“Roman”, read Russian, Dutch, British or French; for “barbarian”, read Algerian, Indian, Indonesian, Cossack or African.
To most thinkers of the early twentieth century, even the more profound ones, imperialism was if not justified, at least compensated by the advantages in terms of law, order, morals and religion imposed by the new masters on their willing or unwilling subjects. Continued European domination under “mandated” colonial administration, not self-government, was the League of Nations’ gift to the liberated territories of the vanquished German and Ottoman Empires. The former subjects of the Austrian Empire, on the other hand, were allowed to govern themselves; but then of course they were Europeans.
As with European expansion, the justification of Roman expansion was rarely called into question, and Romanisation was seen to justify Roman dominance or at the very least, as a beneficial spin-off effect of Roman expansion. In the graphic formulation of Francis Haverfield, the Roman empire was an oasis of peace and order; outside its borders “roared the wild chaos of barbarism” (Haverfield 1924).
The comfortable assumptions on which European imperialism was based were already called into question during the inter-war period and definitely shattered by World War II. The breakup of the colonial empires had begun during the war, gained momentum in the 1950s and was largely complete by the mid-sixties. This did not, however, translate into a reappraisal of Roman imperialism. On the contrary, Rostovtzeff’s Rome, firmly rooted in the ideological perceptions of pre-1914 Russian liberalism, was still being reprinted and translated in the 1960’s. To solve this seeming paradox, it needs to be remembered that in its early post-war phase, decolonisation was largely imposed on the European powers by the two new superpowers, both strongly anti-colonialist (though for very different reasons). What eventually made the intellectual establishment of western Europe turn its back on colonialism, however, was the rise of local resistance movements from the mid-1950s onwards, often led by an educated and Europeanised elite who could no longer be dismissed as “barbarians”.
Resistance
At the same time, the success of the colonial resistance movements inspired a new interest in the historical sociology of resistance and revolution. The case for the existence of hitherto-overlooked movements of social revolt in history was forcefully made by Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits (1971) with the claim that those whom history has recorded as brigands, bandits, robbers and vandals were motivated by a wider social or political agenda. Whatever the merits of Hobsbawm’s thesis, it kindled an interest in resistance to Rome and Romanisation. The sixth International Congress of Classical Studies (Pippidi (ed.) 1974) was entirely devoted to the theme of “Assimilation and resistance to Graeco-Roman culture” and was followed by Stephen Dyson’s study of native revolt patterns in Gaul (1975) and Marcel Bénabou’s monograph on resistance in Roman Africa (1976). As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, however, a declining interest in ancient resistance movements could be observed. A Crocean reflection of the changing political climate, or merely a general sense of surfeit and tedium after so many words had been expended on the subject?
The postwar phenomenon of global cultural Americanisation also brought the realisation that a dominant power might impose changes in culture, language, lifestyle and patterns of consumption even without the formal political and economic control framework that had characterised the colonial era. Within the study of Roman history, this new insight translated into a dialectical analysis of the relationship between domination and Romanisation and the rediscovery that Romanisation could be an instrument of dominance rather than a consequence.
The study of Romanisation in its Mommsenian sense (as a process of linguistic and institutional assimilation) thus gave way to a concept of Romanisation closer to that of Francis Haverfield (whose classic The Romanisation of Roman Britain was republished in 1979). On the other hand, the new generation of researchers rejected Haverfield’s optimistic dualism of Romanity and barbarism as emphatically as they rejected Mommsen’s vision of an empire unified by common norms, laws and institutions. In the postmodern world of cultural relativism, there is no place for the notion of “higher” and “lower” cultures, and the worn-out idea of cultural diffusion has given way to concepts such as ethnic strategy, identity choice or cultural bricolage. The individual – to paraphrase Appius Claudius Caecus – is the maker of his own identity.
Romanisation remains a controversial and much debated concept. In the last decade, many researchers have felt that the whole notion of “Romanisation” is burdened down by so many imperialist connotations that it should be discarded. Instead of “Romanisation”, we now talk of “Kulturwandel unter Roms Einfluss” (Haffner and Schnurbein 1996), “Becoming Roman” (Woolf 1994; 1998), “cultural interaction” (Creighton and Wilson (ed.) 1999), “italicisation” (Lomas 2000, 165) or “Creolizing the Roman Provinces” (Webster 2001). Others concede that Romanisation “could be allowed to stand as a term, as long as some fundamental preconceptions about the processes it purports to describe are altered” (Alcock in Hoff and Rotroff (ed.) 1997). Romanisation has become the R-word of ancient history, banned from polite academic conversation.
As the twenty-first century dawns, it is being argued that the moral deficit of British imperialism was compensated by its modernising influence on the subject peoples (Ferguson 2002). It remains to be seen if this view will gain acceptance among contemporary historians, whether there will be a Crocean trickle-down effect on the perception of ancient imperialism and Romanisation, and whether the R-word will once more become a buzzword.
Romanisation and the Black Sea region
The fifth international conference of the Centre for Black Sea studies was dedicated to the impact of Rome on the Black Sea Region. In this volume, nine of the papers presented at the conference are published, but like any conference volume, the present book fails to do justice to the inspired discussions after the papers, in the intervals, at dinner and over drinks.
In the opening paper, “From kingdom to province”, Jakob Munk Højte traces the strange political metamorphosis of Pontos as it is revealed in the patterns and practices of everyday life. Within two generations, Pontos went from a late Hellenistic kingdom ruled by a warlord with expansionist, indeed imperial ambitions to a peaceful provincial backwater ruled by the ex-magistrates of late republican Rome. Swords were turned into ploughshares and the Pontic hammer became an anvil. What visible effects did this have locally? Højte traces the evolution of three aspects of daily life: settlement patterns, calendar systems and the development of the “epigraphic habit” – the last is a topic that is taken up by several other contributors.
The imposition of Roman rule is also at the centre of the chapter by Liviu Petculescu, examining in detail not only how the Roman army achieved and maintained control over Scythia Minor, but the cultural and economic consequences, first and foremost in the sphere of urbanism, that followed. Militarised and Latinised, the military zone of Scythia Minor provides an instructive contrast not only with de-militarised and un-Latinised Pontos but with the Greek cities on the coast of Scythia Minor, which were far less affected by the advent of Rome.
With the contributions by Daniela Dueck, Thomas Corsten and Jesper Majbom Madsen, we move back to Asia and into the cultural sphere of Pontic Hellenism. The Roman province of Bithynia et Pontus is particular interesting for the study of Roman influence and Greek reactions. The cultural complexity of this composite province offers a rare possibility to compare the response to Roman hegemony in different societies with different cultural patterns. An important question is whether there are significant differences between the ways in which people in the Greek colonies, in the Hellenistic city-states and in the communities colonized by Rome reacted to the Roman presence. For instance, were the residents of the ancient Greek colonies more reluctant to live and identify themselves as Romans than citizens of the communities that were founded in the Hellenistic or Roman periods? From
