Stay who you were: Keeping the Roman Provincials 'Ethnic' from the Second to the Fourth Century (original) (raw)
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'Ethnographicising' Arguments between the Second-Century Genres
This paper studies the ways in which – and the aims for which – ‘ethnographicised’ information or topoi are wielded across differing second-century genres in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking East. The paper’s source texts represent four second-century authors (Polemo of Laodicea, Claudius Ptolemy, Lucian of Samosata, and Bardaisan of Edessa), as well as referring to the rebuttal of Celsus by Origen, which casts interesting light upon the monotheistic doctrinal disputes within which ‘ethnicised’ themes became increasingly used during the Later Antiquity. Common to all of these texts is that they stem from the cross-pollinating exchange of ideas, theoretical structures, and rhetorical tropes which took place in the context of the Imperial Eastern Mediterranean, facilitated by common language and almost as widely shared common understanding of how ethnographical-seeming details could help to build a winning argument – no matter what the occasion. Inter-generic interactions are evident in many stages of the ancient tradition of ethnographical and ‘ethnographicising’ writing, but the often antiquarian-seeming elements about population groups that are time and again recirculated in Imperial literature have not been extensively studied in terms of their rhetorical and epistemic underpinnings. Their usefulness seems to be confirmed by their constant presence in a variety of registers, and essentialist – often physiognomic – arguments could be deployed both about individual characters and broader group characteristics alike. The orators of the ‘Second Sophistic’, represented by Polemo and Lucian in this paper, found many uses for the technique of keeping provincials ‘ethnic’ for the purposes of their own arguments. The technical literature represented by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos – and to a certain extent the surviving evidence for Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of the Countries – found much use for essentialist representations of provincial character(istic)s. Origen, hailing from Alexandria like Ptolemy did, demonstrates in his rebuttal of Celsus’ True Discourse (Orig. Contra Celsum) the freedom with which the supposed ‘ethnic’ antiquities of a number of peoples could be put to use in expositions which had very little to do with ‘real’ ethnography. Identities and religious affiliations are also crossed among this selection of writers in ways that highlight important dynamics (and ironies) associated with the ‘conditioned co-opting’ of provincial backgrounds into the ranks of cultural/doctrinal insiders. Lucian and Bardaisan are Syrians, but while Lucian is in many ways comparable to Polemo, a native of Laodicea, in his approach to the cultural belonging as a ‘sophist-as-Hellene’, Bardaisan has some points in common with both Ptolemy (in terms of his astrological subject matter), and Origen (in the moralising argumentation that pervades his cultural critique). Social and personal interactions become thoroughly enmeshed in some of the examples of rhetorical one-upmanship and self-fashioning involved, whether we are dealing with sophistic set-pieces or doctrinal disputes. For such agendas, the cultural and phenotypic plurality of the Empire’s provinces formed a common pool of ‘embodied knowledge’, to be used when necessary by the learned writers.
The Use of Ethnography In Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania
Tacitus, in his various works, presents several examples of what can be termed “ethnographies”, works whose purpose is to inform the reader of the various customs and living conditions of groups that are otherwise foreign to the reader. Tacitus’ Germania serves as ethnography on the various Germanic peoples. Agricola, while ostensibly a panegyric on his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, also contains ethnography on the various peoples of ancient Britain. However, in each of these cases Tacitus presents the culture, practices, and institutions of various ethnic groups in such a way so as to demonstrate and thereby prove a political or moral point. Ethnography in Tacitus is thus not a study or presentation of ethnic groups, but a subversion of a classical historical style and methodology by Tacitus to present “case-studies”, real world examples of the political and moral argument that Tacitus is attempting to make throughout all of his works. This paper will examine the historiographical background of Tacitus by examining how classical authors prior to Tacitus presented and utilized the issue of ethnicity in their own writing and how these techniques and models are reflected in the works of Tacitus. This paper will then examine how Tacitus uses these models in his presentation of various ethnic groups in order to highlight his own specific political or moral arguments regarding Rome and Roman culture. Finally, this paper will present explanations as to why Tacitus either chose or felt it necessary to disguise his moral and political statements as ethnographies.
