Chapter 1 - The Discourse on Romanization in the Age of Empires

Summary

This chapter traces the origin of the Romanization framework: that is, how the discourse on Romanization sprang up and has taken root in early twentieth century scholarship. Professionalization of the discipline mixed with the deep-rooted gentlemanly tradition stirred new dynamics. Views on Roman imperialism ranged from those of British imperial civil servants to those of American professional academics; approaches varied from the old gentlemanly tradition of exemplary history to new professional academics’ critical history; and evaluations diverged from admiration to disapproval. Despite wide-ranging differences, none escaped from their own social, economic, and political surroundings shaped by European and American imperialism. The comparisons between the ancient Roman Empire and the contemporary British, French, and American empires, either overtly or covertly, underpinned the works of the time.

St. Augustine looked at Roman history from the point of view of an early Christian; Tillemont from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman; Mommsen, from that of a nineteenth-century German. There is no point in asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one possible for the man who adopted it.¹

Thus wrote Robin G. Collingwood in The Idea of History in 1946. It would be too bleak a view to read his comment as one of cynical resignation which suggests that it is futile to grasp historical truth (however it is defined). Rather, he provides a salutary reminder that what is handed down to us as ‘history’ is, fundamentally, less historical reality, more history of thought. He does not mean that the history of thought written hitherto is entirely unfounded on historical reality and, therefore, useless or invalid. Instead, it is neither dogmatic assertion nor rejection of historical truth, but constant awareness of the distance between historical reality and history of thought that offers critical perspectives and constructive steps towards a richer understanding of the past.

In this sense, the development of the discourse on Romanization shows the significance of Collingwood’s insight. Romanization studies was conceived at the height of European imperialism and American optimism in the early twentieth century – before a turn of events, including the World Wars, the Great Depression, and decolonization – and thus displayed a perspective characteristic of the era, that of being sympathetic towards the great ancient power of the Roman Empire. In Britain in particular, Christopher Stray argues, not only the framework of Romanization but the discipline of Roman history itself owes its emergence to the rise of British imperial ideology in the era.² The changing attitude towards the flourishing British Empire, signalled by Queen Victoria being named as the Empress of India in 1876, had gradually shifted the locus of authority from Greek democracy to Roman imperialism and increased interest in various aspects of the Roman Empire, including Romanization.³ This sympathetic perspective does not wholly invalidate the Romanization studies of the period. On the contrary, the recognition that Romanization studies is a product not only of ancient historical realities but also of the contemporary social, economic, and political realities allows later historians and archaeologists to investigate the subject matter with sceptical historicism. Questioning the underlying assumptions born of the time – those of the past as well as of the present – enabled them to contextualize and re-evaluate ideas from the earlier studies and, furthermore, to utilize their own contemporary influences as their own intellectual assets. When, from the mid-twentieth- century onwards, decolonization and postcolonialism moulded historians of the following generation with new social, economic, and political configurations, they availed themselves of new intellectual currents of the time to reflect on the imperial legacy embedded in the earlier discourse and to propose alternative paradigms. Romanization throughout twentieth-and twenty-first-century scholarship was not a moribund ancient phenomenon, but a living and breathing past in constant conversation with the present. Following the history of thought on Romanization through the course of this book, here we will explore how the interplay between the ancient past and the contemporary lens has mediated the distance from various perspectives.

This chapter, first of all, traces the origin of the Romanization framework: that is, how the discourse on Romanization commenced and took root in early twentieth-century scholarship. Broadly speaking, the Roman Empire had been an unfailing reference point throughout modern Western intellectual dialogues. Since the eighteenth century, the long-standing elite tradition of classical education and the Grand Tour, as well as the subsequent neoclassical movement in art and architecture, have established ancient Greek and Roman civilization as a staple in modern Western intellectual discourse. Stray states that Greece and Rome represented ‘unity as complementary elements – as male and female parents of Europe’ in which Greece stood for individuality and freedom and Rome for discipline and order.⁴ Yet, until the late nineteenth century, the Roman Empire was more often discussed as a cautionary tale of imperial despotism and decadence and did not command much respect or celebration. It was only after the late nineteenth century, particularly when the British Empire came to establish itself as ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’ with its power and influence, that Roman imperialism kindled fresh interest. Similarly, the ever-expanding powers of France and America made Roman imperialism more relevant to modern Western minds.⁵ Whether in order to better comprehend their own British, French, and American powers by comparison or to ape or surpass one of the great ancient powers, intellectuals and scholars of the time looked to the Roman Empire, alongside many other great historical empires, for wisdom and insights.⁶ Views on the Roman Empire were, nevertheless, far from uniform. Professionalization of the discipline from the early twentieth century mixed with the deep-rooted gentlemanly tradition instigated new dynamics in the discourse on Romanization. Standpoints ranged from that of British imperial civil servants to that of American professional academics; approaches varied from the old gentlemanly tradition of exemplary history to new professional academics’ critical history, and evaluations diverged from admiration to disapproval. Despite wide-ranging differences, none escaped from their own social, economic, and political surroundings, shaped by European and American imperialism. The comparisons between the ancient Roman Empire and the contemporary British, French, and American empires, either overtly or covertly, underpinned the works of the time.

The Gentlemanly Tradition

In an age when academic historians seem to embody old traditions shelved in ivory towers and popular TV historians engage with the wider public of the twenty-first century, it is not easy to imagine professional academic historians as the one-time avant-garde. Against the well-established tradition of gentlemen scholars, they pioneered a new critical history which was to refashion history as a modern academic discipline of the early twentieth century. While this gradual shift within the discipline was unmistakable, the old conventions of gentlemen scholars still lived on during this period. In fact, the overarching climate that governed Roman history in transition is traceable to the Victorian and Edwardian tradition of Classics. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Roman history had been subsumed under the mighty discipline of Classics. Situated as a sub-category of Classics, Roman history in general shared and inherited the gentlemanly tradition of Classics, which enjoyed its heyday during the Victorian and Edwardian ages.⁷ It, in essence, describes an intellectual protocol of the time whereby Classics and the gentleman class symbiotically defined and sustained each other. Classical education, which started at public school and continued at either Oxford or Cambridge University, effectively formulated the taste of gentlemen, inculcated their morality, shaped their discourse, fostered solidarity among the elites, and ultimately signified a badge of status; in turn, amateur-gentlemen scholars educated in this manner dominated and directed the field of Classics.⁸ In other words, this specific class represented the face of the Classics. With respect to Roman history, Edward Gibbon, who is immortalized by his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (despite his anti-Christian stance), proudly epitomized the tradition of gentlemen scholars and was succeeded by politician-gentlemen scholars such as Lord Cromer, Sir C. P. Lucas, and Lord Bryce in the early twentieth century.⁹ Vance relates that within the gentlemanly tradition ‘the writing of ancient history continued to be regarded mainly as a literary activity, philosophy teaching by examples, rather than a severe academic discipline aspiring to be the condition of science’.¹⁰ The gentlemanly tradition approached Roman history not as an unknown world to be investigated and reconstructed with critical eyes, but as a mirror to reflect upon its universal lessons through politico-moral exemplars and warnings.

