This collection examines models idealised in Roman art and literature from the third century b.c.e. to the third century c.e., including emperors and gods, social types like the benevolent patron and various literary characters. Some contributors focus exclusively on the elite and primarily masculine culture of the Roman metropolis (Imber on rhetorical education, Spentzou on epic, Alston on Tacitean exempla, Hales on wall-paintings of Greek gods). The majority tackle the challenge of analysing people whose experience leaves fewer traces – women, slaves, provincials, the poor – through materials and art forms accessible across the empire to many sorts of people.
The sensuous particulars of everyday life – coins, public art and relatively modest tombs and wall-paintings – are by one measure the stars of the volume. They offer the most methodologically sound evidence with which to speculate how values coincided and diverged over time between rich and poor, imperial core and provincial borders, pagan and Christian. Religion, ethnicity and class are key themes. J. Huskinson illuminates the complexity of early third-century Christian assimilation and self-differentiation in her study of biblical and secular imagery on Christian sarcophagi. H. von Hesberg's detailed readings of Gallic and British tomb art suggest that provincials imported certain core Italian-Roman values and practices (such as the treatment of slaves in the family circle) while making hybrids out of others. C. Dixon shows how shoemakers and bakers represented themselves and their friends as embedded in networks of obligation and gratitude that closely resemble the friendships of better-off figures like the younger Pliny.
Gender is another vital concern. S. Pomeroy surveys the appeal of Spartan women in the Roman context. H. sensitively explores the evocations of family concord and authority raised by imagery on the sarcophagi of learned women. Diana represented as a huntress on tombs of young girls, according to E. D'Ambara, embodies the feminine virtue of modesty, but may also compensate for the girls' early deaths by granting them the masculine virtue of courage.
Diversity fuels thoughtful methodological discussion in J. Clarke's lucid paper. His comparison of different approaches to the study of iconography, which anchors his defence of his preferred ‘site-specific’ interpretation of a facade wall-painting in Pompeii, boldly confronts the challenge of speculating about the different meanings the image held for the different types of people who encountered it. Along similar lines, in terms familiar from W. Fitzgerald's and K. McCarthy's work, R. Stewart addresses the multiple meanings of Plautus' cunning slave.
Several essays venture into the contested field of identity, a concept that is as ill-defined as it is popular. In his excellent introductory essay, B. frankly acknowledges the drawbacks of identity studies and argues that the focussed study of exemplarity through role models escapes identity's over-generalisations while reaching the same goal: understanding the values a group lives by and seeks to replicate. Though not every contributor shares his scepticism, and B. himself does not renounce the study of identity, his essay is a refreshing corrective for classicists (including myself) accustomed to using the term uncritically.
B. cites a trenchant 2000 article by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker and the African historian Frederick Cooper, who advise scholars to abandon ‘identity’ in favour of terms that more precisely distinguish who is doing the identifying and to what end. Simplified, their discussion defines identity in terms of: (1) external classification, voluntary or not, (2) psychological self-understanding, and (3) the expression of membership in a collective. For example, I am classified as a woman on my passport (1). But I do not identify strongly with this label (2), because many of the values popularly associated with femininity are not mine. Still, I believe children should study women's history, so that they assume personal responsibility (2) to help women improve and celebrate their collective status (3). Unless future archaeologists happen to read this review, however, whatever I leave behind at my death will probably mark me as expressing my identity as a woman (1, 2 and 3), erasing my objections (2) to that identification. Most importantly, the values and practices I consider central to my existence may be utterly lost to future understanding. As Brubaker and Cooper point out, thinking in identitarian terms constricts the political as well as the historical imagination.
T. Hölscher does not cite Brubaker and Cooper, but his study of the gestures used by Roman emperors and their filtration across social strata emphatically rejects ‘identity’ as a twentieth-century invention that shields potentially destructive political movements and allows scholars to dodge tough moral questions. (He also persuasively argues that one of the most enduring and problematic effects of iconography is its simplification of complex realities – useful for an emperor promoting his preferred representation of the world, dangerously misleading for scholars who take that simplified version as reality.)