Cultural Identity in the Roman Near East: An Historiographical Exercise
The central premise of this thesis is that the concepts of hellenisation and romanisation are no longer useful as interpretive models of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Through most of the twentieth century they did good service generating research questions and providing innovative explanations of both existing and new data. On the one hand the notion of hellenisation focused attention on the historical importance of cultural change in the Hellenistic period, while the concept of romanisation focused scholarly attention on life in the provinces rather than on the court life of the imperial city and highlighted the importance of epigraphy and archaeology as against the philological study of literary texts. But the underlying assumptions of both conceptsthe superiority of Graeco-Roman culture, the 'civilising' role of the intrusive powers, the passivity of the indigenous peoples of the region, the notion that Greek, Roman and Semitic cultures are bounded entitiesare now dated.
Memories of the Subaltern: 'Ethnicising Religion' in Roman Imperial Literature, c. 100-300
The context of the Roman Empire, in addition to fostering the tradition of writing about the ‘barbarian’ groups outside the empire, proved to be a fertile ground ethnographical or ‘ethnographicising’ accounts about the provincial groups and their past. But why was the religious past of the provincial groups still ‘good to think with’ in the second or third centuries of the empire? What were the primary aims for writers in a wide variety of genres and registers as they referred to the religious practices and antiquities of provincial – essentially subaltern – groups in an ‘ethnicising’ fashion? What difference did the spread of Christianity, with its strong and exclusionary religion-based but occasionally ‘ethnicised’ identity, make? My paper will focus upon the Roman discourse that sought to portray the provincial groups as ‘remembering’ their pre-Roman pasts even in the context of the High and Late Empire. Memory of the past cults and heroes could, on occasion, be portrayed as a holding of grudge towards the Romans, and some uprisings in the provinces seem to have been imagined to have strong religious, even millenarian, motivations. Generally, however, the empire of peoples, regions, and practices was much more useful for rhetorical or knowledge-ordering purposes if its varietas could be maintained – but for this purpose, it was necessary to relegate the provincials to their ‘ethnic’ roles, about which centuries-earlier material could still be circulated. Such a mind-set is essentially colonial, and thus amenable to readings informed by Subaltern Studies, but it can usefully be studied from the point of view of the Greco-Roman tradition of religious ethnography – or perhaps more aptly ‘ethnographicising outgroup religiosities’. This is the particular ‘relocation of religion’ that my paper explores. The portrayal of what provincials ‘remember’ about their past displays even broader linkages when bearing in mind that during the second and third centuries the concept of religious communities as an ethnos became a more widespread notion – partly through the increasing Judeo-Christian influence, as well as the recirculation of originally Hellenistic ideas about ‘barbarian wise men’. Both inside and outside the empire, peoples’ religious practices and antiquities were suspended in a rhetorical state of ahistoricity, while the only religious change imaginable was the inexorable progress of Christianity’s linear time. For the pagan writers, on the other hand, exploration of the religious traditions of their own past or those of the far-away foreign groups’ supposed present (as in the case of the Brahmans) appeared as an attractive, prestige-building option.