There had been many gentlemen scholars before, but what distinguishes the twentieth-century gentlemen scholars from their predecessors of the Victorian era is their direct involvement in the British imperial administration.¹¹ For example, Evelyn Baring, otherwise known as the Earl of Cromer, after his stellar colonial career in India and Egypt, served as the president of the Classical Association and published his presidential address, Ancient and Modern Imperialism, in 1910.¹² Also, Sir Charles P. Lucas, after having served as a distinguished civil servant in the Colonial Office for decades, took an academic position at the Working Men’s College in London and published Greater Rome and Greater Britain in 1912.¹³ Having worked as colonial civil servants and politicians in the field, they formed unique perspectives different from those of both their predecessors and contemporary professional academics. However, it was not the case that gentlemen scholars stood on the opposite side to professional academics. Rather, they encouraged, influenced, and communicated with professional academics to develop the discourse on Romanization. Richard Hingley and Phiroze Vasunia respectively in Roman Officers and English Gentlemen and The Classics in Colonial India elucidate the profound legacy of the gentlemanly tradition in the scholarship of Classics and ancient history.¹⁴ Although the gentlemanly tradition has already been discussed in detail, and with discernment, in these works, another closer look at the most frequently discussed works of Cromer and Lucas, with particular focus on Romanization, will help us to trace the intellectual genealogy of the Romanization debate at its nascent stage.¹⁵ In contrast to professional academics, gentlemen scholars’ principal credential and/or asset as historians was their field experience in British colonies. They did not attempt to assume scholarly objectivity, but rather drew heavily on their personal observations and experiences to offer hands-on insights in comparing and contrasting modern British imperialism with ancient Roman imperialism. For instance, Cromer explains the reality of ancient Roman provincial administration by personally identifying himself with Pliny the Younger and voices his sentimental attachment with pride: ‘I have a strong fellow-feeling for that Bithynian praetor whose justice has been immortalized by Catallus, for I have had a somewhat personal experience of the race of company-mongers to which Catallus belonged, and of their angry vituperation – though in prose rather than in poetry’.¹⁶ He derives his authority to understand Roman imperialism mainly from his experience as a British consul-general. Lucas also credits the opinion of Cromer regarding the comparison between Roman and British imperialism on account of his field experience: ‘[Cromer] gives as the result of his almost unrivalled experience, “the conclusion that the British generally, though they succeed less well when once the full tide of education has set in, possess in a very high degree the power of acquiring the sympathy and confidence of any primitive races with which they are brought into contact”’.¹⁷ The fact that they consider their field experience to be the primary resource for their historical understanding allows us a glimpse into the underlying assumptions that they had about the history of the Roman Empire.

Here, the often-overlooked premise of gentlemen scholars’ history comes into sight – that Roman imperialism and British imperialism are comparable in nature. If British colonial officers had experience in governing colonies, it is assumed that they could vicariously understand what ancient Roman provincial governors underwent, since the two experiences of ruling a colonized population are not dissimilar in essence in spite of the temporal and spatial gap.¹⁸ Based on this underlying belief, gentlemen scholars derived their authority to understand ancient Roman imperialism from comparing and contrasting it with modern British imperialism. Conversely, it was evident to them that the study of the ancient Roman Empire would further the understanding of how to govern, as well as improve the administration of the modern British Empire. Deeming ancient Roman and modern British imperialism to be analogous, they maintained that the study of their historical antecedent would give the British particular advantages in better grasping their own imperialism and in improving upon their ancient counterpart. This view sustained the significance and utility of the comparative study, which fundamentally served as a mirror study for gentlemen scholars. In other words, subscribing to the idea that the past reflects the present and vice versa, gentlemen scholars used the past as a mirror to reflect on their British position and to enhance their British imperial endeavours. In the preface to his presidential address to the Classical Association, Cromer recounts that his professional experiences framed such a viewpoint on history:

As an additional plea in justification of the choice of my subject, I think I may say that long acquaintance with the government and administration of a country which was at different times under the sway of the Macedonian and the Roman does to some extent bridge over the centuries, and tends to bring forcibly to mind that, at all times in respect to certain incidents, the world has not so very much changed in 2,000 years.¹⁹

Although Lucas believes that Roman imperialism had more in common with French imperialism than with its British counterpart,²⁰ he still shares the same underlying assumption that history repeats itself. On the whole, within this gentlemanly tradition, history was not a linear progress, but a cyclical and/or spiral movement – the latter being repetition with progress – therefore, a philosophy teaching by example.

Despite their shared philosophy on history, Cromer and Lucas maintain opposite stances on Roman imperialism. At the risk of oversimplification, they conceive two contrasting notions of Roman imperialism: defensive imperialism and military despotism. Cromer argues that the principal driving force for both ancient Roman and modern British imperialism was ‘the imperious and irresistible necessity of acquiring defensive frontiers’.²¹ Though various factors, such as ambitious individuals and powerful institutions, played parts in shaping distinct courses for each imperial power, he insists that the desire to obtain defensive frontiers is natural. Hence, history repeatedly witnesses the ebb and flow of imperial powers. Of all the empires throughout history, Cromer gives the Roman and British empires more weight for in-depth analysis, since he considers each to represent a paragon of imperialism, from ancient and modern times respectively. According to Cromer, the temperament of the Romans and the British was better suited to thrive in imperial endeavours than that of their own contemporary rivals: ‘[t]here is, in fact, a good deal of similarity between the Roman and British character. Both nations appear to the best advantage in critical times’.²² Soon it becomes not too difficult to trace in his work a patchwork of prominent ideas of the early twentieth century that range from racial theories and social anthropology to nationalism. To identify the Roman Empire with a nineteenth-century sovereign state and to presume that the Roman Empire formed a coherent national character demonstrates problems inherent in Cromer’s hasty application of contemporary thoughts to the comparative study of the Roman and British Empires. It led him to conclude that the Romans and the British, as nations, accomplished the most out of the natural course of imperial evolution.

Cromer’s contemporary, Lucas, was no less influenced by the same set of contemporary ideas. However, Lucas arrives at the opposite verdict and condemns the Roman Empire as a form of military despotism – that is, the antithesis of the British civilizing family-like Empire. He distinguishes benevolent British imperialism from abusive Roman imperialism on the grounds that the British as a race, as a society, and as a nation are naturally more inclined to give benefit to the world via Britain’s civilizing imperialism: ‘There is in fact no parallel to it in history of the world. The gradual growth of younger British peoples within and not without the Empire, the maintenance of the connexion between the younger and the old, coupled with the continuous development from terms of subordination to terms of practical independence, is peculiar to the British race’.²³

In comparison, Lucas explains that the continental races – that is, modern France and ancient Rome – share the tendency to impose a form of tyrannical imperialism: ‘The French colonization of Canada had in it a touch of Roman settlement. It was in its essence largely military colonization. It was despotically arranged, organized, and held together, in order to keep the land against notable Indian fighters with hostile British colonies behind them’.²⁴

In addition to his prejudiced view on racial qualities, Lucas selects an arguably biased set of examples to support his argument. He often confines his discussion of British imperialism to self-governing colonies (i.e. settler colonies) and treats other colonies, including British India, which were de facto debarred from obtaining independence, as a separate category in need of an exceptional explanation. Confining his discussion to self-governing colonies to a large extent, he projects an overly optimistic – and arguably deceptive – view to portray colonies as siblings within a supportive family and to trust the purported goodwill of British explorers, traders, and missionaries. Eventually, as subtly suggested by the title of his book Greater Rome and Greater Britain, Lucas argues that Rome was great, but Britain was even greater.

And yet Cromer and Lucas agree that the Romans surpassed the British in one aspect: that is, in how they assimilated the colonized. Whilst approving of Roman success in this with the label of Romanization, they nonetheless hold back their full praise of Roman achievement by rather unconvincingly explaining that Romans were more successful at assimilation only because the task was much easier in ancient times. In so doing, they artfully rationalize the relative failure of the modern British. They provide a list of reasons to justify why Romanization was easier. Cromer points to ancient polytheism and so-called unorganized primitive tribes as factors that gave Romans an upper hand in assimilation, while insisting that modern monotheism and intricate stratification of societies and institutions proved to be major stumbling blocks for the British. In other words, modern complications that were unknown in ancient times naturally made assimilation much more challenging for the modern British. Furthermore, he argues that the pitfalls of spreading the imperial language fortunately escaped the Romans, whereas the British learned about them the hard way. Based on his experience, he asserts that the goodwill to promote integration by spreading the language often backfired; English language failed to encourage the colonized to feel sympathy towards the colonizers and instead empowered the colonized to more forcefully and tactically rise against the colonizers. He leaves this question – why the spread of language worked against British imperialism but not against Roman imperialism – hanging and moves on to conclude that the British faced more challenges than the Romans. However, after a lengthy defence of the British Empire, Cromer admits one British flaw – the apparent incongruity of their purpose in imperialist integration – that is, more precisely, the hypocritical discrepancy between their professed ideal and their ulterior desire.

