by Woolf, Greg
The Futures of Rome
What did the Romans want to tell posterity through their monuments? Many kinds of message can be put in a bottle. Most obvious is the author’s desire to preserve his name, not to perish utterly. Imperial monuments were associated with the names of dynasties and individual emperors and their relatives. So the Porticoes of Octavia and Livia, the Forum of Trajan, the Baths of Caracalla made permanent marks on the cityscape of the city of Rome. The great marble plan of the city created in the Severan period is written all over with the names of generations of the Roman powerful. Greek and Latin inscriptions on the wall of gymnasia, theatres, libraries, and other civic buildings commemorated their founders. Even temples, where the names of the gods were most prominent, bore records of those who had paid for their building and successive restorations. Poets often began their works with letters addressed to their patrons. Tombstones listed ranks achieved, priesthoods and magistracies held, the profession, tribe, and age of the deceased, and the names of those left behind who had seen to the burial. All this is completely comprehensible to us now.
All monuments present an ambiguous attitude to the future. The act of creating a monument is an act of faith that there will be future readers, yet the need for one betrays a fear that all will be forgotten. That fear seems reasonable even when we think of the empire at its most secure. What of the period that followed? No agreement yet exists on the reasons for the end of monument building. Did the powerful lose faith in the future, or simply run out of the funds needed to communicate with it? Many were certainly impoverished as the imperial economy contracted and as the weight of government pressed harder on those who were not well connected. If the building industry collapsed perhaps this had knock-on effects for the production even of modest monuments. Yet the rich villas of the fourth century and growing expenditure on churches suggest no simple economic explanation will do. Inscriptions continued to be produced, if fewer and now for the rich alone. Perhaps we should imagine a loss of faith in the existence of a future audience, specifically that audience of fellow citizens that in the cities of the early empire had provided spectators for shows and viewers for urban monuments. Perhaps the wealthy had reimagined posterity not as the continued existence of the civic community, but as the persistence of a community of readers like themselves. Was that who Sidonius was writing for in the fifth century in his villa in the Auvergne?
New attitudes to antiquity emerged in the literature of the fourth century AD, but no new consensus, either about history or the future.19 Classicizing historians presented themselves as traditionalists, but of course they were not. Zosimus gives the game away when he alludes to Polybius’ account of Rome’s rise and immediately asks who could imagine it was not due to divine favour. The answer, of course, is Polybius, who had offered an explanation based on the comparative advantages of political institutions and the attitudes they inculcated. But the argument had evidently become one about religion. Yet even the Christians did not agree about the past. More than a century before Constantine, Melito, the Bishop of Sardis, had suggested that the birth of Christ at the origin of the Roman Empire showed the Roman world was a providential creation. Orosius tentatively suggested something similar. But this seems to us to deviate from his teacher Augustine’s position that the convulsions of the Earthly City had little relevance for citizens of the Heavenly One. Not all Christian futures had Rome in them, nor did all Christian pasts. Gregory of Tours’s ten-book History of the Franks, composed in the later sixth century, began with the creation of the world and went on to tell the story of Christian Frankish rulers. The western empire fell somewhere in the middle of book 2, but it was not important enough to merit a mention in Gregory’s account. For Christians this flexibility was an advantage. Nothing could catch them out, not the fall of the western empire, the thousand-year succession of Byzantium, or the terrible events of the Arab conquests.
What about the posterity of Rome today? Looking back down the telescope we see the worst is now past. Most classical literature ever written was lost between the fifth and eighth centuries AD.20 When cities contracted the libraries—public and private—were no longer maintained, and books burnt, rotted, or crumbled away. Many had probably never existed in more than a handful of copies anyway, given the cost of producing multiple versions in an age before print technology. The shift from papyrus scroll to a codex format, essentially that of the modern book, also acted like a filter. What was not transferred onto the new format was lost. For nearly two hundred years in the west almost no copies of any non-Christian text were made. But what survived to the Carolingian Renaissance had a good chance of being gathered by humanists and preserved until the invention of printing. Almost all classical texts are now available electronically, in the original and in many translations. For the moment those monuments seem safe.
We can be similarly optimistic about the archaeological heritage, at least its most prominent components. Conservation is firmly established in law and it is rare now for Roman monuments to be threatened with demolition. Popular interest in the past has saved it, making it an asset for those poorer countries that attract tourists and a symbol of national pride, too. Local activists defended Roman and other antiquities everywhere. Nor is it a dead heritage. I have tried in this book to indicate the many areas in which research is transforming our understanding of the Roman Empire. The philologists who established the science of classical antiquity in the nineteenth century have now been joined by archaeologists, art historians, and social scientists of every kind. New answers are being offered to old questions, and new questions are being asked and answered about every aspect of Roman antiquity. Neither the general public nor school and university students have lost that sense of excitement in piecing together a great movement through history that has left so many traces in the world we inhabit today. We are not the posterity that Romans of any age imagined—how could we be?—but in our hands the future of the Roman Empire is an exciting one.
Further Reading
No single book deals with all the issues rounded up in this chapter but there are several inspiring texts that touch on one aspect or another. The recovery of the past, including that of classical antiquity, is the subject of Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past (New York, 1997) and of David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). Edward Thomas’s Monumentality and the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2007) is a vivid and learned account of the most tangible of Roman remains. How the Romans saw ancient art is the subject of Jas Elsner’s Roman Eyes (Princeton, 2007). Key works on the later reception of Rome are listed under the Further Reading for Chapter 2.
