by Mary Beard
92. This first-century CE inscription from Chichester, in southern England, records the dedication of a temple to Neptune and Minerva, ‘for the welfare of the imperial house’ (literally the ‘divine house’). The temple was erected under the authority of Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus, here restored as Cogidubnus (the spelling is uncertain).
What originally lay behind this system of government was at least as much simple necessity as ideological vision. Outside the areas of active fighting, Romans were simply too few in number to govern in any other way. But the character of imperial rule was increasingly defined by its collaboration with the elite of the subject peoples. They in turn increasingly identified their interests with the Romans, both culturally and politically; they came to feel that they had a stake in the Roman project, as insiders rather than outsiders; and some of the most successful in due course took a place, as Roman citizens, in the central government of Rome. For these men and their families, the experience of Roman rule was partly the experience of becoming Roman.
Romanisation and resistance
The historian Tacitus has some characteristically shrewd, and cynical, things to say about this process of Romanisation, as it is now often called. They come in the short biography he wrote of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who served as the governor of Britain from 77 to 85 CE, an unusually long period. Most of Tacitus’ account concerns Agricola’s successful military operations in the province, his extension of Roman power northwards into Caledonia (Scotland) and the jealousy of the emperor Domitian, who refused him the honour and glory he deserved for his success. The biography is as much a critique of autocracy as it is a eulogy of Tacitus’ distinguished relative: the overriding message is that the imperial regime allowed no place for traditional Roman virtue and military prowess. Occasionally, however, Tacitus turns to the civilian aspects of Agricola’s government of the province.
Some of the topics are fairly routine and would not have looked out of place in the letters of Pliny, who was a friend of Tacitus’ in the literary circles of early second-century CE Rome. Agricola is praised for keeping his household under tight control (‘as hard a job for many as actually governing the province’). He also sorted out some of the abuses in army requisitioning, and he put money into enhancing the towns of Britain with new temples and Roman-style public buildings. It is rather more surprising to discover that he had a local education policy too: he made sure that the sons of the leading provincials were educated in the ‘liberal arts’ (literally ‘the intellectual pursuits suited to the free’) and in the Latin language. And soon, as Tacitus put it, the Britons were dressing up in togas and taking their first steps on the path to vice, thanks to porticoes, baths and banquets. He sums this up in a pithy sentence: ‘They called it, in their ignorance, “civilisation”, but it was really part of their enslavement’ (‘Humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset’). This has been hugely influential, for better or worse, in modern attempts to understand how the Roman Empire worked.
In one respect it is the sharpest analysis there is of Roman government in the western part of the empire (but not the East: no official from Rome would have dreamt of instructing the Greeks in ‘civilisation’ like this). However snobbish Tacitus was about the naive ignorance of these poor provincials, who have left no written account of their perspective on these transactions, however cynical he was about slavery masquerading as sophistication, he saw straight through to the connection between culture and power and realised that by becoming Roman the Britons were doing the conquerors’ work for them. But in other ways Tacitus’ comments give a seriously misleading impression of what was going on.
For a start, if Agricola really did promote an organised programme of education in the way Tacitus suggests, inculcating Roman habits into the upper echelons of British society, he was the only provincial governor, so far as we know, to do that. Romanisation was not usually something that was imposed directly from above. It was much more a consequence of the provincial elites opting in to a version of Roman culture. It was bottom up rather than top down. Tacitus would no doubt have objected that, given the balance of military and political power which was so overwhelmingly in Rome’s favour, it was not exactly a free choice. That is true. But nonetheless, on a practical day-to-day level, the relatively well-off urban population of the provinces became the agents of their own Romanisation, not the objects of a concerted Roman campaign of cultural reprogramming or a civilising mission.
The evidence of archaeology makes it clear that they opted for new Roman forms in everything from architecture and town planning, through crockery and kitchenware, to fabrics, food and drink. There are a few choice Roman items found buried in British graves even before the conquest of 43 CE; and as early as the beginning of the first century BCE, the same Greek visitor to Gaul who had been shocked to find enemy heads pinned up outside huts also spotted that – despite what Caesar had to say about local distaste for the grape – the richer locals had started to quaff imported wine, leaving traditional Gallic beer to the less well off. By the beginning of the second century CE, there were rather fewer beer gardens and rather more wine bars in Roman Colchester; or that, at least, is what the surviving fragments of the jars used to transport the wine suggest. And for the first time, at the start of another long tradition whose origins lie in the Roman Empire, a substantial quantity of wine was being made in what is now France, outperforming the Italian vintages.
There was a dynamic combination of forces at work here: on the one hand, the power of Rome made Roman culture an aspirational goal; on the other, Rome’s traditional openness meant that those who wished to ‘do it the Roman way’ were welcome to do so – and, of course, it suited the stable maintenance of Roman rule that they should. The main beneficiaries (or victims, as Tacitus saw it) were the wealthy. But they were not the only ones to create a Roman identity for themselves.