[A Roman imperialist] would have added that the last thing in the world he intended was to put into the heads of the provincials that, by copying Rome and Roman customs, they would acquire a right to sever their connection with the Empire and to govern themselves; in fact, that his central political conception was not to autonomize, but to Romanize, or at least Hellenize, the world.

But what would be the reply of the leading imperialist of the world – of the Englishman? He would be puzzled to give any definite answer, for he is in turn always striving to attain two ideals, which are apt to be mutually destructive – the ideal of good government, which connotes the continuance of own supremacy, and the ideal of self-government, which connotes the whole or partial abdication of his supreme position.²⁵

Cromer’s acknowledgement that British imperialism contains an internal paradox is meaningful, if not revealing. Turning to the Roman Empire as a point of reference, he not only advocates that British accomplishments were on a par with those of the great ancient imperial power, but also criticizes the shortcoming of British imperialism. In other words, he uses the Roman Empire as a lens to more fully explore both the bright and dark sides of British imperialism.

Lucas, on the other hand, unequivocally upholds the British model of assimilation even though it might have appeared to be unsuccessful at times. He holds ‘the race and colour problem’ accountable for posing a modern challenge to the British. He then unapologetically minimizes the issue by glossing over it as collateral damage that is an unavoidable result in the course of achieving an evolved form of imperialism that promotes freedom and diversity. The Romans simply did not allow racial conflicts to arise, since Roman military despotism reduced their own imperialism to nothing more than subjection and uniformity:

It may be summed up that in the Roman Empire there was a perpetual opening out of citizenship. The tendency was all towards fusion and uniformity, and race imposed few or no barriers. In the British Empire we have started with British citizenship of one kind or another as coterminous with British soil, in whatever part of the world the soil may be; but the tendency has been to greater diversity rather than to greater uniformity; and the lessening of distance accentuated, instead of obliterating, distinctions of race. But at the same time it must be borne in mind that the grant of universal citizenship in the Roman Empire was combined with the stereotyping of military despotism. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that all Roman citizens became lowered to the level of Roman subjects, than that all Roman subjects were raised to the level of Roman citizens. Equality came in the Roman Empire as the result of the loss of freedom. Diversity has developed in the British Empire as the result of the growth of freedom. The race and colour problem has increased in difficulty in our Empire in proportion as some of the Provinces of that Empire have become more and more self-governing.²⁶

Lucas refers to Roman imperialism to expand on why racial problems hindered assimilation in the British Empire. Yet, what is even more striking in his comparative study is that he not only uses ancient Roman imperialism to make sense of modern British imperialism but also vice versa. He perceives ancient Roman and modern British imperialism as opposites that mirror each other, and places them in a dialectical framework.

Nowadays, the gentlemen scholars’ understanding of the Roman Empire comes across as being poles apart from that of contemporary historians in the twenty-first century. So distant that one might wonder whether it is useful to trace back to the early twentieth-century gentleman-scholar tradition in order to comprehend the development of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century historiography. The gentlemen scholars had different agendas, approaches, and philosophies in their studies of Roman history from those of their professional academic counterparts. As former British colonial civil servants, they believed that history repeats itself, with or without progress, viewed Roman imperialism as an example from the past, either good or bad, to learn lessons from, and aimed at improving their own imperialism in light of ancient Roman imperialism. Naturally, their expertise and their focus fell less on Roman imperialism and more on their own empire. Even though they did not fully concentrate on Roman history per se, their studies are nonetheless worth investigating. Vasunia unfolds the significance and legacy of their works: ‘Classics is still embedded in national politics and national culture at this point, and to speak authoritatively about antiquity can also be a way to make an intervention in (the history of) the present’.²⁷ In other words, they established the enduring parallel discourse between ancient Roman and British imperialism, as the widespread use of the term Pax Britannica, modelled on Pax Romana, demonstrates. The understandings of both British and Roman imperialism have become so entangled and entrenched with one another that it becomes futile to disentangle them. Ancient imperialism was evaluated using the framework of modern imperialism, and the understanding of one imperialism was projected onto the other. Hingley points out the pitfalls of this parallel discourse, that is, the inherent circular argument: ‘A circular process occurred, in which interpretations of the Roman past were used to inform the late Victorian and Edwardian present, although in this process the parallels that were drawn were selective and determined by the needs of that present. As a consequence, the present, at least in part, was used to recreate the past in its own image’.²⁸ The discourse of one imperialism sustained that of the other. As Vasunia declares, ‘[t]his is … an account of collusion between classics and empire’.²⁹ This parallel discourse continued to have lasting impact not only on Cromer and Lucas’ contemporaries but also on succeeding generations.

The Rise of Professional Academics

Search for truth, scientific method, and scepticism of mind defined professional academic historians and ushered in the era of critical history; so goes the common understanding. The tide of change rolled in when positivism, which had been dominant since the nineteenth century across Europe and across various disciplines, rather belatedly crossed the threshold of the British scholarship of Roman history, or to be precise, the newly formed discipline of Roman history at the University of Oxford as a part of Literae Humaniores, also known as Greats.³⁰ By the time of the First World War, professionalization of Classics, including Roman history, had slowly settled in and led to the creation of academic positions as well as academic societies and journals.³¹ On the other hand, on the Continent, the trend was well underway from the nineteenth century onwards, epitomized by German scholarship of Altertumswissenschaft. Entitling their discipline a science of antiquity, German professional academic classicists and historians adopted methods and approaches of natural scientists, such as collaborative research, critical analysis of evidence, and discovery of objective truth. Mommsen, the figurehead of Roman history in this age, in the spirit of positivism compiled a colossal corpus of Latin inscriptions and Roman law.³² In recognition of Mommsen’s contribution, Haverfield says, ‘it is the age when Roman history was reborn … The old looseness of pharaseology, the old indifference to many branches of evidence, the old inaccurate idea of what things mattered have now to disappear’.³³ It was, in fact, Haverfield, a disciple of Mommsen (along with a contemporary French historian, Camille Jullian³⁴), who introduced the positivist history to the British scholarship which until then had been dominated by exemplary history of the gentlemanly tradition. Whilst Mommsen changed the landscape of the field with his methodical rigour in the study of epigraphy and law, Haverfield followed in Mommsen’s steps to apply his own methodical rigour to archaeology.³⁵ Afterwards, Collingwood, a student of Haverfield in turn, further expanded the critical history beyond positivist history. A philosopher as much as a historian, he delved into the philosophy of history and approached Roman history with both methodological rigour and epistemological questioning.

