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Interpretatio: Roman Word Power and the Celtic Gods

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2011

Jane Webster
Jane Webster
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Extract

What are the cultural grounds on which both natives and liberal Europeans lived and understood each other? How much could they grant each other? How, within the circle of imperial domination, could they deal with each other before radical change occurred?

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), 241

As recently remarked by Poulton and Scott, archaeological perspectives on Celtic deity are largely derived from the Romano-Celtic period, with studies employing ‘the evidence of epigraphy and iconography to reveal how particular Roman and Celtic gods were identified with each other’. This paper explores a specific form of post-Conquest epigraphy: name-pairing interpretatio.

Type
Articles
Information
Britannia , Volume 26 , November 1995 , pp. 153 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Jane Webster 1995. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 R. Poulton and E. Scott, ‘The Hoarding, Deposition and Use of Pewter in Roman Britain’, in E. Scott (ed.), Theoretical Roman Archaeology: First Conference Proceedings (1993), 115–32.

2 Poulton and Scott, op. cit. (note 1), 123.

3 M. Henig, Religion in Roman Britain (1984), see esp. 14.

4 G. Webster, The British Celts and their Gods under Rome (1986a); G. Webster, ‘What the Britons required from the gods as seen through the pairing of Roman and Celtic deities and the character of votive offerings’, in M. Henig and A. King (eds), Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire (1986b), 57–64; M. Green, The Gods of the Celts (1986); M. Green, Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art (1989).

5 A single paragraph is allocated to this issue in Green, op. cit. (note 4, 1989), 1.

6 Hence the title of Green, op. cit. (note 4, 1986).

7 G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986b), 58.

8 RIB 711; G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986a), 54. See also Mars Rigonemetos (‘King of the Sacred Grove’) from Nettleham, Lincolnshire: Wright, R.P., JRS lii (1962), 192, no. 8.Google Scholar

9 e.g. Lucan, Pharsalia 1.444–6. Also, perhaps, the rings RIB II.3 (1991), nos 2422.36–39.

10 The origins of some of the non-Classical deities worshipped in Roman Britain are uncertain. The Matres, at least as worshipped in a triad, were probably Celtic, but appear to have been imported into Britain in the Roman period, possibly from the Rhineland: Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 48. Veteris is possibly a Germanic deity: G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986a), 78–9.

11 RIB II.ii, 2420.12–22.

12 K. Jackson, ‘The Inscriptions on the Silver Spoons’, in C. Johns and T. Potter, The Thetford Treasure (1983), 46.

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14 M.-L. Sjoestedt, Gods and Heroes of the Celts (trans. M. Dillon, 1949).

15 Wait, op. cit. (note 13), 17.

16 Wait, op. cit. (note 13), 195.

17 H.D. Rankin, Celts and the Classical World (1987), 289.

18 Pharsalia 1.391-465. See Vsener, H., M. Annaei Lucanni. Commenta Bernensia (Teubner, 1869), 32 under 1.445.Google Scholar

19 G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986a), 58.

20 Roymans, N., ‘Religion and Society in Later Iron Age Northern Gaul’, in Jones, R.F.J. et al. (eds), First Millenium Papers, BAR Int. Ser. 401 (1988), 55–71.Google Scholar

21 Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 43.

22 G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986b); Hassall, M., ‘Epigraphy and the Roman Army in Britain’, in Blagg, T.F.C. and King, A.C. (eds), Military and Civilian in Roman Britain, BAR Brit. Ser. 136 (1984), 265–77Google Scholar; Mann, J-C., ‘Epigraphic consciousness,’ JRS lxxvi (1986), 204–6.Google Scholar

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24 e.g. Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 88–94; Mann, op. cit. (note 22), 206.

25 e.g. Green, op. cit. (note 4, 1986), 110.

26 E. Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (1985), 226.

27 G. Webster, op. cit. (note 4, 1986b), 57.

28 F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus. The Representation of the Other In the Writing of History (1988), 212–59.

29 ibid., 246.

30 E. Said, Orientalism (1978); E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); Bhabha, H.K., ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October xxviii (1984), 125–33; P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986); J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986); J. Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983); G. Chakrovorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, in F. Barker et al. (eds), Europe and its Others (1984), 128–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 S. Connor, Postmodernist Culture (1989), 203.

32 ibid., 23.

33 T.C. Champion, ‘Written Sources and the Study of the European Iron Age’, in T.C. Champion and J.V.S. Megaw (eds), Settlement and Society: Aspects of West European Prehistory in the First Millenium BC (1985), 9–22; Webster, J., The Identification of Ritual in the Later Iron Age, with Specific Reference to Selected Themes in Proto-historic Gaul and Britain (Unpub. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1991).Google Scholar

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35 C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1985), 270.

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37 ibid., 18, emphasis mine.

38 ibid.

39 Hulme's argument may, of course, be applied to the hybridisation of Latin and Celtic elements in the creation of Romano-British place-names. Rivet has, in this context, explored place-naming in modern colonial contexts as a potential model for Roman practices: Rivet, A.L.R ‘Celtic names and Roman places’, Britannia xi (1980), 1–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Henig, M., ‘Throne, Altar and Sword: Civilian Religion and the Roman Army in Britain’, in Blagg, T.F.C. and King, A.C. (eds), Military and Civilian in Roman Britain, BAR Brit. Ser. 136 (1984), 227; quoting Macrobius III.9.3–8.Google Scholar

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43 On a bronze patera from South Shields: RIB II, fasc. ii, 2415.55.

44 Wedlake, W.J., The Excavation of the Shrine of Apollo at Nettleton, Wiltshire, 1956–7, Res. Rep. Soc. Antiqs. XL (1982), 135–6.Google Scholar

45 Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 63.

46 E. Birley, The People of Roman Britain (1978).

47 See also Mann, op. cit. (note 22), 206, on military tombstones.

48 The cult of the Matres, for example, appears to have had a wealthy, Romanised background: Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 49.

49 M. Henig, ‘Ita intellexit numine inductus tuo – Some Personal Interpretations of Deity in Roman Religion’, in M. Henig and A. King (eds), Pagan Gods and Shrines of the Roman Empire (1986), 229.

50 Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 67.

51 e.g. RIB 235, associated with the imperial numina.

52 Hartog, op. cit. (note 28), 212–59.

53 P. Rabinow, ‘Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), 234–61.

54 M. Millett, The Romanisation of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation (1990), xv.

55 Hingley, R., ‘Past, present and future – the study of the Roman period in Britain’, Scottish Arch. Rev. viii (1991), 90–101; R. Hingley, ‘Attitudes to Roman Imperialism’, in E. Scott (ed.), Theoretical Roman Archaeology: First Conference Proceedings (1993), 23–7.Google Scholar

56 See e.g. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972).

57 Henig, op. cit. (note 3), 22.