man Empire. A growing interest in postcolonial approaches to imperialism among some archaeologists60 has been opposed by others with entrenched interests in the model of a benevolent Roman Empire.61 1 would counter that we may be in a better position to judge the distinctiveness of the Roman Empire in comparison with more recent imperialisms once we have subjected the ancient evidence to the same sort of critical analyses that have been applied to the modern case studies. It is precisely in this light that the exploration of the underlying factors that explain the hybrid and diverse culture and cultural practices of the Roman Empire in its entirety is such a pressing need. It does not matter much to me whether people call this “discrepant identity,” hybridity, or some other term, as long as the phenomenon is explored — with Scholars’ Day,62 the exhibition, and this book a promising start. When engaging in colonial comparisons it seems to me that we need to focus on underlying processes rather than the specific mechanics of colonial systems, as Stark and Chance have done recently in exploring the strategies adopted by provincials in empires. The detail varies, but the behaviors can generally be equated with a range of options: bol- stering, emulation, resistance, exodus, information control, appropriation, complicity, as- similation (fig. 3. 4). 63
Strategies
Bolstering: E.g., elites seek collaboration with imperial agents to guarantee position within empire
Emulation: E.g., elites (and others) take on styles and practices of imperial elites Resistance: Provincials seek to reduce or overturn imperial controls Exodus: Move to escape imperial boundaries or power
Information control: Attempts to conceal or restrict information that was demanded by the imperial power
Appropriation: Selective adoption of imperial procedures and institutions
Complicity: Individuals pursue own interests (often economic) via collaboration with imperial regime
Assimilation: Elites and some commoners seek varied degree of social and identity integration with dominant imperial society
3.4. Strategies of provincials in imperial societies (after Stark and Chance 2012, 193).
Plurality versus Singular Affiliations
In his book Identity and Violence Amartya Sen eloquently makes the case for why we need to give more attention to multiple affiliations in social analysis, instead of over- emphasizing singular affiliations, like nation-state or religion.64 This seems to be one of the key safe- guards against the reifying power of identity studies when narrowly focused. The moment we prioritize one or a few identity markers we are heading toward essentialist and often
45
David }. Mattingly
predictable conclusions. Brubaker, while voicing semantic concerns about the use of the term identity, has highlighted in his other work the importance of multiple ways of defining groupness. Both writers stress that factors that help define groups may be either specific to the individual or influenced by external factors (such as the structure and agency rela- tionship). As Sen observes, “The freedom of choosing our identity in the eyes of others can sometimes be extraordinarily limited.”65 Some cultural behaviors thus represent “reactive identity” as a response to socio-political impositions — here I think in particular about the sorts of colonial humiliation or the dramatic inequalities inherent in a colonial society that are implied in Figure 3.1.
One of the key questions to ask about political changes is the extent to which they were transformative of the lived experience of people. This is well illustrated by a story told by Hugo Gryn in his memoir of growing up in what is now southeast Slovakia. A man from the town of Berehovo has arrived at the gates of heaven and before admittance is told by an angel that he must tell the story of his life:
“I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. . .received my education in Czechoslovakia, and started to work as an apprentice in Hungary. For a time I also worked in Germany, but I raised my own family and did most of my life’s work in the Soviet Union.” The angel was impressed. “You certainly travelled and moved about a great deal.” “Oh no,” the man protested, “I never left Berehovo!”66
While those political transitions of the early twentieth century were particularly dramat- ic and had a major impact on the lives of many inhabitants, they were not historically unique — one can imagine ancient equivalents. In the course of the second century BCE, for example, the North African coastal city of Lepcis Magna moved from being a Carthaginian dependency, to a territory of the Numidian Kingdom, to a self-governing Libyphoenician community, to an ally of Rome, to an effective part of the Roman Empire. Each of those political changes will have involved cultural realignments.
Plural identities need to be investigated at a number of different levels, not simply in terms of ethnic, linguistic, or political units — which tend to dominate identity politics. In my recent work, I have suggested that identity in the Roman provinces may have been defined by (in no particular order): status, wealth, location, employment, religion, place of origin, family or ethnicity, proximity of engagement with the Roman imperial project, legal condition, language, literacy, gender, and age. It is unlikely that there was a predomi- nant factor that consistently outranked others. Scholars of early Christianity recognize that religious identity did not serve as a primary affiliation until long after Christianity was established as the dominant religion.67 Individuals may have belonged to multiple identity groups at any time, or indeed have acted in socially contingent ways depending on locale, fellow actors, audience, and so on. In this example I present the complex identity markers that can be deduced about Regina, a British slave who was freed by and married to Barates, a Syrian with a connection to the Roman army in northern Britain. The iconography of the tombstone (fig. 3.2) is that of a respectable Roman matron and the image is regularly used in books and museum displays to illustrate the archetype of a Roman woman in Britain, once again exposing the essentialism of the Romanization model. The true story of Regina shows that her identity and her life were far less straightforward and typical, with a sinister shadow cast by her enslavement.68
My next example is drawn from Lepcis Magna in Libya. This Libyphoenician city was trans- formed from the reign of Augustus into one of the most recognizable Roman centers in North Africa, boasting early examples of Italian- style theaters, market buildings, and pedimental temples. The people who effected the transformation were not Roman colonists, but local Liby-
46
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
Phoenician notables — men like Annobal Tapapius Rufus, who donated the funds for the market (11 BCE) and theater (1-2 CE). These early adopters also embraced Latin epigraphy for public inscriptions (initially as part of handsome bilingual texts), togate statues, and, increasingly as the first century CE progressed, Roman naming practices and the other perks of citizenship. At one level this is the classic Romanization success story But there are indications that more complex identity games were being played out here, even among the aristocratic order that was most visibly “becoming Roman.” Annobal Tapapius might define his identity in a number of different ways, in part dependent on social context and the maintenance of such plural identities; this is strongly supported by the evidence of funerary practices in first- and second-century CE Lepcis.69
The pre-Roman tradition in Tripolitania included the use of subterranean hypogea for multiple burials and freestanding tower and obelisk mausolea, in the Punic tradition. Exca- vations at Lepcis have shown a diversity of Roman burial and commemorative practices. Initially, many burials continued to be made in specially constructed hypogea of Libyphoe- nician type. The hypogea type of burial at Lepcis is well illustrated by a double-chambered example at Gelda, c. 2.5 km southwest of Lepcis. The two funerary chambers were each constructed with 10 niches for cinerary urns, with a wide bench running around the walls in front of the niches for the placement of other grave goods. One of the chambers had been completely cleared in antiquity, but the other contained 1 1 cremations and three inhuma- tions, evidently deposited between the Flavian period and the mid-second century. The burial rite employed, the tomb contents, and the epigraphic indications on the cinerary urns provide a remarkable record of a society in cultural transition. The family seems to have been from the very top level of Lepcitanian society, as indicated by the quality of the burial monument, the best of the ash urns and associated grave goods, including fragments of two folding stools. Two types of cinerary urn were used: the earlier form was a gabled stone chest; the later type a stone vase, some plain, some with elaborate vegetal decoration. Most of the urns carried engraved inscriptions, the earlier examples in Neo-Punic script, the later ones in Latin characters.