However, as Stray argues, ‘[c]lassical scholarship did not become class-neutral when it became professionalized; it simply took a place in a reconstructed social order’.³⁶ Nor did it become value-free as it seemed or claimed. Professional academic historians attempted to search for historical truth detached from religious or moral values, but this change of orientation itself took place within the surrounding social, political, and historical realities. In the face of pluralization of knowledge and curriculum, professional academics tried to assert the position of Roman history as an academic discipline that mattered; an increasing number of industrial bourgeoisies in the reconstructed social hierarchy still aspired to acquire a classical education to earn the badge of status and supplied the increasing demand for classical education; the expanding British Empire raised public interest in the history of the Roman Empire as a source of guidance and inspiration. The backdrop provided both internal and external incentives not only to maintain the privileged position of Roman history in the social hierarchy, but also to write the elite-driven Roman history for the elite, or the aspiring-to-be-elite, audience. For example, when considering the ordinary non-elites, Haverfield does not find many things of significance, because ‘the rustic poor of a county seldom affect the trend of its history’.³⁷ Professionalization and critical history writing, therefore, resulted in prolonging the identification with the elite class handed down from the gentlemanly tradition by recasting exemplary history for the gentleman class into analytical political history for the imperial elites. Vance states that ‘[s]ceptical revisionism, in combination with – or in tension with – imaginative responsiveness to the romantic-poetic and legendary dimension of … Roman history, could permit the old exemplary history to be reinvented as more explicitly ideological and all the more easily appropriated for modern political … purposes’.³⁸

The apparent parallel between the Roman elites and the British Imperial elites underpins Roman historiography of the time. The identification was far from an implicit assumption. On the contrary, it was established and acknowledged sufficiently overtly that there is little need to read between the lines. The political and intellectual climate of the time revolved around drawing lessons from a comparison of the two imperial powers (the Roman and British Empires) and the two imperial colonies (Roman Britain and British India), as exemplified by the authors mentioned earlier.³⁹ Professional academic historians were not isolated from the current. Although their methodological rigour and critical approach set them apart from the gentlemen scholars, to a certain extent they channelled the same understanding through their professional expertise and developed it into strands of studies in Roman history.

Two particular areas of study, formed and flourishing in this period, heavily hinge on this identification and its assumptions: first, prosopographical studies, pioneered by Sir Ronald Syme, and, second, frontier studies, led by Haverfield. First, prosopographical studies, exemplified by Syme’s Roman Revolution in Anglo-American scholarship, uses the network of Roman elites to explain political developments at the imperial centre and in the wider empire.⁴⁰ The underlying belief that the elites determine the course of imperial history was widely accepted during the time, not only because rigorous analysis of the network convincingly demonstrated it, but also because both historians and readers of the time – both predominantly from an elite background – shared the same worldview: that the elites dictate the course of history. In other words, the prevalent understanding that British elites determined the course of their imperial politics was projected onto Roman elites and their course of history and allowed prosopographical studies to gain sympathetic reception.⁴¹ Second, frontier studies headed by Haverfield also benefited from the popular identification between Roman and British imperial elites. Frontier studies employed increasingly scientific methodologies of archaeology, for example to examine Hadrian’s Wall and military sites in north England, and thereby transformed Roman history and archaeology from the earlier gentlemanly pursuit to an organized academic discipline. Nonetheless, the contemporary concern shared by both gentlemen scholars and professional academics fuelled the development of frontier studies: how British imperial elites should administer ‘the frontier of civilization’ oriented historians’ and archaeologists’ interests to investigate how ancient Roman elites administered their own frontiers, since they believed that Roman and British elites shared similar concerns and were thus akin to one another.⁴² The identification which stems from the gentlemanly tradition of Classics continued to influence the course of Roman historiography in the first half of the twentieth century, until an intellectual backlash took place in the second half of the twentieth century.

As shown, it was not an abrupt rupture from the exemplary history of gentlemen scholars to the critical history of professional academics. Certainly there was a shift in the overall direction. The historical truth that gentlemen scholars sought was the underlying and permanent force of human nature, will, or (ir)rationality repeatedly manifested through the course of history, in other words, ‘History with a capital H’ in the tradition of Kant and Hegel. Historical truth that professional academics pursued, on the other hand, was a systematic knowledge of the past liberated from subjective value judgements. ‘All subjective elements (as they were called) in the historian’s point of view had to be eliminated. The historian must pass no judgement on the facts: he must only say what they were,’ as Collingwood describes the positivist history dominant during the time.⁴³ However, the vantage point of the twenty-first century offers hindsight that positivist history was not value-free or neutral as it claimed. Processing historical data (according to certain criteria), prioritizing historical facts (perhaps over contexts), and then asserting historical truth (however it is defined) all in itself entails implicit value judgements. As Stray analyses the transition taking place in the study of Classics and ancient history, ‘this search for truth was moralized and given a reformulated cultural authority’ as academic knowledge.⁴⁴ Contrary to its claim to purified and objective historical knowledge/truth, to borrow Foucault’s terms, positivist history not only contained subjective elements built into its own system but also acquired authority to establish a new régime of historical truth.⁴⁵ It was the régime of historical knowledge/truth that shifted from one mode to another. Transition took place in the methodology and philosophy of historical knowledge/truth, whilst continuity prevailed in the structure and content of historical discourse. The parallel frame between the ancient Roman and the modern British empires and between civilizing mission and Romanization occupied the attention of both gentlemen scholars and professional academics. The structure and content of the discourse that persisted on the surface reveals that another régime of truth, which sustained the discourse at its root, continued to be upheld throughout the transitional period – colonialism and/or imperialism. For example, notions such as the dialectic between the civilized colonizer and the barbarian colonized and the progress of civilization through imperialism stood steadfast through the period of shift from exemplary history to critical history. The ‘collusion between classics and empire’, in the words of Vasunia, did not come to an end with the advent of professedly objective positivist history, but rather continued to be built into the new régime of truth for critical Roman history. As a whole, there was a shift in the régime of truth on one level and continuity on another level.

As a result, the mixture of continuity and discontinuity pervades the discourse on Romanization. The break from the gentlemanly tradition is perhaps most pronounced in the general impression that ‘Roman history … has become more difficult, more full of facts, more technical’, as Haverfield writes.⁴⁶ Professional academics published their historical research dense with literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, developed systematic analyses of literary and non-literary evidence, and became disciplinary specialists. It was amid the professionalization of the discipline that the framework of Romanization came to appear in the British scholarship. While Mommsen first advanced his idea of ‘Romanisierung’ in German scholarship based on his mastery of literary and epigraphic sources in the fifth volume of Römische Geschichte in 1885, Haverfield brought archaeological sources to the fore and formulated the model of Romanization in The Romanization of Roman Britain, published in 1905. Credited with founding the discipline of Romano-British archaeology, Haverfield stresses the newfound potential of archaeological evidence:

The field of non-literary evidence offers a still wider and more fertile area of virgin soil. That is, indeed, the chief work now to be done in Roman history, to wring life and blood out of stone.

The more I study the ordinary written materials, the harder I find it to learn the truth from them, the more often I feel that the story which they tell is not the story which is worth telling. I would sacrifice all that tract of Arrian which Professor Pelham was discussing, for a little appropriate archaeological evidence. It is no doubt hard to construct a ‘story’ out of archaeological evidence, but it is certainly possible to construct history. It is possible to-day to write some sort of history of the Roman frontier in Scotland, although the facts of that history are known to us mainly through archaeological evidence: they are the fruits of the labours of Mr. J. Curle and Mr. George Macdonald and one or two others during recent years. Without these researches we should still be struggling with vague Tacitean rhetoric or should remain the victims of errors into which even Mommsen fell when he tried to tell the tale of Roman Caledonia and suggested that Septimus Severus rebuilt the Wall from Forth to Clyde.⁴⁷

He believes that archaeological evidence is tangible, specific, and consistent: it is free from possible errors that literary evidence poses with its ambiguity, subjectivity, and inconsistency and, therefore, not only complements but also counterbalances literary evidence. Advocating the use of archaeological evidence to write history, he published many excavation reports, catalogues of archaeological objects, and monographs that heavily draw upon archaeological evidence, The Romanization of Roman Britain, Ancient Town-Planning, and The Roman Occupation of Britain to name a few.⁴⁸ Following in Haverfield’s footsteps, Collingwood also made a substantial contribution that furthered Romano-British archaeology, of which the most significant works include The Archaeology of Roman Britain and Roman Britain and the English Settlements.⁴⁹

