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A Revolution in Roman History?

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Wallace-HadrillA., ROME'S CULTURAL REVOLUTION. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxiv + 502, 18 pls, illus. ISBN 0-5218-9684-3/9780-5218-9684-9 (bound); 0-5217-2160-1/9780-5217-2160-8 (paper). £65.00/US$130.00 (bound); £29.99/US$49.00 (paper).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2010

Robin Osborne  and
Caroline Vout
Robin Osborne
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge, [email protected]
Caroline Vout
Affiliation:
Christ's College, Cambridge, [email protected]
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Extract

Whether or not Syme made a convincing case for revolution at Rome, his Roman Revolution did not effect a revolution in Roman history. To be sure, his choice of where to start and where to end his discussion was unorthodox (if orthodoxy was the old edition of the Cambridge Ancient History or Rice Holmes or the periodization of Oxford Greats), but his relentless focus on individual political actors and their relations with one another differs from the emphasis of earlier scholars only in its priorities and intensity. Whether or not Wallace-Hadrill makes a convincing case for revolution at Rome, Rome's Cultural Revolution is revolutionary. To be sure, the individual parts of the book have been variously anticipated in particular studies, but the insistence that what happens in the history of buildings, instrumentum domesticum, dress, and monuments constitutes not simply the background to a political story, but is itself the story of Late Republican Rome — in W.-H.'s own words ‘that the political transformation of the Roman world is integrally connected to its cultural transformation’ (xix) — challenges the assumptions on which Roman historians have built the history of the Republic ever since Asinius Pollio.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 100 , November 2010 , pp. 233 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 Holmes, T. RiceThe Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire, 3 vols (1923)Google Scholar began, effectively, with Pompey but finished in 44 b.c.e.; the old Cambridge Ancient History, like the new, divided at 133 and 44 b.c.e.

2 ‘Integrally connected’ represents a strengthening of W.-H.'s position since 1997 when he talked, in explicitly Foucauldian terms, of the political and social revolutions involving a ‘parallel revolution in ways of knowing’ in his ‘Mutatio morum: the idea of a cultural revolution’, in Habinek, T. and Schiesaro, A.The Roman Cultural Revolution (1997)Google Scholar, 3–22, at 6. On p. 215 (see below) W.-H. puts the case more strongly still.

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8 ‘Mutatio morum’ cited above n. 2, at 5 n. 7. W.-H. first used the title ‘Rome's cultural revolution’ for his review of Zanker's The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus in JRS 79 (1989), 157–64 — a fact which, as we shall show, makes the chronological limits of Rome's Cultural Revolution more, rather than less, surprising.

9 Scepticism about the rather mechanical view of clientship sometimes found in older literature does not justify abandoning the perception that ‘The Empire was based on the personal loyalty of leading men throughout the provinces to leading families at Rome, and this attachment proved to be independent of political vicissitudes and … on the whole unaffected even by the fortunes of those families’, Badian, E.Foreign Clientelae (1958)Google Scholar, 262.

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13 Dillon, S. and Welch, K. E. (eds) Representations of War in Ancient Rome (2006)Google Scholar, and the review by Vout, C. ‘Domination and liberation’, Art History 32.1 (2009), 186–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 That language is, however, anticipated earlier in the book: cf. ‘the last and most spectacular wave of hellenism’ (111).

18 See Welch's chapter in Dillon and Welch, op. cit. (n. 15).

19 Very relevant to this chapter is Roth, R.Styling Romanisation: Pottery and Society in Central Italy (2007)Google Scholar, whose conclusions about the importance of sub-élite agency in the transformation of Italian pottery offer substantial grounds for resisting the ‘capillary action’, top-down, view.

20 W.-H. repeatedly (xix, 441) asserts that Syme's title was ironical, by which he seems to mean that Syme used a Marxist term to argue for a very non-Marxist revolution which left class positions quite unchanged. W.-H.'s ‘cultural revolution’ might be held to be equally ironical in relation to Mao were it not that others, and he himself (above nn. 2 and 8), have used the phrase in a non-Maoist sense for years.

21 Potter, T. W.Roman Italy (1987)Google Scholar; Crawford, M. H. ‘Italy and Rome from Sulla to Augustus’, in Bowman, A., Champlin, E. and Lintott, A. (eds), Cambridge Ancient History X: the Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–A.D. 69 (1996), 414–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 979–89.

22 Excellent here is Edwards, C. ‘Incorporating the alien: the art of conquest’, in Edwards, C. and Woolf, G. (eds), Rome: the Cosmopolis (2003)Google Scholar.

23 See the work of Versluys, Miguel John including Aegyptiaca Romana: Nilotic Scenes and the Roman Views of Egypt (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Beck, H. et al. Ägypten, Griechenland, Rom: Abwehr und Berührung (2005)Google Scholar.

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25 Rawson, E.Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (1985)Google Scholar, where Part II is entitled ‘The Artes’, starting with ‘Grammatica’ and ending with ‘Theology’. W.-H. is curiously uninfluenced by Moatti, C.La Raison de Rome: Naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République (II–I siècle avant Jésus-Christ) (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, whose categories cut across the artes.

26 W.-H. himself draws attention to the absence of literature and religion, as indeed of Roman art, in the preface (xix) but does not explain or justify it, saying only ‘If I do not pursue certain themes, it is not for lack of appreciation of their interest and importance’.

27 Hence the irony that W.-H. first talked of cultural revolution when reviewing The Power of Images (above, n. 8).

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29 Especially helpful here, methodologically, are Goldhill, S.Who Needs Greek? Studies in the Cultural History of Hellenism (2002);Google ScholarGoldhill, S. (ed.) Being Greek under Roman Rule: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for material culture, Alcock, S.Graecia Capta: the Landscapes of Roman Greece (1993)Google Scholar and Borg, B. (ed.) Paideia: the World of the Second Sophistic (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Particularly relevant to W.-H.'s concerns is also König, J. and Whitmarsh, T.Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and indispensable for epigraphic material, Puech, B.Orateurs et sophistes grecs dans les inscriptions d’époque impériale (2002)Google Scholar.

30 The classic text is FIRA 1.55, a decree of Octavian of 41 b.c.e.