Considerable interest lies in the naming practices observed on the ash chests and urns. Two of the ash chests had Neo-Punic inscriptions, but evidently related to individuals who already at that time possessed Roman citizenship, Publius Flavius Proculus Iaton and [Pub- lius Flavius] Iustus Iaton. The final element is evidently a peregrine name added to the tria nomina. The third ash chest bore the name Flavia Amothmic Nysfur in Latin. The vase urns all had inscriptions in Latin letters, but though (seemingly) dealing with Roman citizens the form of names did not generally respect the expected form of presentation of tria nomina (see fig. 3.5). The vase urns represented an innovation of the Flavian period and probably derived from Roman models, though several were of clear local manufacture. Overall, this fascinating assemblage shows a family of early adopters at work, taking on Roman citi- zenship and Roman names, but maintaining onomastic practices in the tomb that evoked earlier identity markers in Punic and Libyan society. This family was also quick to switch to coffined inhumation and plaster portrait busts in the mid- second century.
Other Lepcitanian hypogea have revealed a similar pattern of non-synchronicity between the forms of names on public inscriptions or on funerary inscriptions outside the tomb and the use of Neo-Punic or abbreviated Latin names on the cinerary urns. Of approximately 200 inscribed urns known from burials near Lepcis only about 10% used the Latin naming system properly.70 The majority of these hypogeal burials evidently related to the elite class and this shows that even among the Lepcitanian elite, who were at the forefront of “becom- ing Roman,” families often retained Libyan or Punic cognomina in the domestic and funer- ary contexts, whereas public identity emphasized the purely Latin aspects of the individuals identity. There is a mix of Latin, Punic, and Libyan names among the inscriptions, and even the Latin names sometimes reflect the Libyan heritage of an individual, as in the case
47
David }. Mattingly
|
Urn no. |
Form on urn |
Reconstructed name? |
|
1 (Neo- Punic) |
PWBLY PF‘WY PRQL YT/NN/T |
Publius Flavius Proculus Iaton |
|
2 (Neo- Punic) |
YHST’ YT/NN/T |
(Publius Flavius) Iustus Iaton |
|
3 |
FLAVIA AMOTH/MIC NYSFUR |
Flavia Amothmic Nysfur |
|
4 |
No inscribed name — perhaps originally painted |
|
|
5 |
C. FLAVI PROCULI |
C. Flavius Proculus |
|
6 |
NAMGYDDE |
(?) Namgyddus |
|
7 |
C. F. PROCUIL BYDBA/LIS F |
C. Flavius Proculus, son of Bydbal |
|
8 |
PROCUL |
(C. Flavius?) Proculus |
|
9 |
CANDIDE |
(?) Candidus (or Candida?) |
|
10 |
M. F. IUSTI |
M. Flavius Iustus |
|
11 |
FLAMINIAE GAETULIAE |
Flaminia Gaetulia |
3.5. Names on funerary urns in the Qasr Gelda hypogeum at Lepcis Magna (after Di Vita-Evrard et al. 1996).
of Flaminia Gaetulia mentioned in Figure 3.5. There are few young children represented in the hundreds of cremations from Lepcis, and on the ash chests female names are much less common than male ones (33 : 67). Both of these anomalies may reflect continuation of pre-Roman cultural traits. A final point about the hypogeal burials is that they continued in use even after the switch to inhumation and the fact that the inhumations were inserted into the hypogea alongside the existing ash urns that were moved to one side but not cleared out completely, suggests continuity of family use.
The contrast between building dedications from within the city where tria nomina were generally used by prominent Lepcitanians from the late first century CE and funerary texts on mausolea, evidently for people of the same sort of elevated social status, is striking. The man commemorated on the Qasr Duirat mausoleum near Lepcis, C. Marius Boccius Zurgem, has a distinctly Libyan extra cognomen and this pattern echoes other examples.71 These Libyan or Libyphoenician lineage groups seem to have remained of high significance for the first generation or so after acquisition of Roman citizen status.
The first use of Latin varied across different types of inscriptional contexts (with its use initially overlapping with Neo-Punic): public inscriptions were the first to change, fol- lowed by funerary inscriptions, and finally by names inscribed on the urns within tombs. Nor was there a synchronous cutoff point across these different types of inscriptions when Neo-Punic gave way finally to Latin. In other words, the Libyphoenician elite adopted Latin much sooner and more completely in the public sphere than in the domestic sphere. Punic remained the key spoken language at Lepcis, and its use in funerary inscriptions long out- lasted its disappearance in public inscriptions. The funerary landscape at Lepcis thus reveals a rather different pattern of identity presentation to the monumental urban core and the world of public inscriptions, statues, and mosaics.
In my work on Britain and Africa, I have dealt with very different types of data. Britain is rich in published artifact assemblages covering a wide range of materials but is com- paratively weak in epigraphic and literary data. Africa has a disproportionate volume of inscriptions and literary texts, notably from the Christian period, whereas the artifactual record is heavily slanted toward elite artworks, with few sites for which the mundane cul- ture of daily life has been well published. Nonetheless, I have found in both cases that the approach of discrepant identity has yielded interesting and valid results.72 That gives me hope that the approach will have utility elsewhere too, notwithstanding the fact that our datasets are so varied and incomplete. New approaches to data collection can enhance the
48
Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
datasets available, as in the outstanding work on household assemblages carried out by Anna Boozer in the Dakhla oasis town of Amheida.73 Dura-Europos seems to me to be another ideal site to apply discrepant identity analysis to, with its plural and highly dif- ferentiated expressions of groupness and individual personhood.74 However, rather than seeing sites like Dura-Europos as exceptional, we need to recognize the likelihood that this sort of hybrid cultural plurality was probably much closer to the norm at many sites in the Roman Empire. Nor do we need the extraordinary preservation conditions of sites like Dura-Europos, Amheida, or Pompeii to engage in the sort of analysis of identities that I am advocating. All that is required is a change of mindset and asking different questions of the available evidence.
Cultural Backwaters and Cultural Backwash
In 2012-13 there was a major exhibition in central Rome, spread across the Colosseum and several monuments in the Roman Forum. Roma Caput Mundi. . .fra dominio e integrazione explored traditional themes in Roman studies. It posed the old question: How was it that the Roman Empire enjoyed such success in unifying the ancient Mediterranean and lands beyond for so long? The theme of domination, though given equal billing in the title, was much less prominent in the displays, which strongly emphasized integration as the key aspect of Roman imperialism. Perhaps inevitably, Romanization still looms large in the model proposed:
The Romanisation of Italy and the provinces was not like a blanket spread over cities and countryside with the intention of eliminating diversity and turning the infinitely varied colours of local culture into a monochrome fabric. Roman identity was never forced on Rome’s conquered subjects, can- celling pre-existing identities as punishment for defeat. Rebellions were put down ruthlessly, but the Romans did not force their culture on submissive former enemies. .. Romanisation was the highest privilege they could offer, and since they were convinced that their culture was superior, they thought it natural that foreigners should make it their own. Individuals chose to be- come Romanised because they were attracted to Roman culture, because it raised their social status, because it allowed them access to local and public offices. [. ..] Fusion of the dominant culture and indigenous cultures could lead to diverse and novel ways of life. Romanisation was like a unique tree that spread the same branches everywhere, but produced fruits of different flavours.75
Leaving aside the florid and mixed metaphors and the emphasis on false negatives here, this passage is interesting for the way it still presents cultural change as something that was initi- ated by Romans and that took place in the provinces. However, the Rome exhibition in fact illustrated a very different pattern of cultural interaction. Since virtually all the material pre- sented in the exhibition came from Rome or Italy, the real subject was the transformation of the metropolitan heartland of the Roman Empire and the integration of an extraordinary diversity of new cultural markers, religions, and ethnic groups within Roman society. The catalogue is filled with images of these cultural innovations often culturally incongruous in the context of republican Italy, with much epigraphic testimony of migration of people from all corners of the empire, some voluntarily, some forced. Here we encounter one of the great paradoxes of imperialism: the more wide-flung and diverse the cultural territories incor- porated, the greater the long-term transformation of the metropolitan core, with cultural change at the center generally running at a faster pace and exceeding the transformation in the provinces. The reason is self-evident when one considers the operation of an empire
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like Rome — the individual provinces were opened up to new cultural ideas from Rome and to potentially enhanced regional contacts and migration flows, but the effects often appear to be focused at certain key sites, or on particular social groups (mainly elites) and representative of only a subset of the totality of the material culture of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the metropolitan center was open to reciprocal cultural flows and mi- gration with all the provinces. The scale and pace of cultural change was thus much more dramatic and multi-dimensional than what we encounter in the provinces. Many provincial territories remained relative cultural backwaters, where pre-Roman traditions and practices were long maintained, while we might characterize what we witness at Rome as the cultural backwash of empire.