The rise of Romano-British archaeology stood at odds with the gentlemanly tradition. When ancient Roman artefacts were unearthed and presented, the past became the present and lost the appeal of being permanently ‘classic’. Archaeology, which attempts to locate the ancient past in specific time, space, and context, by implication challenged the gentlemanly tradition, which sought to learn historical lessons that transcend the specifics of time, space, and contexts. Stray describes the significance of archaeology in the British scholarship: ‘[t]he ancient world shifts from mirror to window, from reflection to perception; the mirror’s silvering is eroded to show a past separated by the thin glass wall of history’.⁵⁰ This, nevertheless, should not be taken to imply that the parallel discourse between the ancient Roman and the modern British empires abated. Instead, this parallel discourse unfalteringly continued. With the rise of archaeology, the discourse was reframed from the mirror study of gentlemen scholars pivoting on personal experiences to the comparative study of professional academics referring to organized evidence. Romano-British archaeology, despite Haverfield’s claim to be objective, was not free from the imperialist régime of truth that has underpinned the parallel discourse. In fact, it was not exempt from imperialism but founded upon it, thus argues Hingley extensively in his book Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology: ‘a circular process of interpretation existed … In the context of imperial discourse, archaeological narrative was drawn into the provision of useful lessons for the British Empire’.⁵¹ Hingley debunks the scientific objectivity of Romano-British archaeology and exposes imperialist thoughts pervading professional academic scholarship. A closer look at their studies on Roman Britain and Romanization reveals how professional academic historians and archaeologists shaped the discourse with a seemingly contradictory blend of positivism and imperialism.

Positivism sparked off the rise of Romano-British archaeology, and this, in turn, launched a new branch of studies in the British scholarship of Roman history, that is, Roman Britain. Archaeology enriched the understanding of Roman Britain with systematic excavations. While literary sources have characterized Roman Britain merely as a military frontier of the Roman Empire, newly discovered epigraphic and archaeological evidence filled the landscape of Roman Britain with towns, villas, temples, sculptures, writing tablets, etcetera. Roman Britain became an ideal field for professional academics of the time to showcase their versatility, to build their expertise, and to cultivate a cohort of specialists. They were able to demonstrate their methodical rigour with epigraphic and archaeological evidence discovered in Britain, to reappraise Romano-British heritage and promote the heritage industry, and to engage with the wider imperial discourse of the time by linking ancient Roman and modern British imperialism. In short, in the context of British scholarship, Roman Britain became more than a regional case study of Romanization and established itself as an exclusive subject of expertise. As Hingley depicts the narrow scholarship of Roman Britain, ‘Romano-British scholarship has often been no less an island than its subject. By and large, [Roman] Britain has formed the preserve for a clearly defined group of scholars who conduct work of a specific type which is cut off to an extent from broader classical scholarship’.⁵² According to Hingley, the fundamental reason behind the phenomenon is that British national identity was at stake in the history of Roman Britain. Instead of contextualizing Roman Britain more broadly with studies on other Roman provinces, Romano-British historians and archaeologists tended to be preoccupied with resolving the British past as the conquered in relation to the Roman Empire and vindicating the British present as the conqueror in India.⁵³ Although their arguments were far from homogenous, they carried similar nationalistic concerns originating from their shared social, political, and historical realities.

Above all, a lingering uneasiness in relation to the conquered ancient Britons was shared across the discipline. It became a paramount question, because racial theories in anthropology, which had been employed to justify European imperialism at the time, could imply the racial inferiority of the British. Previously, the dilemma had been dealt with mainly by two different racial myths: first, by identifying the defeated Celtic Britons with the ancestors of the marginalized Welsh and Cornish and the subsequently conquering Anglo-Saxons with the ancestors of the prevailing English,⁵⁴ or second by characterizing the Roman rule over the fiercely independent Britons as superficial and fleeting.⁵⁵ Haverfield then took a different approach and proposed Romanization as a key to resolve the conundrum:

The west offers a different spectacle. Here Rome found races that were not yet civilized, yet were racially capable of accepting her culture. Here, accordingly, her conquests different from the two forms of conquest with which modern men are most familiar. We know well enough the rule of civilized white men over uncivilized Africans, who seem sundered for ever from their conquerors by a broad physical distinction. We know, too, the rule of civilized white men over civilized white men – of Russian (for example) over Pole, where the individualities of two civilized races clash in undying conflict. The Roman conquest of western Europe resembled neither of these. Celt, Iberian, German, Illyrian, were marked off from Italian by no broad distinction of race and colour, such as that which marked off the ancient Egyptian from the Italian, or that which divides the Frenchman from the Algerian Arab. They were marked off, further, by no ancient culture, such as that which had existed for centuries round the Aegean. It was possible, it was easy, to Romanize these western peoples.⁵⁶

And he continues to build up towards the observation that ‘uncivilized but intelligent’ Britons learned the benefits of Roman civilization and eventually surpassed their conquerors to become even more powerful imperialists on their own (only many centuries later).⁵⁷ Hingley rightly points out that the magic formula behind Haverfield’s Romanization was that it conveniently ‘removed the stigma of conquest’.⁵⁸ As Hingley explains, Haverfield’s argument that endorses imperialism without compromising national pride and racial superiority has unsurprisingly gained enduring and far-reaching influence. From his initial framework of Romanization onwards, Haverfield prompted the ensuing discourse on Romanization to acquire its particular relevance and significance in a British, as well as a wider Anglo-American, context.

The many editions and reprints of The Romanization of Roman Britain testify to the long-lived success of Haverfield’s Romanization model. First proposed in his lecture in 1905, then expanded and published into a monograph in 1912, his book is still reprinted to this day. Even though his work, interspersed with antiquated ideas on race and civilization, might appear to be obsolete to many modern readers, its staggering longevity and legacy in the present day necessitates a closer look at Haverfield’s original paradigm. G. D. Barri Jones aptly summarizes the significance that Haverfield holds in the Anglo-American discourse on Romanization: ‘In Anglophone terms … the debate was formulated and shaped over half a century by Haverfield’s study of Romanization in Britain … Effectively, until the rise of revisionism in 1970s, it is fair to say that Haverfield’s framework provided the Leitmotif of approaches to Romanization’.⁵⁹ It is regrettable that Haverfield’s colossal presence came to obscure the contributions of other historians (a closer reading of one of them, Collingwood, will follow in order to consider counterpoints made during the period); on the other hand, his incomparable contribution to the shifting of popular perception of the Roman Empire explains his status in Anglo-American scholarship.⁶⁰ Until Haverfield, ‘historians seldom praise[d] the Roman Empire. They regard[ed] it as a period of death and despotism, from which manly vigour and political freedom and creative genius and the energies of speculative intellect were all alike excluded’.⁶¹ Aided by the thriving British Empire at the time, he succeeded in overturning the general inclination to be sympathetic towards ancient Roman imperialism and, moreover, in raising the relevance of the discipline to contemporary British imperialism.⁶² He achieves it by underlining long peace, safety, and stability within the Empire secured by Romanization.

Romanization, therefore, thanks to Haverfield, became a focal point of Roman imperial success:

The Roman Empire was the civilized world; the safety of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside roared the wild chaos of barbarism. Rome kept it back, from end to end of Europe and across a thousand miles of western Asia. Had Rome failed to civilize, had the civilized life found no period in which to grow firm and tenacious, civilization would have perished utterly. The culture of the old world would not have lived on, to form the groundwork of the best culture of to-day.⁶³

It was this growth of internal civilization which formed the second and most lasting of the achievements of the Empire. Its long and peaceable government – the longest and most orderly that has yet been granted to any large portion of the world – gave time for the expansion of Roman speech and manners, for the extension of the political franchise, the establishment of city life, the assimilation of the provincial populations in an orderly and coherent civilization. As the importance of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large part of the world grew to be Roman. It has been said that Greece taught men to be human and Rome made mankind civilised. That was the work of the Empire; the form it took was Romanization.