A surprising glimpse into a different way of becoming Roman comes from the potteries of southern Gaul, which during a boom in the first and second centuries CE produced on an industrial scale some of the most characteristic ‘Roman’ shiny red tableware. The names of many of the individual potters have been preserved on rosters and lists found at the pottery site. There are still arguments about exactly how to read them, but they appear to be a mixed bag of both characteristically Latin names (Verecundus, Iucundus) and Celtic ones (Petrecos, Matugenos). This is not so on the pots themselves: when these same men came to stamp their names into the plates and bowls that would be put on sale as their handiwork, many of them Romanised. Petrecos called himself Quartus; Matugenos became Felix. There may have been a narrowly commercial incentive here. Customers buying Roman-style pottery produced in southern Gaul might have been attracted by an authentically Roman maker’s name. But it is also possible that, for the public face of their trade, these successful but relatively humble craftsmen saw themselves as at least partly Roman and embraced one version of Romanness.
Version is the right way to put it. For another problem with Tacitus’ analysis is that it implies a simple opposition between ‘native’ and ‘Roman’ cultures or a single spectrum along which degrees of Romanness could be plotted: Togidubnus the wine-drinking new Roman citizen much further along the line than Petrecos the potter, who used a Latin soubriquet on his work but may have been resolutely Celtic in many other respects. In fact, the interaction between Rome and other cultures in the empire is striking for the variety of forms it took and for the very diverse hybrid versions of Roman (and sometimes ‘not-Roman’) culture that were the result. Across the Roman world, all kinds of different cultural amalgams emerged from particular local attempts to embrace, to accommodate or to resist the imperial power.
The signs of these range from the images of Roman emperors in the province of Egypt, all presented as if they were traditional Egyptian pharaohs, to the flamboyant sculpture on the façade of the Temple of Sulis Minerva in the Roman town of Bath in southern England. In some respects, this is as cle
ar a case of Romanisation as you could wish. It was part of a classical temple built to a design unknown in Britain before the Roman conquest; it was put up in honour of a Celtic deity, Sulis, now seen as the equivalent of the Roman Minerva; and it includes various elements, from the oak-leaf roundel to the supporting figures of Victory, drawn directly from the traditional Roman repertoire. But at the same time it is a glaring example of a provincial culture either failing or, perhaps better, refusing to become Roman.
The most remarkable case of this kind of interaction is found in the provinces of the Greek world, where an extraordinary literary and cultural renaissance was one result of what we would now call the ‘colonial encounter’. In the early period of Roman military expansion overseas, starting in the third century BCE, Roman literature and visual art developed in dialogue with Greek models and predecessors. The poet Horace exaggerated when, in the late first century BCE, he summed up the process as one of simple cultural takeover: ‘Greece, once conquered, conquered her savage victor and brought culture into the rough land of Latium’ (better in Latin: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio’). It was a much more complicated interrelationship than that, as Horace’s own poetry shows, which is a distinctively Roman combination of homage to Greek culture, ambitious transformation of Greek literary models and celebration of Latin traditions. But, all the same, he had a point.
93. Portrait of Trajan in the guise of a pharaoh, from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt. How Roman or Egyptian this is depends on the eyes of the viewer: was it Trajan assimilated into Egyptian culture, or inserting himself into the conventions of the provincial community?
94. At Bath, there is a gap between the rigidly classical framework in this façade, and the bearded central figure. This has been thought to be a Celtic image of the snake-haired classical Gorgon, but the Gorgon was female where this appears to be male. Or was it the face of the Ocean?
In the Roman Empire of the first two centuries CE, the encounter took a different turn. It was not simply that many Greeks, like many Britons, adopted such habits as Roman-style bathing and watching gladiatorial fights. The transformation of local culture in the East was nothing like as radical as in the West, but sophisticated Greeks did not necessarily look down their noses at brutish Roman blood sports. There is clear evidence that Greek theatres and stadia were adapted for both gladiators and wild beast hunts; traces of the fixing for the nets intended to keep the audience safe from the animals are one clear sign. But the most striking development was an outpouring of literature in Greek, in which the power of Rome either hovers in the background or is directly addressed – in playful satire, passive resistance, curiosity or admiration. The quantity of this material is huge. The vast majority of all the ancient Greek literature that has survived comes from this period of imperial rule. To give a sense of scale, the work of just one of these writers – Plutarch, the second-century CE biographer, philosopher, essayist and priest of the famous Greek oracle at Delphi – extends to as many modern pages as all the surviving work of the fifth century BCE put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the history of Thucydides.