The cultural changes were not always welcome in conservative Rome — as the section in the Roma Caput Mundi exhibition on the attempted repression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE illustrates. But it is equally apparent from the sequel to the ultimately unsuccessful action against the Bacchic cult that the Roman state had limited ability to constrain or con- trol the multilateral process of cultural exchanges that imperial conquest had unleashed. Like the tide coming in, cultural backwash is an unavoidable side effect of empire.
Conclusions
In this paper, I have advanced eight key arguments.
In the first place, I challenge the common assumption that there was a clear-cut Roman identity that was widely adopted across the Roman world. This has implications for the way in which we approach the material culture and behaviors of people living in the Roman provinces. Linked to this first proposition, I also think it mistaken to prioritize a singular non-Roman alternative identity. Thirdly, this Roman : non-Roman binary opposition is embedded in Romanization theory and is a further reason we need to replace the Roman- ization discourse with new approaches linked to identity.
The fourth issue raised relates to the emergence of “identity” in the last decades as a serious alternative to Romanization, and the fact that the application of identity studies in archaeology also has problematic aspects and theoretical and methodological processes that need to be clearly defined.
My fifth point relates to my own approach to identity, which takes as its starting points the inherent diversity of material culture in the Roman world and the fact that imperial systems elicit discrepant behavioral responses covering a broad spectrum from resistance to consensual participation.
The next point acknowledges that while there is value in looking for variance in identity markers and behaviors at the level of broad groups — the army, townspeople, rural commu- nities— it is evident that there was huge variance within these groups as well as between them and a plurality of identities resulted which were dynamic rather than static.
My seventh point recognizes that the ultimate goal of studying identity in the Roman world is not simply to categorize specific examples (the stamp collecting approach), but to use such studies to arrive at a deeper understanding of how the impact of the Roman Empire operated at the social level, revealing the varied choices and priorities of the mil- lions of subjects, not simply the culture and aspirations of the ruling elite who have pre- dominated in the Romanization view.
Finally, I have suggested that the cultural flows between metropolitan center and provinces, between province and province, and between provinces and center are highly variable. Paradoxically, especially in relation to the assumptions underlying a model like Romanization, the greatest net cultural change in an imperial system is often located at its metropolitan center due to the focusing there of the diverse cultural influences of all the provinces. This is what Edwards and Woolf encapsulated in Rome the Cosmopolis, but we
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might equally think of Rome as one of the first multicultural cities, characterized not by its sense of unchanging Romanitas so much as myriad plural identities.76
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1 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006).
2 The chapter summarizes and takes further work on identity that I have been engaged with over the last decade, see “Vulgar and Weak ‘Romanization,’ or Time for a Paradigm Shift?,” review of Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization, ed. Simon Keay and Nicola Terrenato, Journal of Roman Archaeology 15 (2002): 536-40; “Being Roman: Expressing Identity in a Pro- vincial Setting,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 (2004): 5-25; An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC-AD 409 (London: Penguin, 2007); “Cultural Crossovers: Global and Local Identities in the Classical World,” in Material Culture and Social Identities in the Roman World, ed. Shelley Hales and Tamar Hodos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 283-95; Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
3 Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1998); but cf. his earlier article, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Cul- ture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philo- logical Society 40 (1994): 116-43.
4 The paper is published as John C. Barrett, “Romanization: A Critical Comment,” in Dialogues in Roman Imperialism: Power, Discourse and Discrepant Experience in the Roman Empire, ed. David J. Mattingly (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1997), 51-64 (quote from 52).
5 Ibid., 59.
6 Leicester Laith Trail, see http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/research/projects / mapping-faith/ faith-trail.
7 See Timothy Insoll, “Configuring Identities in Archaeology,” in The Archaeology of Identities: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2007), 1-18, see 1 1-13 for the comparison of modern multicultural societies with the Roman Empire.
8 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995); Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998); Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2004).
10 Ton Derks and Nico Roymans, eds., Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tra- dition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Rac- ism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sian Jones, The Archaeol- ogy of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1997).
11 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 58.1.21 cited by Jonathan Conant, Stay ing Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
12 J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
13 Tacitus, Germania, trans. J. B. Rives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14 Yves Moderan, “La province, troisieme patrie,” in Provinces et identites provinciales dans VAfrique romaine, ed. Claude Briand-Ponsart and Yves Moderan (Caen: CRAHM, 2011), 9-40.
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15 Richard Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London: Routledge 2005); Simon James, ‘“Romanization and the Peoples of Britain,” in Italy and the West: Com- parative Issues in Romanization, ed. Simon Keay and Nicola Terrenato (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2001), 187-209; Mattingly, Dialogues in Roman Imperialism-, Jane Webster, “Creolizing the Ro- man Provinces,” American Journal of Archaeology 105, no. 2 (2001): 209-25; Jane Webster and Nick Cooper, eds., Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives (Leicester: School of Archaeo- logical Studies, University of Leicester, 1996).
16 See inter alia, Barri Jones and David J. Mattingly, An Atlas of Roman Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Mattingly, Tripolitania (London: Batsford, 1995); Mattingly “Being Roman”; Mattingly, Imperial Possession; and Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity.
17 Jane Webster, “Roman Imperialism and the ‘Post-Imperial Age,”’ in Roman Imperialism, 1-17; Webster, “Ethnographic Barbarity: Colonial Discourse and ‘Celtic Warrior Societies,’” in ibid., 111-23; Webster, “Necessary Comparisons: A Post-Colonial Approach to Religious Syncretism in the Roman Provinces,” World Archaeology 28, no. 3 (1997): 324-38.
18 Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (London: Routledge, 2000); Alan Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs, 332 BC-AD 642 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC-AD 337 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1993); Miguel Versluys, “Exploring Identities in the Phoenician, Hellenistic and Roman East,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 65, nos. 3-4 (2008): 341-56. Cf. also, Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek.”
