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Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontiers in the Roman Empire. Problem of Romanization. Luttwak’s Hegemonic Empire. Romanization. What Is It? Francis Haverfield and the Coinage of the Term Center and Periphery Post-Colonial Discourses and Complexities of “Acculturation”.
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Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontiers in the Roman Empire Problem of Romanization
Romanization • What Is It? • Francis Haverfield and the Coinage of the Term • Center and Periphery • Post-Colonial Discourses and Complexities of “Acculturation”
Romanization as HellenizationImpact of Greek Culture in Roman Society
Significant Contacts with Greece from circa 200 BCE • Wars against Hellenistic Monarchs (Philip V; Antiochus III) • Third-Second Century BCE: Arrival of Poetry at Rome: Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey; Ennius’ Annales • Beginnings of Roman Historiography: Fabius Pictor writes in Greek ca. 200 BCE
Roman Approach/Avoidance Conflict with Greek Culture • Periodic Expulsions of Greek Philosophers and Rhetoricians in Second Century BCE • Bacchanalian Conspiracy of 186 BCE • Portrait Sculpture: Veristic—“Warts and All” • Foundation Myth: Adoption of the Trojan Legend
Portrait Bust: Roman “Verism”
Alexander: Hellenistic Idealizing Portraiture
Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE) “And in the effort to turn his son against Greek culture…he pronounced with all the solemnity of a prophet that if ever the Romans became infected with the literature of Greece, they would lose their empire. At any rate time has exposed the emptiness of this ominous prophecy, for in the age in which the city rose to the zenith of its greatness, its people had made themselves familiar with Greek learning and culture in all its forms” (Plutarch, Cato 23)
Vergil, Aeneid, 847-53 “Others will cast more tenderly in bronze/Their breathing figures, I can well believe/And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble/Argue more eloquently, use the pointer/To trace the paths of heaven accurately/And accurately foretell the rising stars/Roman, remember your strength to rule/Earth’s peoples-for your arts are to be these/To pacify, to impose the rule of law/To spare the conquered, battle down the proud”
Horace, Epistulae 2.1.156-7: “Captured Greece seized the fierce conqueror and carried the arts into rustic Latium” • Idealizing (Hellenistic) Portraiture from Augustus onwards • Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Greek in the Augustan age); Aelius Aristides (mid-2nd c. CE): Rome becomes a Greek city • Incorporation and Rejection of Hellenism: Apollonian vs. Dionysian (see P. Zanker, Power of Images, pp. 33-77) • Vespasian (69-79 CE): State Chairs for Greek and Latin Rhetoric • Philhellenic Emperors: Hadrian (117-138 CE); the Stoic emperor, M. Aurelius (161-180 CE)
In the ProvincesRomanization and Urbanization • Market Place • Theater • Gymnasium • Baths • Amphitheater
“[T]he fundamental problem with ‘Romanization’ as a term is that it implies a unilateral transfer of culture, whereas it is clear that not only was cultural exchange bilateral, it was also multi-directional.”D.J. Mattingly
“In any case, no end to all difference was achieved by the Romans, no single homogeneous ‘Roman civilization’, partly because of the limits of their will and administrative powers, partly because what they carried abroad in Augustus’ day was a civilization already so full of differences, so broadly Mediterranean in the loose sense.”R. MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus (2000)
“It is not Rome-centered; it is not easily sought in literary texts; rather, it is archeological, and of the provinces.”R. MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus (2000)
Who Was ‘Romanized’?“The elite adopted the culture of the Romans in order to create prestige, reflecting the increasing political power that they had acquired through Roman support. Attention is focused mainly on the elite; the evidence for their lives and beliefs is strongest, and those lower in the social hierarchy have only a secondary role in the study.”R. Hingley