Employing the dichotomy between civilization and barbarism, he conjures up the Roman Empire as an enclosure that preserved civilization. This binary outlook, as a matter of course, leads him to rank his archaeological data between the hierarchical binaries of superior ‘classical/Roman’ and inferior ‘native/Celtic’ and to interpret them as evidence of a unilateral civilizing process in varying degrees – but not those of reciprocal cultural change. In this narrative, the rebellion of Boudicca serves as a moment of regression hindering the progress of civilization.⁶⁴ On the whole, Romanization, according to Haverfield, was a linear progress of civilization in which Romans handed over the torch of civilization to the ‘uncivilized but intelligent’ natives, or Britons. When social Darwinism seemed to explain the expanding British Empire, progressive Romanization became another parallel example in history without much question.⁶⁵

Yet not everyone agreed with Haverfield. Collingwood, widely considered to be Haverfield’s successor, after a hiatus due to the First World War, recommenced his study of Romano-British archaeology as well as philosophy. With most of his fellow students trained by Haverfield having fallen in the war, he was left alone to carry on Haverfield’s legacy, ‘to keep alive the Oxford school of Romano-British studies that [Haverfield] had founded, to pass on the training [Haverfield] had given …, and to make use of the specialist library [Haverfield] had left to the University’.⁶⁶ While he established himself in philosophy, he also endeavoured to fulfil his obligation to continue Romano-British studies. Inquiring into both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, he used history and philosophy to enlighten one another. In his autobiography, he puts his scholarly trajectory in a nutshell: ‘My life’s work hitherto, as seen from my fiftieth year, has been in the main an attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history [italics in original]’.⁶⁷ Yet, it is worth noting that Collingwood was better known as a philosopher: he held the position of Waynflete Professor of metaphysical philosophy at the University of Oxford and wrote his tour de force in the field of philosophy, The Essay on Philosophical Method.⁶⁸ Additionally, his posthumously published The Idea of History, which recounts how philosophy on historical truth (or régime of historical truth in Foucault’s vocabulary) has changed over the course of history, became one of his notable works that bridge his interests between philosophy and history.⁶⁹ This piece crucially reveals that Collingwood, against the backdrop of the positivist trend, approached history not only with empirical data and positivist methodologies but also with epistemological questions on historical knowledge. His remark quoted at the beginning of this chapter captures his concerns as well as his contribution.

Likewise, the opening chapter to Collingwood’s Roman Britain, published in 1923 and then expanded in 1932, immediately lays out his distinctive approach to Roman Britain:

There are two sides to Roman Britain, the British side and the Roman. That is to say, it may be regarded either as an episode of in the history of England or as a part of the Roman Empire. If we wish to form a true idea of it, we must do justice to both these sides.

For a citizen of the Roman Empire, Britain had no individuality of its own except a purely political individuality, like that of an electoral district. The student who approaches Roman Britain as merely an episode in English history cannot see this fact. His point of view makes him forget that England herself, at the beginning of English history, did not exist, even by the name of Britain; and that England is the product of an historical process. Thus, in his well-known History of England, Gardiner remarks on the melancholy fact that the Britons had no patriotism, that they did not feel called upon to ‘die for Britain’. Such lack of patriotism he feels to be a reproach both to the Britons and to the Roman Empire. But the fact is that, writing from the distorting point of view of an historian of England, he expects the Britons to show loyalty to something which had not even begun to exist.⁷⁰

Collingwood warns of anachronistic nationalism distorting the history of Roman Britain. Emphasizing that the nation as a sovereign state and the national consciousness as a coherent character are historical, not intrinsic, ideas, he exhorts his readers to refrain from projecting modern nationalist patriotism to the ancient past and from distorting the historical truth with contemporary social, political, and historical surroundings. He himself was not exempt from the influences of his own surroundings, as he betrays a hint of patriotism from time to time.⁷¹ Still, he is mindful that the epistemology of historical knowledge/truth is founded not only on hard evidence but also on the philosophy of history governing the processing of evidence, which is a historical product as well. Since he finds it anachronistic to impose the dualist perspective fostered by modern nationalism, he rejects reading the history of Roman Britain in the framework of conquest by foreign power or conflict/competition between dialectic forces. To resolve these binary perspectives, Collingwood brings Romanization to the fore. Like Haverfield, he centres on Romanization, but veers away from Haverfield’s view to form a distinct outlook from the 1930s.

In contrast to his renown as a philosopher, Collingwood has not received due recognition in Romanization studies.⁷² Haverfield’s monumental presence in Romanization studies effectively eclipsed the original contribution of Collingwood as a mere reflection of Haverfield’s legacy. This led many to the misunderstanding that there had not been any attempt to revise Haverfield’s Romanization until the wave of revisionism from the mid-twentieth century. Admittedly, Collingwood was also immersed in the imperialism of the era and challenged Haverfield’s Romanization less radically than revisionist historians of the post-colonial generation. Nevertheless, as Hingley points out, ‘Collingwood belonged to a less optimistic generation than Haverfield’, having witnessed the First World War and the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.⁷³ His contemporary circumstances as well as his academic career in philosophy prompted him to re-examine Romanization. To start with, Collingwood rejects the rigorous binary perspectives, as mentioned earlier. He contends that the dialectical relationship between the civilized, conquering Italian Romans versus the savage, conquered Celtic Britons is a myth. Such a gulf in race, language, and culture as exists in modern European imperialism between Britain and India or between France and Algeria is not applicable to ancient Roman imperialism. On the other hand, between Romans and Britons, ‘[t]here was no sharp distinction of race; the distinction of language did not matter; and the difference in civilization was not of such a kind that Romans could be called civilized and the Britons savages’.⁷⁴ Therefore, Collingwood does not translate Romanization into a unilateral civilizing process. Instead:

What we found is a mixture of Roman and Celtic elements. In a sense it might be said that the civilization of Roman Britain is neither Roman nor British but Romano-British, a fusion of the two things into a single thing different from either. But this is not a quite satisfactory way of putting it; for it suggests that there was a definite blend of Roman and British elements, producing a civilization that was consistent and homogenous throughout the fabric of society. The fact is rather that a scale of Romanization can be recognized. At one end of the scale of come the upper class of society and towns; at the other end, the lower classes and the villages.⁷⁵

He neither outright rejects the model of Romanization nor puts forward a catchy term to satisfactorily replace it, which partly explains his ineffectiveness in giving currency to his idea. Nonetheless, it is worth noting Collingwood’s attempt to revise Haverfield’s model of Romanization. Collingwood argues that it was a process of cultural change with its scale tipped in favour of Romanization that resulted in hybrid Romano-British civilization.

Collingwood handpicks one piece among his many writings to best represent his view: ‘the chapter on “Art” in the Oxford History of England [titled Roman Britain and the English]; a chapter which I would gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle’.⁷⁶ Here, he ponders over the problem that Haverfield’s unilateral Romanization encounters over how to interpret Celtic art surviving and reviving in Roman Britain. The linear understanding of the change under Roman imperial rule has divided opinion into two camps, either British artisans’ failure to master the higher form of Roman art or British artistic resistance against oppressive Roman art. Looking at the same examples of Romano-British artworks, including ‘the Bath Gorgon, the Corbridge lion, the Aesica brooch, Castor or New Forest pottery, or the like’, Collingwood proposes a different perspective.⁷⁷ He argues that there coexisted different layers of culture. Repeatedly warning against pseudo-scientific readings of Celtic artistic expressions as racial temperament, he claims that Celtic tradition, which was the underlying cultural tradition, persisted ‘behind the façade of [R]omanization’.⁷⁸ In particular, he elevates the Bath Gorgon on the temple pediment of the Roman Baths as a paragon of Romano-British art, bringing Roman demands and old Celtic styles together into a syncretic piece of artwork, rather than describing it as a ‘vigorous semi-barbaric carving’ as Haverfield does.⁷⁹ Collingwood argues: ‘[t]he artistic romanization of Britain is therefore a melancholy story, not because Rome failed to impose her standards – she succeeded all too well – nor because Britain lacked artistic aptitude, for she had it in plenty, but because teacher and pupil were at cross-purposes’.⁸⁰ Although Collingwood still maintains the hierarchy between Romans and Britons in softened language and assumes Roman imperialism to be benevolent, it is worth noting that he recasts linear Romanization into the bilateral synthesis of Romano-British culture. It would be farfetched to consider Collingwood a precursor of the postcolonial revisionist movement that took off from the late twentieth century onwards, since he presumes imperialism (either ancient Roman or modern British) to be normative, as it was commonly considered during the time. Still, recognizing hyphenated Romano-British culture as a valid culture of its own may have set the course for subsequent studies on Romanization. Despite all, his attempt to revise Romanization leaves a crucial lesson that resonates with the historiography of Romanization – that the set of evidence on which to investigate the same historical phenomenon has not much changed, but the epistemological questions on how to interpret that same set of evidence have changed to reshape our understanding. Collingwood’s model demonstrates that recognizing Celtic elements in Romano-British art as an active force in the dynamic, rather than a passive or reactive, recasts Romanization in a different light. How the next generation of Roman historians and archaeologists read and interpret evidence to reshape the framework of Romanization will be investigated in later chapters.