Debating Ethnicity in Post-Roman Historiography
Debating Ethnicity in Post-Roman Historiography, in: Historiography & Identity 2: Post-Roman Multiplicity and New Political Identities. ed. Gerda Heydemann and Helmut Reimitz (Turnhout 2020), pp. 27-70., 2020
This paper discusses the role of 'ethnicity' in some of the best-researched and in many respects most controversially debated historiographic texts in recent scholarship: Jordanes’ Getica, Gregory of Tours’ Historiae, the so-called Fredegar Chronicle, Bede’s Ecclesiastic History of the Angles and Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards. In one way or another, these works focus on a particular polity, use ethnic terminology to describe collective agency, and place their narrative in a Christian frame that was in many ways still Roman. After half a millennium in which historians had written in an unquestionably Roman and imperial context, Latin authors of the sixth to eighth centuries had to adapt to a transformed political landscape. Their ‘visions of community’ differed considerably, but they all had come to terms with a world of post-Roman kingdoms distinguished by ethnonyms: the regna of the Goths, Franks, Angles/Saxons or Lombards. Many told the stories of the respective peoples, and referred to them in the title: De origine actibusque Getarum, Origo gentis Langobardorum, Liber historiae Francorum, or Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Until recently, most of the texts discussed in this volume were classified as ‘national histories’ or ‘Volksgeschichten’, taking a ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ character of these histories for granted. However, such an a priori classification would stand in the way of the methodological approach that I would like to propose here. These are histories focusing on larger, supra-regional communities and identities; and these are hardly ever only ethnic, political, territorial or religious. We only use these distinctions in a second step to ask just what role such ethnic, political, territorial or religious identifications play in a text. In what way were they entangled or juxtaposed, and what impact did their respective salience have? Rather than straightforwardly classifying these works as ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ histories, I would like to show that the significance of ethnic identities varied, both within and between these works. What they have in common is that they dealt with large polities and the communities and networks that secured their agency, which they often described in ethnic terms.
Journal of Roman Studies, 2018
Roman pasts, of manipulations and negotiations which 'would not always have been readily intelligible or even recognizable to a non-local, Roman audience' (229). The exploration ranges widely across histories involving Trojans, Rutulians, Romulus and Remus, republican events and gures. The nal main chapter opens with a discussion of the visual representation of the Sequanian brothers at Burdigala, a passage which, along with several others, would have beneted from the inclusion of images. The chapter takes as its mission demonstration of 'performance of identity' and discusses local ofces (e.g. through the ring lists of La Graufesenque), Druidism, expressions of identity in Ausonius and Martial and a will from an individual of the Lingones. The scope of the book is ambitious: no individual can be expected to write equally expertly on the literary, epigraphical and archaeological evidence from Gaul and the Iberian peninsula. J.'s expertise and the most successful parts of the book lie in the contextually sensitive manipulation of literary sources: there is comparatively little discussion of archaeology and we rarely hear what the inscriptions look like, how they are physically presented, how they t within the epigraphic landscape. J.'s treatment of the materials conrms that the evidence tends to be very good on the 'Roman side', whereas often leaps of faith and imagination are required to reach the local. It is of course tempting to see links, for example, between early monumental architecture and snippets in much later authors, but examples such as the sixth-century B.C. Massaliote Floralia, which J. can identify as 'anachronistic', indicate caution is required. Reading back across centuries with notoriously slippery later Roman sources as guides makes for an enjoyable adventure, but we may still end up far from the local. To my mind there is not enough engagement with Gaulish inscriptions, and the Monumenta linguarum hispanicarum (MLH), the bible of local language inscriptions from the Iberian peninsula, only appears once in the whole text. J. criticises others for a focus on the dichotomy between objective change and continuity, but does not in practice offer a better approach: his temporal scope is stretched and messy, skipping between material centuries apart without careful contextualisation (e.g. of transmission processes of literary sources) and not acknowledging broader, sometimes radical, societal, economic and political changes. The Roman Empire ends up being everywhere and nowhere, a problematic feature of many critiques of 'Romanisation'. Understanding Roman provincial realities requires not only sensitivity to the local, but also to the complex and constantly evolving broader provincial and imperial context.
Constructing identities within the periphery of the Roman Empire
2020
This paper aims to analyse the interaction and process of change that took place in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula as the area came under the control of the Tarraconensis province during the administrative reorganisation of Hispania by Augustus. Following a general cultural description of the region, further detail will be offered of its integration into the bracarensis conventus. The unique characteristics of the local pre-Roman communities and their systems of power led to a particular evolutional process in the region. After describing the main changes in the cities and the territories, we will highlight the negotiation processes underlying the adaptation to the Roman way of life, through which new places, new symbols and new narratives related to identity emerged.