Nowhere else in the collection is ‘identity’ explicitly challenged. R. Alston (briefly) and S. Hales underscore its fluidity and internal contradictions – precisely the ground on which Brubaker and Cooper dismantle it. But the volume's contents encourage scepticism about the concept. Though they do not reject identity as a category of analysis outright, by paying close attention to the complex mosaic of beliefs that characterise social collectives, to the possibility of change in values over time, and to the multivalent meanings of role models and ideals, they indirectly call into question the identitarian terms we take for granted, especially ‘Roman’.
Two fine papers by H. von Hesberg and C.B. Rose stand out in this regard. V.H.'s essay examines imagery on tombs in Roman Gaul and Britain from the first to the third centuries c.e. In a typical example, a woman on a British tomb is represented as wearing local jewellery along with the traditional dress of an Italian-Roman matron. While v.H. carefully allows for a variety of interpretations, he assumes that the relationship between imperial core and province was centrally important.
Is this necessarily so? V.H.'s meticulous presentation of the hybrid features on the tombs suggests alternative explanations arising from class or disposition: rather than ‘local’ and ‘Italian-Roman’, the combination of jewellery and dress might signify to contemporary observers ‘very well-off’, or ‘conservative’ or ‘modish’. (When I wear an Italian suit, I am advertising my income and my tastes, not my Italian-ness.) The question is, why does copying a dress style evoke ‘Romanness’ as opposed to some other identification? And at what point does the woman's imitation of Romans become an identification with them?
Rose's ambitious and wide-ranging essay seeks to explain the forging of ‘Romanitas’ through changes in Roman painting and portraiture in the context of Rome's foreign entanglements. Reminding us that the Romans adopted Troy as their ancestral homeland in the early third century, he traces the history of the Phrygian cap and other elements of traditional ‘eastern’ garb. At first unremarkable, eastern dress acquired negative connotations once war rendered necessary the construction of clearer distinctions between Rome and eastern peoples. R. claims that veristic portraiture develops in response to similar pressures: after the Romans begin warring with the Greeks, Roman portraits increasingly feature signs of age, by contrast to the Greek preference for youthful attributes. Is ‘Romanitas’ the right term to describe these phenomena? Are these men expressing their membership in a collective called ‘Roman’ (my 3 above) or a sense of psychological self-understanding as Roman (2) – or are they aggressively seeking to define their small group as embodying the nation, which is something else again? To Brubaker and Cooper, these are precisely the crucial distinctions that talk of ‘identity’ glosses over.
H. Bhabha exhorts scholars of cultural history to think more critically about the ‘settled nature’ of nationalistic words like ‘Roman’. In his influential essay ‘DissemiNation’, which parallels Brubaker's and Cooper's argument in certain respects, he questions the equivalence of event and idea that allows historians to take the national collective for granted as an empirical category, and he calls on us to develop new terms of analysis, particularly in the case of the nation, which produces a ‘continual slippage of categories’, including ethnicity, sexuality and class.
E. Varner shows how particular configurations of politics – here, the autocrat and his household – generated a slippage of categories in his fascinating collection of imperial portraits that blur boundaries between the sexes, such as a bearded male profile on a coin labelled ‘Galliena Augusta’. He argues that these images proclaim the emperor's other-than-human nature by celebrating his unique capacity to transcend human gender roles. While V. has no need to invent new terms, his essay shows how emperors undid familiar categories like sex as they sought to maintain absolute and universal power.
Identity and exemplarity remain under-theorised terms, especially given the work they are regularly called upon to do in classical scholarship today. If I have focussed on a theoretical problem that the contributors might fairly protest was not their central concern, I hope it is clear that their learned, thoughtful essays were the provoking factor. Incisive analysis of well-chosen material demands comparably critical theoretical reflection.