Professional academic historians reframed the history of Roman Britain and Romanization with their new critical tools, including systematic analysis of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence and epistemological questioning of the historical truth. Haverfield most influentially reframes Roman Britain as the frontier of Roman civilization and argues convincingly that Romanization was a civilizing process to cohere the yet-to-be-civilized natives within the civilized world of the Roman Empire. Less influentially but no less importantly, Collingwood maintains that a process of cultural exchange between unequally civilized Romans and Britons took place and envisions Roman Britain as a site of new hybrid civilization with stronger Roman influences. With their methodological rigour and epistemological questioning, they shifted Roman history from the gentlemanly tradition of exemplary history to the professional academics’ critical history. Notwithstanding, the colonialist régime of truth persisted throughout. Neither Haverfield nor Collingwood fundamentally raises questions regarding their own value judgements to distinguish the civilized from the barbarian and their own implicit premise that the more civilized Romans rightfully colonized the less civilized or barbarian natives. Their arguments, by implication, uphold British imperialism while excusing the failure of British assimilation, which confronted a more difficult challenge of ruling over less civilized and less intelligent races. Meanwhile, by reconstructing Roman Britain into a successful example of Romanization, they emphasize the exceptionality of Europeans in their capacity to reap the benefits of civilization (which, at the same time, contributes to justifying the perpetually colonized state of North Africa by a series of invaders in history).⁸¹ In this way, Romanization studies came to develop hand in hand with imperialism.

The Dawn of American Scholarship

It would be useful here to take a brief pause to place Anglo-American scholarship into global perspective; overlooking the international context risks isolating Anglo-American scholarship as an independent body and giving a misleading account of it. From an international standpoint, classical studies in the early twentieth century had different dynamics from that in the mid to late twentieth century. A data sample which Chester G. Starr, the first president of the American Association of Ancient Historians, draws attention to verifies the general opinion that German scholarship blossomed while Anglo-American scholarship lagged behind in the early twentieth century. Based on the number of items published under the index of ‘Histoire romaine et romanique’ in L’Année philologique, Starr reports that: ‘[I]n 1924–26 works in German were by far the largest group at 44 per cent of the total – followed by English (about 20 per cent) and French (about 15 per cent)’.⁸² Moreover, many scholars around the world went to Germany for their doctoral research and introduced approaches modelled after German Altertumswissenshaft to their countries’ scholarship. Yet, ‘thirty years later German titles had sunk to 17 per cent, well below English (30 per cent) and Italian (26 per cent)’.⁸³ The proliferation of works produced in English from the mid-twentieth century onwards owes in part to the growth of American scholarship. Although its contribution has expanded over time to become, it was rather less remarkable in the early twentieth century. Keeping this aspect in mind helps in understanding both the development of American scholarship and its growing contribution to and exchange with the wider scholarship in the following decades. A couple of episodes that Starr relates evoke the atmosphere of American scholarship in relation to its European counterpart in the early to mid-twentieth century:

European scholars had harsh views of the early training of American scholars; A. E. Housman wrote Robert Bridges in 1924, ‘I am glad you are safe home from America [where he had been a visiting lecturer at Ann Arbor University, Michigan] where I hope you have lit a candle or sown seed. They are terribly docile, but have not much earth, so it is apt to wither away.’ Later, in 1949, I wrote a little book tracing the rise of Rome; for no very good reason Cornell University Press sent review copies abroad. French and Belgian critics were shocked at the limited amount of knowledge which American freshmen could be presumed to have; today, in view of the abrupt decline of Greek and Latin in European education, they could scarcely adopt such a stance.⁸⁴

A mixed bag of feelings towards European scholarship aside, Starr here acknowledges the underdeveloped early stage of the American scholarship compared with the established European scholarship. However, lacking infrastructure alone neither defines nor does justice to American scholarship of the early twentieth century. Rather, as Richard P. Saller suggests, American historians of the early twentieth century communicating with European peers started to form ‘American classical historians’ self-identity … marked by a pragmatic and anti-theoretical streak’.⁸⁵

Tenney Frank stands for this distinctively American strand of scholarship, rather than the mainstream of overall American scholarship.⁸⁶ In his article sketching American scholarship of the twentieth century, Starr praises Frank as an outstanding figure during the earliest years of American scholarship: ‘Tenney Frank, however, was so extraordinary a character as to deserve larger note. … He was perhaps a genius, if flawed somewhat in our eyes by his obsession with racial theories’.⁸⁷ Frank’s presence in and contribution to the budding American scholarship was indeed noteworthy, but Saller more aptly delineates the significance of Frank in the international landscape of classical scholarship. He notes that Frank was one of the few American-born and American-trained Roman historians amid a drift of European scholars crossing the Atlantic to the United States. Against the backdrop of transatlantic scholarship, Frank maintained a distinctively American perspective characterized by a pragmatic and anti-theoretical attitude. While European historians concentrated on shifting Roman history from a gentlemanly intellectual pastime/pursuit to a modern scientific discipline and on adopting methodological tools and theoretical questions for critical analysis, a group of American historians spearheaded by Frank did not share the same agenda and instead retained optimism towards their anti-theoretical and pragmatic reading of evidence. American pragmatism and optimism, which distinguished America from Europe from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century with respect to both academic and everyday philosophy, permeated the American scholarship of Roman history and set the undertone. Starr, who is also an American-born and -trained scholar, affirms that ‘generally the method of approach does subtly differ.’ Compared with their European peers, American historians were less theoretical, that is, less receptive to theories from anthropology or sociology, and more pragmatic, that is, more attuned to practical concerns demonstrated in literary and epigraphic sources.⁸⁸ This tendency resulted in American scholarship gravitating towards conventional approaches. In general, it favoured literary and epigraphic sources and shunned relatively new approaches of exploring archaeological sources, sociological concepts, or epistemological questions.