19 See most notably, Gail L. Hoffman, “Theory and Methodology: Study of Identities Using Ar- chaeological Evidence from Dura-Europos,” in Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, ed. Lisa R. Brody and Gail L. Hoffman, exh. cat. (Chestnut Hill: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston Col- lege, 2011), 45-69; Nigel Pollard, “Colonial and Cultural Identities in Parthian and Roman Du- ra-Europos,” in Aspects of the Roman East: Papers in Honour of Professor Fergus Millar FBA, ed. Richard Alston and Samuel N. C. Lieu (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 81-102. Cf. J. A. Baird, “The Graffiti of Dura-Europos: A Contextual Approach,” in Ancient Graffiti in Context, ed. J. A. Baird and Claire Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2011), 49-68, for an attempt to show how different communities within the town employed graffiti in varied ways and to different degrees.
20 Conant, Staying Roman, 3-9, for an insightful analysis of Romanness.
21 For a representative range of recent studies, Margarita Diaz-Andreu et al., The Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity and Religion (London: Routledge, 2005); Andrew Gardner, “Social Identity and the Duality of Structure in Late Roman-Period Britain,” Journal of Social Archaeology 2, no. 3 (2002); Gardner, ed., Agency Uncovered: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Agency, Power, and Being Human (London: University College London Press, 2004); Melanie Giles, A Forged Glamour: Landscape, Identity and Material Culture in the Iron Age (Oxford: Windgather, 2012); Margarita Gleba and Helle W. Horsnaes, eds., Communi- cating Identity in Italic Iron Age Communities (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011); Hales and Hodos, Material Culture; Edward Herring and Kathryn Lomas, Gender Identities in Italy in the First Mil- lennium BC (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2009); Timothy Insoll, ed., The Archaeology of Identities: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2007): Lynn Meskell, “Archaeologies of Identity,” in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 187-213; Louise Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ursula Rothe, Dress and Cultural Identity in the Rhine-Moselle Region of the Roman Empire (Ox- ford: Archaeopress, 2009); Peter van Dommelen and Nicola Terrenato, eds., Articulating Local
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Cultures: Power and Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (Portsmouth: Journal of Ro- man Archaeology, 2007).
22 See inter alia, Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry, eds., Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (Lon- don: Routledge, 1998); Claude Briand-Ponsart, ed., Identites et cultures dans I’Algerie antique (Rouen: Publications de l’Universite de Rouen, 2005); Claude Briand-Ponsart and Sylvie Cro- giez, eds., EAfrique du nord antique et medievale: Memoire, identite et imaginaire (Rouen: Publi- cations de l’Universite de Rouen, 2002); Emma Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Monique Dondin-Payre and Marie-Therese Raepsaet-Charlier, Noms, identites culturelles et Romanisation sous le Haut-Empire (Brussels: Timperman, 2001); Janet Huskinson, ed., Experiencing Empire: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 2000); Andrew Wallace-Ha- drill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Tim Whit- marsh, ed., Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2010).
23 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity, 1984).
24 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 208-9.
25 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity, Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47, see 5: “What is problematic is not that a particular term is used, but how it is used.” For an in- sightful discussion on the potential and problems of the use of identity in Roman archaeology, see Martin Pitts, “The Emperors New Clothes? The Utility of Identity in Roman Archaeology,” American Journal of Archaeology 111, no. 4 (2007): 693-713.
26 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” 6-8.
27 It also remains the case that Brubaker and Coopers rejection of the term “identity” is far from accepted within the social sciences in general, see inter alia Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, 3rd ed. (Fondon: Routledge, 2008).
28 Here I must acknowledge that other contributors to this volume are far more expert than I in researching material culture across a wide range of artifact types. My analysis of the shortcom- ings of some of the traditional approaches to artifactual studies is not intended as a criticism of their work, but rather an observation on a lack of critical rigor in the field more generally. As is apparent from the papers presented in this volume, there is a commendable engagement with new agendas among the contributors.
29 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Chris Gosden, Archaeology of Colonialism: Cultural Con- tact from 5000 BC to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169-78.
30 Jeremy Evans, “Material Approaches to the Identification of Different Romano-British Site Types,” in Britons and Romans: Advancing an Archaeological Agenda, ed. Simon James and Mar- tin Millet (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2001), 26-35. See also Robin Fleming, “Strug- gling to be Roman in a Former Roman Province,” in this volume.
31 R. Bruce Hitchner, “Globalization Avant la Lettre: Globalization and the History of the Roman
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Empire,” New Global Studies 2, no. 2 (2008), doi:10. 2202/1940-0004. 1034; Tamar Hodos, “Local and Global Perspectives in the Study of Social and Cultural Identities,” in Material Culture, esp. 23-27; Martin Pitts, “Globalizing the Local in Roman Britain: An Anthropological Approach to Social Change,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27 (2008): 493-506; Robert Witcher, “Globalisation and Roman Imperialism: Perspectives on Identities in Roman Italy,” in The Emer- gence of State Identities in Italy in the First Millennium BC, ed. Edward Herring and Kathryn Lomas (London: Accordia Research Institute, University of London, 2000), 213-25.
32 Martin Pitts, “Regional Identities and the Social Use of Ceramics,” in TRAC 2004: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Durham 2004, ed. James Bruhn, Ben Croxford, and Dimitris Grigoropoulos (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005), 50-64; Pitts, “Pots and Pits: Drinking and Deposition in Late Iron Age South-East Britain,” Oxford Journal of Archaeol- ogy 24, no. 2 (2005): 143-61; Pitts, “Consumption, Deposition and Social Practice: A Ceramic Approach to Intra-Site Analysis in Late Iron Age to Roman Britain,” Internet Archaeology 21 (2007), doi: 10. 1 1 141/ia.2 1.2; Pitts, “Artefact Suites and Social Practice: An Integrated Approach to Roman Provincial Linds Assemblages,” Facta: A Journal of Roman Material Culture Studies 4 (2010): 125-52; Steven Willis, “Samian Pottery: A Resource for the Study of Roman Britain and Beyond; The Results of the English Heritage Lunded Samian Project,” Internet Archaeology 17 (2005), doi:10.11141/ia.21.2.
33 The seminal text remains James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early Amer- ican Life (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
34 “Grey literature” is the term used for archived reports, whether held in hard copy or in digital format. The Archaeological Data Service (ADS) is a common repository for digital files (http:// archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/greylit/). These resources are increasingly being ex- ploited by national research programs, as in the case of a current project on Roman rural settle- ment (http://www.reading.ac.uk/archaeology/research/roman-rural-settlement/).
35 Lindsay Allason-Jones, ed., Artefacts in Roman Britain: Their Purpose and Use (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2011). Lor PAS, see http://finds.org/uk.
36 Hilary Cool, “An Overview of the Small Linds from Catterick,” in Cataractonium: Roman Cat- terick and Its Hinterland; Excavations and Research, 1958-1997, ed. Peter Wilson (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2002), 24-43; Cool, The Roman Cemetery at Brougham, Cumbria: Ex- cavations 1966-67 (London: Roman Society, 2004); Cool, Eating and Drinking in Roman Brit- ain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Hilary Cool and M. J. Baxter, “Exploring Romano-British Linds Assemblages,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 21, no. 4 (2002): 363-80; Hilary Cool and Chris Philo, eds., Roman Castleford Excavations 1974-85: Volume 1, The Small Finds (Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeological Services, 1998); Nina Crummy, Colchester Ar- chaeological Report 2: The Roman Small Finds from Excavations in Colchester 1971-9 (Colchester: Colchester Archaeological Trust, 1983).