Greek writing of the empire ranges from elaborate praise of Roman rule to obvious exercises in denial. In 144 CE, for example, Publius Aelius Aristides, better known as a hypochondriac who wrote several volumes on his illnesses, delivered his Speech in Honour of Rome in front of the emperor Antoninus Pius. It may have gone down well on the day, but it now makes a fairly sickening read, even for those used to probing between the lines of panegyric. Rome has surpassed all previous empires, bringing peace and prosperity to the whole world: ‘may all the gods and their children be called upon to grant that the empire and the city itself flourish forever and do not come to an end until stones float on the sea’. At roughly the same time, Pausanias was writing the ten volumes of his Guidebook to Greece (or Periegesis), in which he gives Roman rule exactly the opposite treatment: silent eradication. Whatever his story was (we know next to nothing about Pausanias’ life), as he guides his travellers around the monuments, sights and customs of Greece, from Delphi to the southern Peloponnese, he simply omits to mention most of the buildings on his route erected by Romans or with Roman money. This was not so much a guidebook in the modern sense but a literary attempt to turn the clock back and to re-create an image of a ‘Rome-free’ Greece.
It is, however, the prolific Plutarch who made the most systematic attempt to define the relationship between Greece and Rome, to dissect their differences and similarities and to wonder what a Greco-Roman culture might be. In his volumes of essays – on subjects as diverse as how to listen to lectures, how to tell a flatterer from a friend and the customs of his sanctuary at Delphi – he explores the details of religion, politics and traditions that distinguished (or united) the two cultures. Why, he wondered, did the Romans start the beginning of a new day at midnight? Why did Roman women wear white in mourning? But it is his Parallel Lives that is especially revealing, a series of pairs of biographies – twenty-two pairs still surviving – made up of the life story of one Greek and one Roman figure, with a short comparison at the end. He puts together two founding fathers, Romulus with the equally legendary Greek Theseus; two great orators, Cicero with the Athenian orator Demosthenes; two famous conquerors, Julius Caesar with Alexander the Great; and a pair of equally famous traitors, Coriolanus with his contemporary the glamorous but unreliable Athenian Alcibiades.
Modern historians have tended to break up the pairs and to read them as individual life stories. That is to miss Plutarch’s point entirely. These were not just biographies. They were a concerted attempt to evaluate the great men (and they were all men) of Greece and Rome against each other, to think about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two cultures and about what it meant to be ‘Greek’ or ‘Roman’. They were nicely ambivalent: putting the Roman subjects into the same league as the ancient Greek heroes and – to see it from the other perspective – making the characters from the ancient Greek past comparable to those who then ruled the world. In a way, this was the fulfilment of a project sketched out 250 years earlier by Polybius, who as a Greek hostage in Rome and friend of the Scipios had been the first to attempt that cross-cultural political anthropology of Rome and its empire and to try to explain systematically why Greece had lost to Rome.
Free movement
The cultural interaction that defined the Roman Empire was not something that took place only within peoples’ heads, whether humble potters or ancient theorists. And it was not merely a matter of different local accommodations to the power of Rome, although that was an important part of it. There were also massive movements of peoples and goods across the empire, which intensified this cultural diversity while bringing enormous profits to some and making victims out of others. This was a world in which people could, as never before on this scale, make their homes, their fortunes or their graves thousands of miles away from where they were born; in which the population of Rome relied on basic food grown at the edges of the empire; and in which trade distributed new tastes, smells and luxuries – spices, ivory, amber and silks – from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and beyond, and not only to the super-rich. Among the precious possessions of a fairly ordinary house in Pompeii was a delicate ivory figurine made in India; and a document from Vindolanda shows that quantities of pepper, from the Far East, were being sold to the garrison there.
The routes into Italy from the rest of the empire were an important axis of this movement. Everything that Rome wanted was sucked into the metropolis. People were one of those commodities. Packed as the city was, the human death rate – from malaria and infections, as well as the other regular dangers to ancient life – meant that there was always the room, and the need, for more. Some of them were slaves, picked up in war or now more likely the victims of an unsavoury trade of people trafficking that made the margins of the Roman world a dangerous place to live. Others must have migrated to the city with hopes and a
spirations or out of desperation. Their stories are largely lost to us; but the short epitaph of a young man called Menophilos, who died in Rome, had come ‘from Asia’ and was skilled in music (‘I never uttered offensive words, and I was a friend of the Muses’), hints at the innocent ambitions of some of those who thought that the streets of the capital were paved with gold.
95. An Indian figurine, and no doubt precious possession, found in a house at Pompeii. How it travelled from India is a mystery. Maybe it was brought back directly by a trader with the East, or maybe it came through various hands, thanks to a series of indirect connections between Rome and the outside world.
The natural products of empire, its luxuries and curiosities, also flooded to Rome and signalled the city’s status as an imperial power. Balsam trees of Judaea were paraded in the triumphal procession of 71 CE. Exotic animals captured in Africa, from lions to ostriches, were slaughtered in the arena. Luscious coloured marbles, quarried in remote locations across the Roman world, decorated the theatres, temples and palaces in the capital. The images of trampled barbarians were not the only things to stand for Roman domination. So too did the colours of the floors on which the Romans walked in the grandest buildings of their city: these stones amounted to an assertion – and a map – of empire.