Unit 5 Cultural Diversity Flashcards
5.2 A bilingual empire
Latin and how it was used alongside other languages in the empire
Gracie capta forum victorem cepit ‘Conqured Greece took captive her savage conqueror’ - Romans had a deep admiration for Greek literature, science, architecture and art e.g. Hadrian was a Grecophile and also the ‘blood circulation’ metaphor of Wallace-Hadrill?
Woolf - Greeks adopted the imperial political practice of Rome e.g. senatorial style, as well as gladiatorial games and baths - Romanised BUT what mattered to Greeks was still language, literature and the common ancestry tied up in Greek mythology
5.3 Latin: a lingua franca for the west
Western conquered territories had spoken but not written languages, e.g. Celtic with its oral tradition of passing down history and myths
Roman census resulted in written names and other written data about conquered areas e.g. legal documents, sales documents therefore Latin spread throughout the empire
Most countries that still speak a derivative of Latin today ar in the western part of the Roman empire the exception being Romania
Writing tablets for Vindolanda reflect the literacy only of military personnel and people immediately associated with them e.g. Sulpician Lepidina, merchants lists (wooden f;atss and was tablets)
5.4. Multilingualism
Latin and Greek used throughout the empire
Main source of survival of non-Latin, non-Greek languages in the Roman empire is epigraphy (ancient inscriptions) though it is very difficult to trace these vernacular (everyday languages spoken by ordinary people) languages precisely
It was often the women of a household who would continue the use of the vernacular and teach it to children (and also ware traditional dress)
5.5 Palmyra
The Palmyrene tax law tablet mid 2nd century BCE (in Palmyra mostly Greek and Palmyran used) i.e. it was;t use in the tax law tablet - the Greek east
The tax law shows that the Palmyrene language wa considered on a par with Greek as an official language and that in some contexts, such as this, Latin could be completely sidelined as an official language - ‘Alas Barates, his Regina and Victor in Arbeia (South Shields)
Palmyras saw themselves as Palmayrans first, then Greek in culture and finally formal members of the Roman empire - interestingly they could be all there at once. They embraced Roman architecture and the structures Rome imposed on them i.e. in this period they were perfectly happy to be Roman
5.5 Palmyra II
In the eastern part of the empire Latin was used in some spheres but Greek retained its role as the lingua franca due to the pre existing cultural links
If languages signal ‘identities’, then the evidence we have suggests that many different ‘identities’ could exist together at the same time
5.6 Roman dress
Menswear in the empire, dress played an important role in social interaction, asserting matters such as status, power and ethnicity:-
Normal dress a sleepless or short-sleeved tonic with a belt - foot length for women, know length for men over which a variety cases and cloaks
Respectable married women could also wear a type of pinafore over the dress called a stola
Women habitually wore large, rectangular cloak called a palla identical with the Greek himation
Soldiers/lower class menials had a variety of cloaks and hooded capes to protect against rain/cold etc.
- 6 Roman dress II
5. 7 The toga
Men wore a pallium/himation in their leisure time only because a Greek garment was associated with private intellectual gatherings and pursuits. This was usually worn wrapped around the whole body in the arm sling style
The symbol of Rome par excellence was the toga a large cloak that was worn draped over a tunic (Etruscan isn origin) and was originally worn by both men and women but by the mid-Republic, just men. Normal version made of wool and had a natural off-white colour
Imperial toga - Augustan period, had a large quantity of fabric and a more complicated draping style. During worship/sacrifice the respectful way to wear a toga was to pull the back of theta over the head - the ‘capite gelato’
5.7 The toga II
Toga Candida - bleached white worn by political candidates
Toga praetexta - with a purple stripe along the edge symbolising protection from impurity and worn by children and priests
Toga octa or toga palmate decorated with gold thread and permitted to be worn only by generals during their own triumphs
toga pulla - dark coloured and worn to express mourning
How to wear a toga (Associated with the old pagan gods) described by Tertuillian (De Pallio 200 CE) who has a specialist household slave to help him put his on and store it properly. He advocates wearing the simpler pallium instead of the complex toga (though the pallium has by then been associated with Christians)
5.8 Who wore the toga?
The cost of the toga itself as well as upkeep expenses (servant etc..) meant only the well to do/wealthy could own one.
‘In much of Italy, to tell the truth, no one puts on a toga unless he’s dead.’ - Juvenal, Satire 3.171-83
Juvenal - Toga mostly worn in Rome, less so in the provinces
Virgil - Romans are - ‘masters of the world, and the nation that wears the toga’ Virgil, Aeneid 1.282
Tacitus in Agricola - ‘the toga as one of the main aspects of Roman culture that the people of Britain were adopting
5.9 Dress case study 1; Palmyra
Graves in Palmyra show dress used in ‘loculus plates’ - carved stone tablets that sealed the niches in which bodies were inhumed. Large family tombs - hypogeaa built underground in cemeteries outside the city
Parthian (Iran) style dress from the area to the east of Palmyra (outside the Roman empire) women were sleeved flowing over and under garments with heavy jewellery and pins and wore turbans. The men wear a baggy trouser dress type with cuffs at the ankle, ornate and elaborate tight fitting long sleeved tunic, tailored to fit, with cape/broach - decidedly un-Roman not plain. Trousers = barbarians? Parthians famous for trousers (practical) as they rode horses
- 9.2 Greek dress style in Palmyra
5. 9.3 Roman dress style in Palmyra
Pallium/himation arm-sling style with Palmyran priest-style cylinder cap and wreath
Rare in Palmyra ad almost entirely confined to officialdom - e.g. in honorific statues
5.10 Dress case Study 2; the middle Danube provinces
Middle Danube provinces - Noricum, Pannonia Superior and Pannonia Inferior
four different styles of headdress and tunic for women in Northern Pannonia
Clarkson 2912 - ‘postulates a special role for women in the retention of local languages’ and this could apply also to local dress - i.e. they continued to assert Pannonia identity via language and dress and teaching the language to the children. Men wore Roman workday/official dress and take Latin e.g. in work, market or the army
5.11 Dress case study 3: Gaul
Women wear a similar dress to the Danube provinces on tombstones (pre Roman dress type) Good example, Claudian gravestone near an important Roman military base at Mainz ‘for Blesses and his wife Menimane of the Trevor tribe from the middle Rhine. She wars the traditional does he were a closed-fronted hooded cape and calf length, sleeved tunic, which was typical generic dress of Gallic men (asserting identity) Caracalla’s name/dress
Eventually the toga may have become a sartorial lingua franca on gravestones depicting international businessmen e.g. the Igel Pillar in Igel Germany
5.11 Dress case study 3: Gaul II
A new pan-Gallic identity seems to have emerged from the late 2 CE onwards. It was native in the sense that it was divorced from a Roman identity (which would have been evident from the increased use of Roan dress i.e. the toga)
But, it came about as a result of incorporation into the (administrative and trade facilitating( Roman empire, and as such cannot be separated from it
‘being Roman’ in Gaul seems, based on the women’s dress, to have meant shedding small-scale, local identities in favour of a wider-reaching Gallic one.
Conclusion
Peoples sense of Greek-ness in respect to cultural identity was grounded in completely different (to Roman( clutrual areas like language and literature. These they retained.
For Palmyrans (Parthans) Roman-ness was confined to things like the donning of the toga for official occasions
The Roman empire was a construct which contained enough unity of structures and ideals to be more or less successful (really? was it just that?) for many centuries, but which developed a crucial flexibility to understand and sometimes foster old, new and evolving cultures and ways of doing things across its vast expanse