37 Hella Eckardt, “The Social Distribution of Roman Artefacts: The Case of Nail-Cleaners and Brooches in Britain,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 139-60; Hella Eckardt and Nina Crummy, Styling the Body in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain: A Contextual Approach to Toilet Instruments (Montagnac: Editions Monique Mergoil, 2008), 36.
38 Simon James, Excavations at Dura-Europos 1928-1937: Final Report 7; The Arms and Armour and Other Military Equipment (London: British Museum, 2004). Also see James, “The ‘Roman- ness of the Soldiers’: Barbarized Periphery or Imperial Core?,” in this volume.
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39 Thomas Grane, ed., Beyond the Roman Frontier: Roman Influences on the Northern Barbaricum (Rome: Quasar, 2007); David J. Mattingly, ed., The Archaeology of Fazzan: Volume 1, Synthesis (London: Society for Libyan Studies, 2003).
40 Duncan Garrow and Chris Gosden, Technologies of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art: 400 BC to AD 100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Duncan Garrow, Chris Gosden, and J. D. Hill, eds., Rethinking Celtic Art (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008); Peter Wells, Image and Response in Early Europe (London: Duckworth, 2008).
41 Sarah Scott and Jane Webster, eds., Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2003). See also Johnston in this volume.
42 David J. Mattingly, “The Art of the Unexpected: Ghirza in the Libyan Pre-Desert,” in Numis- matique, langues, ecriture et arts du livre, specificite des arts figures Afrique du Nord antique et medievale, ed. Serge Lancel (Paris: CTHS, 1999), 383-405; Mattingly, “Family Values: Art and Power at Ghirza in the Libyan Pre-Desert,” in Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art, 153-70. Cf. Paul Zanker, “Selbstdarstellung am Rand der libyschen Wiiste: Die Reliefs an den Hauplings-Mausoleen in der Nordnekropole von Ghirza,” in Austausch und Inspiration: Kul- turkontakt als Impuls architektonischer Innovation, ed. Felix Pirson (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2004), 214-26.
43 Like identity, ancient colonialism has attracted increased interest from classical scholars in recent years, informed by postcolonial theory, leading to new perspectives: Michael Dietler, Archaeolo- gies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Michael Given, The Archaeology of the Colonized (London: Routledge, 2004); Andrew Gardner, “Thinking about Roman Imperialism: Postcolonial- ism, Globalization and Beyond?,” Britannia 44 (2013): 1-25; Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism-, Tamar Hodos, Local Responses to Colonization in the Iron Age Mediterranean (London: Routledge, 2006); Henry Hurst and Sara Owen, eds., Ancient Colonizations: Analogy, Similarity and Difference (London: Duckworth, 2005); Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, eds., The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002); Gil Stein, ed., The Archaeology of Co- lonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2005); Peter van Dommelen, On Colonial Grounds: A Comparative Study of Colonialism and Rural Settle- ment in First Millennium BC West Central Sardinia (Leiden: University of Leiden, 1998).
44 The term “discrepant identity” is my elaboration on what Said called “discrepant experience,” see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1992). See also, David J. Mattingly, “Dialogues of Power and Experience in the Roman Empire,” in Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, 1-16 and Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 213-45.
45 Keay and Terrenato, Italy and the West; Martin Millett, The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Wells, How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
46 The table is a development from an idea initially explored in Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 16.
47 For a review of some of the evidence for the benign assumptions about Roman imperialism, see Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 13-22; Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22, 150-55.
48 A few examples from many, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
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Empire, vol. 1 (1776; London: J. Murray, 1896), 78: “If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Theodor Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire: The Euro- pean Provinces (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 4: “Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long in an orderly sequence. [ . . .] In its sphere, which those who belonged to it were not far wrong in regarding as the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever done.” Francis Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1915), 10: “The men of the Empire wrought for the betterment and the happiness of the world.” Albert Rivet, Town and Country in Roman Britain (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1958), 78:“For success was only achieved when the garrisons could be withdrawn, the forts dismantled and the local inhabitants be left to settle down to sensible Roman life in towns.”
John Wacher, ed., The Roman World, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1987), 1:12: “The endurance of the Roman Empire is one of the success stories of history. That it survived so long is a sign of its principal achievement, whereby a heterogeneous mixture of races and creeds were induced to settle down together in a more or less peaceful way under the Pax Romana .”
49 Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 18-20.
50 Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), espe- cially 341-544 on kingdoms and empires.
51 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (Lon- don: Penguin, 2010).
52 See for example, Vasunia, Classics and Colonial India, 157-91 on the employment of classical architecture in India; James Morris, Pax Britannica (London: Penguin, 1968), 177-213 on ar- chitecture in London and India. See also Richard Hingley, ed., Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2001); Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2000).
53 Rebecca Redfern, “A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Cultural Change in Dorset, England (Mid-to-Late Fourth Century BC to the End of the Fourth Century AD),” Britannia 39 (2008):
161-91. Rebecca Redfern and Sharon DeWitte, “A New Approach to the Study of Romanization in Britain: A Regional Perspective of Cultural Change in Late Iron Age and Roman Dorset Using the Siler and Gompertz-Makeham Models of Mortality” American Journal of Physical Anthro- pology 144, no. 2 (2011): 269-85.
54 Redfern and DeWitte, “A New Approach,” 278-79: “The age patterns of mortality within the late Iron Age and Romano-British samples, as revealed by the Siler model parameter estimates, suggest that Romanization had deleterious effects on the age groups that are typically the most vulnerable, i.e., very young children and the elderly. [. . .] Following the Roman conquest, men were apparently at significantly higher risks of dying than women. This finding questions many traditional and often implicit assumptions about Romanization and life in the Roman Empire, fundamentally that this cultural change and social environment would be more advantageous for men.”
55 We are just returning to such issues, despite interest in these themes 40 years ago, Marcel Bena- bou, La resistance africaine a la romanisation (Paris: Maspero, 1976), D. M. Pippidi, ed., Assimila- tion et resistance a la culture Greco-romaine dans le monde ancient (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976).
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56 On Roman funerary practices see inter alia, Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead: Roman Fu- nerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Richard Jones, “Burial Customs of Rome and the Provinces,” in The Roman World, 2:812-37; Ian Mor- ris, Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Jocelyn Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). The regional complexity and the use of funerary ritual to express aspects of identity is more evident in Valerie Hope, Constructing Identity: The Roman Funerary Monuments of Aquileia, Mainz and Nimes (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2001); John Pearce, Mar- tin Millett, and Manuela Struck, eds., Burial, Society and Context in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000); Lea Stirling and David Stone, eds., Mortuary Landscapes of North Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
57 Adrian Goldsworthy and Ian Haynes, eds., The Roman Army as a Community (Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999); Simon James, “Soldiers and Civilians: Identity and In- teraction in Roman Britain,” in Britons and Romans: Advancing an Archaeological Agenda, ed. Simon James and Martin Millett (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2001), 77-89. Cf. Mat- tingly, Imperial Possession, 16-224; Imperialism, Power, and Identity, 220-36. See also James, “The ‘Romanness of the Soldiers,’” in this volume. Interestingly, the distinctive package of mate- rial culture associated with the army is extraordinarily widespread in the Roman world — indeed it is one of the factors underlying the evolution of the idea of a Romanization process, though we now recognize it as something much more focused on a specific minority group within imperial society, rather than a sign of a general pattern of cultural change.
