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4 - Keti, Son of Maswalat

Ethnicity and Empire

from Part I - Ethnicity and Identity in the Roman Empire

Jonathan J. Price
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
Margalit Finkelberg
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
Yuval Shahar
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Summary

The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

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Rome: An Empire of Many Nations
New Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Identity
, pp. 58 - 84
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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