W.'s stimulating new book is the most insightful treatment of Roman ethnography during the late Republic and early Principate to have appeared in decades, and it sets a very high bar for further discussion. His area of inquiry is western Europe, where Greek and Roman writers created new histories for both subject populations and external peoples in the midst of Roman expansion from roughly the third century b.c.e. to the end of the first century c.e. W. presents the Latin West as ‘an artefact of Roman power’ (p. 4) and treats ethnography as the creation of new knowledge about the varied peoples who lived there. The ‘tales of the barbarians’ came about in part from the ‘effacing of un-Latin and pre-Roman pasts’ (p. 4) in the long process of conquest and assimilation. Thus the book develops issues raised in his influential Becoming Roman. The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998). According to W., the invention of new mythic histories and traditions resulted from ‘epistemic violence’ that cut ties between the knowledge worlds of local societies before and after Roman conquest. The book is a forceful reminder that the picture of non-Romans provided by Greek and Roman authors reflects a set of cultural and literary conventions that inevitably misrepresent the people being described. W.'s argument is illuminated by shrewd discussion of many classical authors and lucid treatment of modern theoretical approaches. Four chapters deal with different aspects of Roman perceptions of barbarians against the imperial background.
The first chapter, ‘Telling Tales on the Middle Ground’, introduces the idea (taken from colonial American studies) of a middle ground where new knowledge was created in the wake of conquest. The western European provinces were a region where unfamiliar cultures ultimately were made familiar to Roman readers as ‘barbarian érudits and Greek grammarians rubbed shoulders with Roman conquerors across a vast and variegated contact zone’ (p. 89). The result was a heady give-and-take of local tales, Greek myths and Roman military experience as provincials sought to locate themselves within Roman cultural narratives just as Romans integrated the locals into broader imperial patterns. Thus, in the interactive matrix of the middle ground, the new knowledge found in ethnographic description indicated far more than the mere compilation of data. It reflected writing practices based on a variety of experience and interpretation for, as W. puts it, ‘authors and readers inhabited the world their texts describe’ (p. 17). Most experiential knowledge was soon lost, he suggests, but some continued to circulate to provoke critical reflection and further investigation (p. 17). Pompeius Trogus, for example, a first-century b.c. Roman historian of Celtic ancestry, presented himself as both metropolitan and provincial. This hybridity is reflected in the stories he narrated in which ‘war and ethnography had opened up new provinces of the imagination’ (p. 31).
The second chapter, ‘Explaining the Barbarians’, addresses some of the paradigms developed by Greeks and Romans to differentiate civilisation and barbarism and to make sense of human diversity. These paradigms, which helped frame the creation of new knowledge, were classical Greek constructs of genealogy and geography (particularly the impact of climate upon culture), and newer additions of astrology, ethics and cosmology that came into play in the Hellenistic period. W. is careful to point out that they were not competitive as their different patterns of causation might suggest, but parallel, complementing one another according to an author's narrative needs. W. notes no sign of ‘science’ replacing ‘myth’ in ethnographic presentation. Of particular value is his discussion of the arrival of astrological interpretation in the Hellenistic age – a rare innovation in Greco-Roman ethnography. Using Manilius as his example, W. explains that Romans added astrology to their repertoire to provide, ‘… a vision of the enduring cosmos normalized for the Roman empire of his day’ (p. 50).
In the third chapter, ‘Ethnography and Empire’, W. explores the effect of Roman rule upon writers of ethnography, noting a rather indirect influence as well as a remarkably conservative approach to new information. In an important subsection, W. argues to great effect that Rome's great libraries played a critical role in the creation of Roman ethnography. Rome had moved to the centre of world affairs in the late republican period, and the city's libraries, which displaced those of Athens and Alexandria as research centres, provided writers with a great wealth of information about the empire, thus sparing them from conducting their own research in foreign lands. W. emphasises that writers used libraries extensively and suggests that actual autopsy may have played a lesser role in the writing of ethnographic passages than generally supposed.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Enduring Fictions?’ W. considers the shelf life of ethnographic conventions long beyond the first century c.e. Stressing again the conservative character of ethnographic materials, he notes a continuity of scholarship as writers through the fourth century used outmoded and unrealistic information about ‘barbarians’. The Roman world had changed, but writers from Tacitus to Ammianus Marcellinus continued to turn a blind eye to contemporary evidence of cultural change and assimilation within the empire. Their imperial vision required the presence of uncouth and violent non-Romans. This attitude comes to the fore in discussion of the Agricola of Tacitus, which W. sees as a largely fictional construct of Britain intended to emphasise the virtue of the Roman general. ‘Only at the edges of the earth can Agricola become a real Roman, and exhibit the virtues Romans had once claimed to be spreading across the world’ (p. 91). From his treatment of Ammianus Marcellinus' reliance on outmoded tropes, W. concludes, ‘Gauls would always remain belligerent flies caught in rhetorical amber’. (p. 114). W. suggests furthermore that readers of anachronistic texts must have appreciated the differences between their own reality and the tales told about barbarians in the texts, and that in some fashion it was the ‘very diversity of barbarian stereotypes that gave them such staying power in an increasingly Roman world’ (p. 111). W. ends with comments about the appearance of some Roman motifs in the kingdom of the Franks, pointing out that while we will never know if the stories actually were passed on orally from Caesar's day to the time of Charlemagne ‘neither conquest nor cultural change completely effaced the tales first told of barbarians in the last generations of the republic’ (p. 105).
This lucid and elegantly written book is filled with compelling arguments and well-marshalled evidence, but it is not meant to be an exhaustive study. Inevitably some topics call for further discussion. This reader, for example, would have liked to see fuller treatment of how Roman ethnography dealt with the interconnected questions of universal inclusivity and transformation through cultural contact (briefly noted on p. 12).
Roman literary and cultural historians should read this book, and it will also be widely influential in many other fields of ancient studies. The volume places Roman evidence in the broader fields of comparative history and post-colonial studies and so will encourage interdisciplinary discussion. In short, there is a great deal to like in it. W. has provided a vigorous and exciting investigation of a major set of problems at the heart of the Roman imperial experience, and he deserves the highest praise.