58 Geoff W. Adams and Rebecca Tobler, Romano-British Tombstones between the P‘ and 3rd Cen- turies AD: Epigraphy, Gender and Familial Relations (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2007).
59 David J. Mattingly, “Urbanism, Epigraphy and Identity in the Towns of Britain under Roman Rule,” in A Roman Miscellany: Essays in Honour of Anthony R. Birley on His 70th Birthday, ed. H. M. Schellenberg, V. E. Hirschmann, and A. Krieckhaus (Gdansk: Department of Archaeology, Gdansk University, 2008), 53-71.
60 Peter van Dommelen, “Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in the Mediterra- nean,” World Archaeology 28, no. 3 (1997): 305-23; Van Dommelen, “Ambiguous Matters: Colo- nialism and Local Identities in Punic Sardinia,” in The Archaeology of Colonialism, 121-47; Van Dommelen, “Colonial Interactions and Hybrid Practices: Phoenician and Carthaginian Settle- ment in the Ancient Mediterranean,” in Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, 109-41.
6 1 Terrenato highlights what he sees as modernizing tendencies of those who would like to com- pare the Roman Empire with other empires, whether this comparison was done in the nine- teenth century or in the postcolonial age, arguing for the uniqueness of the Roman Empire. Terrenato, “The Deceptive Archetype: Roman Colonialism in Italy and Postcolonial Thought,” in Ancient Colonizations, 59-72; cf. also his “The Cultural Implications of the Roman Conquest,” in Roman Europe, ed. Edward Bispham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 234-64. But attempting to disallow comparative study of empire informed by postcolonial approaches, while effectively ignoring the extent to which the conceptual framing of classical studies was and still is influenced by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century comparative study is surely disingenuous. See further Peter van Dommelen and Nicola Terrenato, “Introduction: Local Cultures and the Expanding Roman Republic,” in Articulating Local Cultures, 7-12.
62 Held at Yale University on September 20-21, 2013, Scholars’ Day gathered the curators of Roman
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Identities in the Roman World: Discrepancy, Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Plurality
in the Provinces and contributors to this book to discuss and develop themes for the exhibition and publication.
63 Barbara L. Stark and John K. Chance, “The Strategies of Provincials in Empires,” in The Compar- ative Archaeology of Complex Societies, ed. Michael E. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 192-237. Cf. also, Jane Webster, “Archaeologies of Slavery and Servitude: Bringing ‘New World’ Perspectives to Roman Britain,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 161-79.
64 Sen, Identity and Violence, esp. 20-28.
65 Ibid., 30.
66 Hugo Gryn, Chasing Shadows: Memories of a Vanished World (London: Viking, 2000), 6.
67 Eric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa 200-450 CE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Conant, Staying Roman.
68 For a recent new study of this fascinating tombstone, see Maureen Carroll, ‘“The Insignia of Women: Dress, Gender and Identity on the Roman Funerary Monument of Regina from Arbe- ia ’’Archaeological Journal 169 (2012): 281-311.
69 Ginette Di Vita-Evrard, Sergio Fontana, and Luisa Musso, “Leptis Magna: Une tombe exemplaire du haut-empire,” in Monuments funeraires, institutions autochtones en Afrique du nord antique et medievale, ed. Pol Trousset (Paris: CTHS, 1995), 153-78; Di Vita-Evrard et al., “L’ipogeo dei Flavi a Leptis Magna presso Gasr Gelda,” Libya Antiqua, n.s., 2 (1996): 85-133; Sergio Fontana, “Lepcis Magna: The Romanization of a Major African City through Burial Evidence,” in Italy and the West, 161-72.
70 Fontana, “Lepcis Magna,” 167.
71 Joyce M. Reynolds and John B. Ward-Perkins, eds., The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (IRT) (Rome: British School at Rome, 1952), IRT 729 (Qasr Duirat); Fontana, “Lepcis Magna,” 168-69 citing Q. Domitius Camillus Nysim ( IRT 692); Q. Caecilius Cerialis Phiscon (IRT 673); C. Cal- purnius Tracachalus Dosiedes (IRT 677).
72 For Britain, see in particular, Mattingly, Imperial Possession-, for Africa, see some preliminary thoughts in my Imperialism, Power, and Identity. The African case study was the subject of my 2013 Jerome Lectures and will be prepared in due course for publication.
73 Anna L. Boozer, Housing Empire: The Archaeology of Daily Life in Roman Amheida, Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
74 Indeed, there are already a number of excellent studies that pick up on the plural identities ex- pressed through the site’s remarkable material record, see inter alia Patricia DeLeeuw, “A Peace- ful Pluralism: The Durene Mithraeum, Synagogue, and Christian Building”; Lucinda Dirven, “Strangers and Sojourners: The Religious Behavior of Palmyrenes and Other Foreigners in Du- ra-Europos,” both in Crossroads of Antiquity, 189-99 and 201-20.
75 Andrea Giardina and Fabrizio Pesando, eds., Roma Caput Mundi: Una citta tra dominio e inte- grazione, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2012), 33-34; see also Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “Romanizzazi- on,” in ibid., 111-16.
76 Cf. Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf, Rome the Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2003).
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Household Objects and Social Memories in Roman Spain and Gaul
Andrew C. Johnston
One finds it often asserted in modern scholarship that in their effacement of identity and the erasure of their traditions, the inhabitants of the western provinces of the empire “were distinctive among the emperors’ subjects in being only Roman.”1 This essay endeavors to problematize this idea, and to show, on the contrary, that in the provinces, becoming or “being Roman” — whether by this we mean the acquisition of citizenship or the participa- tion in certain cultural practices — did not preclude the felt sense of being something quite different, of belonging to other and more subjectively meaningful local communities. This analysis of the negotiation of local identities within the western Roman imperial world seeks to move the discussion beyond an outmoded emphasis on processes of “Romaniza- tion” and “resistance” or on quantifications of “Romanness,” a cultural monolith that is in itself an illusory and anachronistic concept. I will focus on a handful of fascinating, under- appreciated small finds from across Roman Spain and Gaul, remarkable but representative household objects that afford a window into how the inhabitants of these provinces situated and remembered themselves in an imperial world. By “household” objects, I here mean portable, non-monumental works in metal — bronze or silver — that would have been kept, displayed, and interacted with primarily in private, domestic contexts rather than in pub- lic. Through these five case studies, which place these artifacts in their cultural historical contexts, this essay offers a new approach to understanding local identities in the Roman West and the importance of social memory — an expression of collective experience that identifies a group, giving it a sense of its past and helping to define its aspirations for the future — in the construction and expression thereof.2
SUCELLUS
Our first case study takes us to the city of Vienna (Vienne, France) in the province of Gal- lia Narbonensis (see map, p. v). Originally a settlement of the people of the Allobroges, its advantageous situation on the Rhone at the confluence with the Gere made it a gateway to northern Gaul, and attracted Roman merchants in great numbers already in the first half of the first century BCE. Economic, social, and cultural anxieties seem to have resulted in the expulsion of Romans from Vienna in 61 BCE during the brief uprising of the Allobroges, led by their chieftain Catugnatus. But tensions soon subsided; by the Augustan period, the city had been granted the honorific status of a colonia, and by the middle of the first century CE
Andrew C. Johnston
the emperor Claudius could cite Vienna as an exemplum of a once-foreign place that now admirably participated in the rights and responsibilities of Roman citizenship.3 Vienna is thus representative of the compelling complexities that characterized many provincial commu- nities of the empire: it was increasingly integrated in political and economic networks that connected it with Rome and the wider Mediterranean, while retaining an appreciation of distinctiveness and local identity informed by memories of its Roman and pre-Roman pasts.
