Download Center and Periphery

Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontiers in the
Roman Empire
Problem of Romanization
Luttwak’s Hegemonic Empire
Romanization
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What Is It?
Francis Haverfield and the Coinage of the Term
Center and Periphery
Post-Colonial Discourses and Complexities of
“Acculturation”
Romanization as Hellenization
Impact of Greek Culture in Roman Society
Significant Contacts with Greece
from circa 200 BCE
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Wars against Hellenistic Monarchs (Philip V;
Antiochus III)
Third-Second Century BCE: Arrival of Poetry at
Rome: Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey; Ennius’
Annales
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Beginnings of Roman Historiography: Fabius
Pictor writes in Greek ca. 200 BCE
Roman Approach/Avoidance Conflict
with Greek Culture
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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
Cn. Pompeius
Magnus
(106- 48
BCE)
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”
Triumph of Hellenism at Rome
Horace, Epistulae 2.1.156-7: “Captured Greece
seized the fierce conqueror and carried the arts
into rustic Latium”
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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)
“Romanization” as
Urbanization
Provinces
In the Provinces
Romanization and Urbanization
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Market Place
Theater
Gymnasium
Baths
Amphitheater
An Urban Network in Roman Gaul
from Woolf, Becoming Roman
“Romanization” as
Acculturation:
Amphitheater and Baths
Amphitheater at El-Djem (Africa)
Amphitheater
at
Nimes
(France)
Roman Aqueduct at Segovia (Spain)
Ruins of North African Aqueduct
Aqueduct
over the
River Gard
“[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