Anti-theoretical, however, does not imply absence of perspective or any conceptual framework. Not sharing the same agenda or perspective with European contemporaries, Frank advances his own objective: to disentangle Roman history from the ‘old-world political traditions’.⁸⁹ He contends that the old-world European politics enacted by vying imperialistic powers for centuries had shaped a historical perspective unfit to explain the new-world politics. The old-world historical perspective regards expansion and imperialism as a natural course of history and fails to grasp the new-world political history, to which the Roman Republic belonged. In Frank’s framework of the binary division between the old world and the new world, the Roman Republic became the new world where the Near Eastern empires had been the old world. His further implication is not so subtle. The underlying parallel between the modern old-world Europe and the ancient old-world Near Eastern empires and between the modern new-world America and the ancient new-world Roman Republic extends across his work. Based on this parallel, he asserts the need to shift away from the old-world European perspective towards the new-world American perspective in order to correct the misunderstanding about Roman imperialism. It almost appears that he regards himself as a historian bearing the mission of American manifest destiny to redeem the old world:

This misconception will best be refuted by a full statement of the causes, but it may be worth while to point out that it has its origin, not in a study of Roman history, but in a misapplication of Oriental, as well as more modern ideals, to Roman methods. Before the history of the eastern states – Babylonia, Egypt, and Persia – was as thoroughly studied as it now is, the possibility existed of loosely grouping of their political ideals with those of Greece and Rome and arriving at the popular generalization that the ‘ancient’ state was imperialistic in a sense that, since the creation of the modern ‘concert of powers,’ no longer exists. Now it is true that the eastern monarchies were generally imperialistic. The empire of the East was seldom a nation of one tongue, one race, one worship; it was held together artificially by its ruler and his effective instrument, a mercenary army. Conquests which brought tribute – the sinews of the ruler’s wars – were absolutely essential to the life of dynasty. How different was the Greco-Roman city-state whose very origin lay in the homogenous small group which constituted its own army, paid its own expenses, and chose its own magistrates from its own body! Even in such a state, of course, greed for conquest might arise, but it would manifestly go against the grain, for the citizen himself must shoulder the danger and the cost, and the conviction is ever present that expansion is suicidal, for the city-state constitution must go under with the acquisition of dependencies.⁹⁰

Frank maintains his analogy based on rather optimistic and loose interpretation of literary and epigraphic sources. As Saller points out, Frank does not resort to ‘any conceptual sophistication’ to support his reading. Instead, ‘[it is] Frank’s view that Americans were especially well placed to understand the early Romans of the republic, because they were kindred spirits … Instead of theory, Frank possessed American pragmatic common sense, as evidenced in his proverbs and racism’.⁹¹ As described, Frank readily projects Americans’ self-identity of the time – particularly as simple, honourable, and pragmatic in relation to Europeans – onto Romans:

The important point after all is the fact established by the existence of this institution that the Roman mos maiorum did not recognize the right of aggression or a desire for more territory as just causes of war. That the institution was observed in good faith for centuries there can be little doubt.

The Romans soon discovered that political and trading alliances – alliances carved on stone and based only upon a mutual consent dictated by considerations of common advantages – were the rule among civilized peoples.⁹²

Reading literary and epigraphic sources through the lens of what he considers to be the modern equivalent, the American perspective, Frank portrays the Roman Republic as a law-abiding and pragmatic society of civilized people. Although Frank’s bias towards an American perspective sounds peculiar in the wider scholarship of Roman history, in fact it was far from being unique within the context of broader American scholarship, according to Saller. Saller claims that ‘Frank fits the broader pattern of liberal reaction of American exceptionalism to the historicist and structural intellectual currents of Europe’.⁹³

The underlying parallel further dictates Frank’s view on Roman expansion and Romanization. His understanding of Roman expansion and Romanization, in essence, echoes American frontier history. The undercurrents of manifest destiny, individualism, and optimism underpin Frank’s narrative. As for territorial expansion during the Republican period, he argues that the senate, due to both its law-abiding integrity and practical concerns, did not have a deliberate expansionist policy. Instead, senators’ efforts to preserve their peace, order, and civilization led them to gradually extend their sphere of influence and eventually their territories:

Rome was also expanding … Here was no overcrowding of population. She actually lacked men to settle the frontier colonies and had to borrow homesteaders from her allies to hold her acquisitions. In fact, at Rome expansion was an accident rather than a necessity,–a by-product of Rome’s insistence upon good order on the frontier and perfect regularity in all international transactions. She pacified the periphery in order to protect the center, and since the new frontier exposed her to strange, lawless tribes, that is, lawless from the point of view of Rome’s mos maiorum, her thoroughgoing insistence upon her conception of government drew her into a progressive game of pacification and organization.⁹⁴

His romanticized portrayal of Roman expansion as benevolent, defensive, and civilizing imperialism echoes the early American tale of manifest destiny to civilize and organize the Wild West. Even though Frank acknowledges a less noble but practical aspect of Roman expansion in which people’s greed for land and money propelled imperialistic expansion, he nevertheless maintains the American vision of Roman expansion. He projects American frontier expansion, which promoted the growth of the American middle class, onto Roman expansion and regards Roman expansion as a similar process which increased the number of small landowners in the Roman Republic.

According to Frank, Romanization was a natural outcome. Emphasizing that it was not a state-led policy but an organic process, he argues that each individual party, through their own will and practical interests, participated in Roman customs and thus contributed to bring about Romanization. This reveals his underlying conception of the Roman Republic – in a similar form to the federation of the United States of America, that is, different races and independent states joining under a liberal federation. Then, identifying the Roman rule with the American laissez-faire approach and ‘the [antecedent] of American liberalism’,⁹⁵ Frank treats Romanization as its expected consequence:

There is not an act clearly traceable to a desire to Romanize or, as has so insistently been claimed, to ‘urbanize’ and thereby to civilize the natives of the provinces. [Augustus] insisted, wherever possible, that there should be some community or orderly tribe responsible for the preservation of peace – and the tax gathering – in every nook and corner of the Empire, and when this was not possible, as in Egypt, he tried to find a substitute. But after that was secured, each community was permitted to go its own way. Economic and social laissez-faire has never been more consistently practised. After all it was probably the quickest road to success if he really cared for Romanization. Peace through the Empire gave the opportunity for material development to those who desired it, and prosperity brought satisfaction and goodwill towards the government, which in turn invited closer relations and a natural assimilation of Roman customs. Prosperity also provided the means for acquiring the amenities of urban life, so that those who craved them drifted to villages and cities. It is true that many cities throughout the rural regions of the Empire dated their beginnings from the Augustan period, but this development was a concomitant, not a purposed goal of the Augustan peace.⁹⁶

Frank’s view on Roman imperialism and Romanization reflects delusive optimism from the perspective of the conqueror-ruler. It effectively precludes the conquered natives from playing any active role, either contribution or resistance, apart from following their practical interests to be Romanized and reduces the complexities in the Romanization process. Frank’s attempt to dislodge the old-world political tradition from Roman history in fact incurs a series of problems. While it unburdens the American historian Frank from the stigma of conquest, it at the same time removes the little interests concerning the conquered natives, renders the narrative heavily biased towards the conquering Romans, and oversimplifies Romanization into a one-way process. He even more resolutely identifies and sympathizes with conquering Romans.

It is misleading to consider Frank indicative of the entirety of American scholarship. The presence of many European, especially British, emigrant scholars working in the United States and their intellectual ties across the Atlantic have helped to form a certain continuity across Anglo-American scholarship. Given the broader intellectual continuity, Frank illustrates a distinct strand of American scholarship, as was his objective. He intends to liberate Roman history from old-world European traditions and eventually frames it within American notions of exceptionalism. Believing that Americans are exceptional in sharing kindred spirits with Romans in the new world, he applies American pragmatism and optimism to comprehend Roman history. Accordingly, the parallel between Americans and Romans underpins his argument on Roman imperialism and Romanization: both Romans and Americans were simple, pragmatic, and honourable people of the new world, having escaped from the corrupted old world; they both expanded their frontier to safeguard civilization and peace and to stabilize through the growth of the middle classes; and they both, with their liberal approach, led the conquered to be assimilated for their practical benefits. His parallel discourse did not implant connection between America and Rome to the extent that the British parallel did in British scholarship. Yet, his identification of Americans with Romans and projection of American experience onto Roman history left behind his overly positive and simplified narrative. Not sharing the same stigma of conquest with Europeans, he was even less concerned with the question of conquered natives than his European peers and contributed to the perpetuation of colonialist history. Although his approach is said to be ‘anti-theoretical’, his history paradoxically demonstrates the significance of theoretical and/or conceptual framework.