It was here that, in 1866, a construction project near the ancient site of the Roman theater fortuitously uncovered a cache of artifacts from the mid-imperial period, the most important of which were two bronze statuettes of a male divinity.4 One was ultimately acquired by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (fig. 4.1), the other by the British Museum.5 The former — a bearded, well-muscled figure — strikes a pose recognizably influenced by Greek artistic traditions, with a hipshot, almost Polykleitan, stance. He is nude but for a wolf skin wrapped around his shoulders, its forepaws tied at his sternum; the pelt covers his head, leaving visible only a few locks of hair that frame his Zeus-like face, and falls across the upper part of his outstretched left arm, its hind legs and tail dangling behind his back. His left hand gripped the haft of a long mallet, now lost, while in his extended right hand he holds an olla (small jar). But the most remarkable element of this statuette is the object that rises up from behind the figure: a huge mallet, with five smaller mallets radiating out from the head. Although this figure of the “mallet god” has been subject to a series of “Romanizing” (mis) identifications since its discovery — Hercules, Jupiter, Dispater, Silvanus — the scholarly consensus is now that the statue rep- resents the divinity Sucellus, whose name in the Gaulish lan- guage means — fittingly, given that his conventional primary attribute is the oversized mallet — “the Good Striker.”6 The case for this identification is strengthened by, among other evidence, votive altars from Gaul, on which a god of similar iconography is explicitly named in the inscription as Sucellus.7
The other Sucellus from the Vienna hoard, which now resides in the collection of the British Museum (fig. 4.2), is represented with many of the same attri- butes as the first: an olla in the outstretched right hand, and a long-hafted mallet (now lost) gripped in the left; a full beard and long hair with articulated locks, again partly cloaked by a wolf skin, a feature which clearly evokes the lion skin of Hercules. There are, however, sig- nificant differences between the two bronzes. This second figure is not in the style of a heroic nude, but rather is clothed in the traditional local costume, consisting of a tight-fitting, thigh- length check-patterned tunic with sleeves, worn over similarly-patterned pantaloons, topped off by what appears to be a sagum, a typical cloak of the peoples of Gaul. Moreover, the detail and proportions of this Sucellus, whose classical stance recalls that of his larger counterpart, are somewhat less masterfully executed. On stylistic grounds, both figures probably date to the late first or early second century CE. Given that the indigenous Sucellus was almost cer- tainly not the subject of figural representation until after the Roman conquest, these images partake of the invention of tradition, capitalizing on a shared consciousness of and desired continuity with a collective past, and imbuing this past with a ritual and symbolic function in the present.8
Although it has been frequently repeated in scholarship that the trove of objects to which these statuettes belonged was found in the lararium of a Roman house, the original
4.1. Bronze statuette of Sucellus, ist-2nd century CE, Vienne. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 54.998.
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Household Objects and Social Memories in Roman Spain and Gaul
archaeological context is, in fact, uncertain, in light of the circumstances of its incidental discovery.9 But it is a plausible hypothesis that these bronzes had at one time in the second century CE belonged to the shrine of a household, or perhaps of a professional corporation, at Vienna; comparanda for the presence of such figurines in domestic ritual contexts are known from various parts of early imperial Gaul.10 Thus it seems that a member — or mem- bers, across multiple generations — of the municipal elite of Vienna commissioned these works in bronze from two different artists for the purpose of private display and devo- tion, and that the two versions of the god may have been intended to complement one another. Other residents of Vienna of a lower social status expressed their veneration of the god in different ways, but with a similarly local audience in mind: a stone stela, prob- ably intended for use as a funerary monument, was found near the so-called “House of Sucellus” in the residential quar- ter on the right bank of the Rhone (Saint-Romain-en-Gal) with a comparatively crude but recognizable representation of Sucellus, dedicated by a small-time tradesman ( sarcitor ) called Atticus.11 While the devotees who commissioned the bronzes chose to align themselves with “classical” modes of viewing and particular patterns of conspicuous consump- tion shared by a larger Roman imperial cultural koine, these Sucellus statues nevertheless reflect the construction and performance of a distinctly local identity, aspects of which would have been unintelligible to those outsiders at Vienna who were not conversant in the local cultural vocabulary.
A contemporary literary source may illuminate, or at least approximate, the texture of some of these Narbonen- sian conversations. In his “introductory discourse” Heracles, the second-century CE Greek writer Lucian relates an anec- dote in which he, while sojourning in Gaul, found himself pondering a strange painting of what appeared to him to be Hercules, whom he claims the locals call in their native lan- guage “Ogmios.” Although some superficial elements of the iconography of this “Hercules” are intelligible to Lucian, like his club and lion- skin, the hero is otherwise unrecognizable: he is old and dark-skinned, with only wisps of white hair left on his balding head, and, most surprising of all, he drags behind him a great throng of men whose ears are chained to his own tongue and who seemingly follow him with great eagerness. As Lucian stands at a loss as to how to interpret the scene, a local wise man approaches him and, in remarkably good Greek, explicates its meaning: his people connect eloquence not with Hermes, as the Greeks do, but with this Hercules-Ogmios. As “eloquence personified,” the god is depicted as an old man because this is the age where the art of speaking reaches its perfection, and the chains that bind the ears of the men to the tongue of the god thus represent a visual metaphor of the power of persuasion.12
It has been suggested recently that we are to identify Lucians philosophizing interlocutor as none other than his sophistic counterpart from Arelate (Arles), Lavorinus, with whom he may actually have conversed during a visit to Gallia Narbonensis, or, more likely, whose writings were reworked by Lucian in order to stage a Active and allusive literary encounter.13 But regardless of the exact inspiration for the conversation related in this text, it possesses a certain verisimilitude, allowing us to “eavesdrop” on discourses of identity that are other- wise difficult to discern, given the nature of our evidence. Particularly important about the story told by Lucian is that behind the superficial syncretism of Ogmios with Hercules actu-