A group of books have considered social memory: Alain Gowing’s Empire and Memory (Cambridge, 2005), Susan Alcock’s Archaeologies of the Greek Past (Cambridge, 2002), and Harriet Flower’s Art of Forgetting (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992) provide contrasting models, all of them interesting. James Fenton and Chris Wickham’s Social Memory (Oxford, 1992) also has a good deal to offer, even if it only concerns antiquity in passing. But the big book on Roman posterity lies in the future …
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 2.1.
CHAPTER 2
1. Philip Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
2. Livy, From the Foundation of the City 4.20.
3. Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History, Sather Classical Lectures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
4. Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Jerome Lectures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
5. Livy, From the Foundation of the City Preface.
6. Emma Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); T. Peter Wiseman, Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
7. Andrew Erskine, Troy between Greece and
Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Greg Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2011).
8. Carol Dougherty, The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
9. Erich Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (London: Duckworth, 1992); Thomas Habinek, The World of Roman Song from Ritualised Speech to Social Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
10. William Vernon Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
11. P. A. Brunt, ‘Laus Imperii’, in Peter Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978; repr. in P. A. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 288–323).
12. Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
13. Jean-Louis Ferrary, Philhellénisme et impérialisme: Aspects idéologiques de la conquête romaine du monde hellénistique, de la Seconde Guerre de Macédoine à la Guerre contre Mithridate, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1988); John S. Richardson, The Language of Empire: Rome and the Idea of Empire from the Third Century BC to the Second Century AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
14. Catharine Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789 – 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
15. Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arab Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (New York: Routledge, 1998).
16. Alexander Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity, Monographs on the Fine Arts (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990); Luisa Quartermaine, ‘ “Slouching towards Rome”: Mussolini’s Imperial Vision’, in Tim Cornell and Kathryn Lomas (eds.), Urban Society in Roman Italy (London: University College London Press, 1995).
17. Matthew P. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran, ed. Peter Brown, vol. xlv, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).
18. J. H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds.), Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel (eds.), The Dynamics of Early Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Phiroze Vasunia, ‘The Comparative Study of Empires’, Journal of Roman Studies, 101 (2011); Peter Fibiger Bang and Christopher A. Bayly (eds.), Tributary Empires in Global History, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); C. A. Bayly and P. F. Bang (eds.), Tributary Empires in History: Comparative Perspectives from Antiquity to the Late Medieval, special issue of Medieval History Journal, 6 (2003).
19. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934).
20. Nicole Brisch (ed.) Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and beyond, Oriental Institute Seminars (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2008).
CHAPTER 3
1. Amanda Claridge, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); J. C. N. Coulston and Hazel Dodge (eds.), Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City, Oxford University School of Archaeology Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2000).
2. Pliny, Natural History 36.109.
3. Christopher Smith, ‘The Beginnings of Urbanization in Rome’, in Robin Osborne and Barry Cunliffe (eds.), Mediterranean Urbanization 800–600 BC, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4. Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri, The Iron Age Community of Osteria dell’Osa: A Study of Socio-political Development in Central Tyrrenian Italy, New Studies in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
5. Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, Greek Colonisation: An Account of Greek Colonies and Other Settlements Overseas, 2 vols., Mnemosyne supplements (Leiden: Brill, 2006); John Boardman, Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, 4th edn. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
6. David Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
7. Corinna Riva, The Urbanization of Etruria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
8. Filippo Coarelli and Helen Patterson (eds.), Mercator Placidissimus: The Tiber Valley in Antiquity: New Research in the Upper and Middle River Valley, Rome, 27–28 February 2004, Quaderni di Eutopia (Rome: Quasar, 2008).
9. Colin Renfrew and John F. Cherry (eds.), Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-political Change, New Directions in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
10. Mauro Cristofani (ed.), La grande Roma dei Tarquini: Roma, Palazzo delle esposizioni, 12 giugno—30 settembre 1990: Catalogo della mostra (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1990).
11. Nicholas Purcell, ‘Becoming Historical: The Roman Case’, in David Braund and Christopher Gill (eds.), Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome: Studies in Honour of T. P. Wiseman (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003).
12. Jonathon H. C. Williams, Beyond the Rubicon: Romans and Gauls in Northern Italy, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
13. Emma Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
14. Ennius, Annales Fragment 156.
15. Polybius, Histories 3.22–6.
16. Kurt Raaflaub, ‘Born to be Wolves? Origins of Roman Imperialism’, in Robert W. Wallace and Edward M. Harris (eds.), Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History 360–146 B.C. in Honor of E. Badian (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
17. Emilio Gabba, Republican Rome: The Army and the Allies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1976).
18. G. E. M. de Sainte Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981).
CHAPTER 4
1. Harry Hine, ‘Seismology and Vulcanology in Antiquity?’, in C. J. Tuplin and T. E. Rihll (eds.), Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lukas Thommen, Umweltsgeschichte der Antike (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2009).
2. Pliny, Natural History 36.125.
3. Robert Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1991), chapter 1.
4. Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8–16.
5. André Tchernia, Le Vin d’Italie romaine: Essai d’histoire économique d’après les amphores, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1986); José María Blázquez Martinez and José Remesal Rodriguez (eds.), Producción y commercio del aceite en la antiguëdad: Congreso I (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1980); José María Blázquez Martinez and José Remesal Rodriguez (eds.), Producción y commercio del aceite en la antiguëdad: Congreso II (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1982).
6. Paul Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
7. David
Mattingly, ‘First Fruit? The Olive in the Roman World’, in Graham Shipley and John Salmon (eds.), Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture (London: Routledge, 1996).
8. Anthony C. King, ‘Diet in the Roman World: A Regional Inter-site Comparison of the Mammal Bones’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 12/1 (1999).
9. Robert Sallares, ‘Ecology’, in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard P. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
10. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Routledge, 1974); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976); Paul A. Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare: An Ecologist’s Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
11. Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: Themes and Variations, 9000 BC–AD 1000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).