Unit 3 Romanisation Flashcards
Intro
3.1 Romanisation
Views on, to 1800, 1900’s revolution
Views on Romanisation have changed dramatically over time - changing ideological environments (Mattingly) - and an ever widening source base - very important
up to 1800 knowledge of Rome would have been based on ruins (and whatever these may have been interpreted as) and most importantly ancient literature
Mid 19th C A REVOLUTION! - German historian Theodor Mommsen (1817 - 1903) who championed inscriptions and coins as evidence for Roman history (started the CIL system)
The concept of Romanisierung (coins by Mommsen) = Romanisation in English - local people had taken on Roman culture
Mommsen’s friend Francis Haverfield (1860-1919)
Mommsen was ‘the father of ancient archeology’
3.2 Tacitus on Romanisation
What did he say suggest?
Did people in the provinces resist? Or did they take on aspects of Roman culture willingly?
Tacitus suggests that Good Roman governors (Agricola) pursued a policy of encouraging people in the provinces to take on Roman culture - Roman authorities being the active party, Britons thinking it desirable whilst at the same time competing with each other for Roman approval - via using urban structures, Roman dress, bath, banquets (like Eastern Europeans with jeans and stock music) - they changed their warlike ways for a superior Roman culture
Tacitus thoughts though may be family/national propaganda - cannot be taken at face value - the Roman ‘place in the sun’ civilising of Barbarians 19th C analogy
3.3 The Romanisation Debate
19th C view balanced or pro empires?
in 19th C - 20th C Europe, Roman rule was seen as the prototype of the European civilising mission
Modern scholars have taken more notice of archeological evidence from the provinces rather than just subjective written primary or ancient secondary source texts as these are the only sources that give us direct evidence of what was happening on the ground
Scholarly opinion doesn’t just change as a result of shifting worldview/successive generations but also as a result of an evolving database
Mommsen criticised for taking Tacitus at face value, he and other scholars of the time reading more into writings (Tacitus) than they actually said, Mommsen displays the strong influence of the Zeitgeits (the defining spirit, beliefs or mood of a point in time in history) of his time (but isn’t Mattingly doing the same?) Europe affected by the prevailing imperial mood of ‘barbarism v civilisation’
3.3 The Romanisation Debate II
Rome’s motivations those for and against today
What motives spurred Roman expansion?
Security - Economic Gain - Money centred NOT civilising - Orsted 1985
A policy of urbanisation that natives lacked the skills for (army used), but Millett 1990 says no, the locals could do it
Romans did have a civilising mission by winning the hearts and minds of elite to effect control - Hanson 1994 - more or less agrees with Mommsen and Haverfield
‘Paths of cultural freedom’ as a result of Rome - Henig 1995 - very pro Roman
‘Romans always had in mid the realities of power’ - MacMullen 2000 - anti Roman (and probably anti-British
3.5 An imperial culture
Slaves, social mobility, Auxillia, barbarians, citizenship
Delos slave market, army recruitment (of Auxilia) trade in general and imperial expansion/campaigns (Judea) all created a highly mobile pan European persona where cultures were in a constant mix
Roman culture and its Roman audience asserted at its core, e.g, via depictions of long-haired trousered barbarians on Trajan’s column or on Auxilia gravestones in Britain. Roman culture seen as the superior norm and superior with that of the barbarians
But - a Roman could in many ways be defined as someone who had Roman citizenship i.e. anyone from anywhere who achieved this, Citizenship was firs and foremost a legal status, not an emotional or psychological state of being
3.5 ‘Globo-Romanisation’
Educated elite, globalisation?
‘The educated elite of the empire (Gaul, Roman, Dacian) joined (elided/joined into one in the case of Greek-Roman) together in the civilising mission, sharing the identity that was Roman, humane and aristocratic’ (Woolf 1998)
Recent works on Romanisation borrowed heavily from modern globalisation theory - result - Roman culture was just like modern globalised culture - constantly in a state of flux - Greeks/Jews reformulate their identities as a result of integration into the Roman empire
3.7 The beating heart of Rome
‘but the flow is two way and far from draining the system of blood, the imperial capital increases the circulation around the Mediterranean to level never seen before nor, since the separation of the Islamic world thereafter - Wallace-Hadrill 2008 - Mary Beard’s everything and everyone came from everywhere else
Wallace-Hadrill ‘strives to break away from the concept of the ‘Hellenisation’ of Roman culture seeing it instead as reminiscent of ideas about modern globalisation (developed so as to make possible international influence or operation Greece by Rome + its culture?)
The ‘Romanisation’ term angst - Revell, Mattingly et al
Egyptian culture became divorced from its origin and instead part of the repertoire of Roman styles (globalisation) i.e. as yoga is now divorced from buddhist religious practice and part of day-to-day western health culture
3.7 The beating heart of Rome II
And the continuing whinging of revisionist modernists and their fixation on material culture
Since the 1980’s Anglo-Saxon scholarship especially influenced by prevailing anti-colonialist thought (as per Versluys) - rejected the term Romanisation as it comes from a Roman imperialist perspective - PRETENTIOUS Matttingly discrepant identities, geopolitical manifestation, Revell - Roman-ness
If Roman archeology were prehistory (no literature/beforre records and myths), Roman imperialism would be quite invisible in the archaeological world - ignore literature and concentrate on what the ‘material culture’ ‘objects in motion’ tells us - NOT HAPPY WITH THIS A BALANCE OF BOTH WOULD BE BETTER, Because -
But Objects cannot tell us anything in themselves, they produce meaning only through interpretation and in interpretation comes the potential both for the influence of personal viewpoints and for simply getting things entirely wrong