4.2. Bronze statuette of Sucellus, ist-2nd century CE, Vienne. British Museum, London, 1894,0507.
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ally lies a meaningful and deep-seated rhetoric of difference, an act of remembering rather than forgetting. Ogmios carries a couple of Hercules’s token items, but for local viewers he is unequivocally not the Greek hero, in the same way that, although a casual glance at the attributes or countenance or posture of Sucellus might suggest to an outsiders eye Hercules or Zeus or Silvanus, on closer inspection the god ultimately frustrates all of these interpreta- tions. As responses to Roman power, these kinds of images— and the irrecoverable narratives and mythologies that were presumably constructed about their subjects— were discursive statements that engaged with imperial artistic and religious grammars in order, ultimately, to display a highly negotiated localism.14
Sucellus was prominent throughout southern Gaul, and though sometimes conflated on Narbonensian monuments with the Roman Silvanus, he maintained a distinctive per- sonality.15 He is implicitly invoked through his reper- toire of symbols (usually olla and mallet, often together with trees and a dog) on anepigraphic altars lacking anthropomorphic representations, and explicitly rep- resented in stone and bronze both at the other major urban centers near Vienna like Glanum (Saint- Re my- de-Provence), Nemausus (Nimes), Vasio (Vaison-la-Ro- maine), and Arelate, and in the hinterland at sites like Orpierre (fig. 4.3). 16 The iconography of Sucellus as well as the diverse style and medium of his representation suggest room for significant local innovation and varia- tion even within this region, as seems to have been the case further north and west of the Rhone valley among the Aedui, Lingones, and Arverni, where attributes relating to viticulture and wine consumption frequently occur alongside the typical mallet. But it was in and around Vienna where his cult seems to have had per- haps the most vibrancy and longevity.17 A votive altar dedicated to deus Sucellus by a woman with a Roman name, Gellia Iucunda, has been dated as late as the fourth century CE,18 and the image of Sucellus is found on a series of decorative ceramic medallions, a genre popular in the valley of the Rhone, including Vienna, during the late second and early third centuries CE. Herein he is depicted with the iconography character- istic of the bronze statuettes or stone reliefs — bearded, with the olla in his outstretched right hand and the mallet in his left, flanked by a small tree and accompanied by a dog — and is explicitly identified by an exclamatory, wishful legend: Sucellum propitium nobis (“Sucellus, be gracious unto us!”).19 Sucellus is, in fact, the only indigenous divinity to be included on these medallions, the mythological scenes of which are predominantly Greek; this suggests the continually renegotiated importance of Sucellus to the local elite of Vienna and its territory, even as they came increasingly to participate in the cultural inheritance of the imperial center. The ultimate motivations behind these kinds of cultural choices and the exact valences of the god Sucellus for the people of Vienna, either individually in the expressions of their personal devotion or as a collective in the construction of a community identity, remain obscure. But it is remarkable that the cult of this divinity continued to compete successfully in the pluralistic “religious marketplace” of the Roman world long into the imperial period.20
The bronze statuettes of Sucellus that we have examined embody the complexities of local social memories among the Allobroges of Vienna, the importance of which ought
4.3. Bronze statuette of Sucellus, ist-2nd century CE, Orpierre (Haute-Alpes). Musee d’Archeologie nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 58257.
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Household Objects and Social Memories in Roman Spain and Gaul
not to be understated. Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist of the mid-first century CE, claimed that, already in his day, Narbonensis was “in the cultivation of its fields, in the reputation of its men and manners, in the abundance of its resources... more truly Italy than a province.”21 Modern appropriation of this contemporary Roman mentality, which is informed by a problematic set of imperial rhetorical tropes, has contributed in large part to the prevailing thread in scholarship that has tended to emphasize the “Romanization” of Narbonensis and the provincials’ “forgetfulness,” at the expense of telling other tales about local communities and identities.22 But Sucellus at Vienna is a salutary reminder of the lim- its of these kinds of historical models and narratives.
Genius Cucullatus
We are confronted with similar challenges in a bronze figurine in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (plate 175), which probably also belonged to a domestic cult. This is one of the most extraordinary images of the enigmatic divinity conven- tionally known by the Latin name genius cucullatus (“hooded spirit”), an appellation attested in antiquity only on a pair of vo- tive altars found at Wabelsdorf, Austria, in the Roman province of Noricum.23 The god, whose defining iconographic features are, in general, his small stature and the pointed cowl ( cucullus ) and cloak, is otherwise vexingly anonymous, although diverse rep- resentations of him — sometimes with the additional attributes of a phallus, egg, or scroll — are found throughout the Roman provinces of Britain, Gaul, and Germany.24 This particular statu- ette, the exact provenance of which is unknown, had been, until recently, variously interpreted as a work of early classical or late Hellenistic Greece; but it has now been convincingly argued on stylistic and technical grounds that it ought rather to be placed in the context of the western Roman provinces of the second cen- tury CE.25 It represents a squat, bearded male figure, enveloped by a long cloak — inlaid with copper to suggest a pattern — that culminates in an exaggeratedly tall, pointed hood; underneath are visible the contours of his arms, one of which holds the cloak together at his chest, while the other nestles horizontally at his waist. Their shape gives the vague suggestion that his hands, especially the left, may grasp unknown objects — possibly the characteristic scroll or egg — hidden under his overgarment. He wears a pair of leather boots, his only other discernible attribute.
One of the earliest and most instructive parallels for this figure appears on several issues of silver coinage dated to the period immediately following the Roman conquest (around the third quarter of the first century BCE), minted by the civitas of the Segusiavi, whose territory was situated in cen- tral Gaul just northwest of that of the Allobroges (fig. 4. 4). 26 On the reverse of this series is depicted, standing at left, a nude, muscular, bearded male figure holding a club in his right hand with an animal skin draped over his left arm; under his right arm is the legend ARVS, probably the name of a local dynast responsible for this coinage. At right, on a pedestal or altar, stands a shorter male figure — sometimes identified as a wooden idol — wrapped in a patterned ankle-length cloak that conceals his entire body, with a hood gathered around his neck; he wears boots underneath the cloak. This image thus seems to show the genius cucullatus as an object of cult, and the apparent relationship with the other figure — possibly
4.4. Silver coin (reverse) of the civitas of the Segusiavi, c. 50-25 BCE. British Museum, London, 1901,0503.235.
4.5. Silver denarius (reverse) of C. Antius Resto, 47 BCE, Rome. British Museum, London, R.8904.
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Hercules or a local divinity with similar attributes — hints at an underly- ing but obscure mythology We are afforded a rare glimpse into dynamics surrounding the creation of this scene by the fact that it was demonstra- bly adapted from a Roman silver denarius of 47 BCE (fig. 4. 5). 27 Signifi- cant alterations were made for the local audience of the Segusiavi, most notably the removal of visual references to Roman victory from the orig- inal and the inclusion of the genius cucullatus. The prominence given to this divinity, presumably chosen from a wide array of available cul- tural symbols, seems almost programmatic, especially on coinage that is a direct reaction to Rome, both chronologically and iconographically, and suggests its importance to the self-representation of the civitas of the Segusiavi, or at least to members of the elite. This kind of response — the articulation and assertion of community memory through a new visual medium — was more common in the western provinces than is sometimes realized; it is broadly similar, for example, to the reaffirmation of local identity and cosmologies in the strikingly independent iconography of post-conquest pottery at the Celtiberian city of Numantia in the province of Nearer Spain.28
In comparison to the other known representations of the genius cuc- ullatus from Gaul and Britain, the Yale bronze figurine is remarkably classicizing (so much so that it was commonly misidentified as a work of fifth-century Greece), rivaled in this respect by only a very small num- ber of other Gallic bronzes of the early imperial period, such as those known from the territory of the Ambiani or Treveri.29 Most cucullati — stone reliefs or sculptures in the round — demonstrate a greater degree of independence from Mediterranean artistic ideals: they tend to be highly schematic and minimalist, with little attention to the kind of realism and detail that we find in this work.30 Indeed, one of the most telling foils for this piece is another cucullatus found in Narbonensis at Moulezan, near Nemausus in the country of the Volcae Arecomici (fig. 4.6): apart from the shared identifying attributes of the full-length cloak and cowl, this stone figurine bears little resemblance to its bronze cousin.31 Like the statues of Sucellus, then, our finely executed representation of the genius cucullatus is a fascinating hybrid of the local and the imperial. Its subject hearkens back to a pre-conquest past, activating a nexus of memories, meanings, and associations of the kind projected some two centuries earlier on non-Roman coinage of central Gaul, while its form usurps classicizing elements, a choice — a statement within a field of positions — likely driven by competition