They Called It “Civilization”: The Dynamics of Cultural Change in the Roman Empire

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The role ascribed to Rome in the foundation of Western civilization is frequently taken as a justification for imperialism.

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By Dr. Neville Morley
Professor in Classics and Ancient History
University of Exeter

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Introduction

He began to train the sons of the chieftains in a liberal education, and to prefer the native talents of the Briton as against the trained abilities of the gaul. As a result, the nation which used to reject the latin language began to aspire to rhetoric; further, the wearing of our dress became a distinction, and the toga came into fashion, and little by little the Britons went astray into alluring vices: promenades, baths, sumptuous dinners. The simple natives gave the name ‘civilisation’ to this aspect of their slavery.

Tacitus, Agricola, 21

The Roman Empire is associated above all with the bringing of ‘civilisation’ to the barbarians: sanitation, aqueducts, roads, irrigation, medicine, education…¹ The significance of Roman imperialism in world history, in this view, was its transformation of the culture of the provinces through the process known as ‘Romanisation’; the Romans created the first truly universal culture, building on the innovations of the Greeks, and by introducing it across Europe laid the foundations for the birth of modernity and the future triumph of the West. According to the nineteenth century British historian J.R. Seeley, the reason why we should be interested in Rome – unlike most other empires, ancient or modern – was ‘the superiority in civilisation of the conquerors to the conquered’, so that the conquest led to positive developments in the conquered regions. Indeed, ‘the effect produced upon the nations of Europe by the conquests of Rome’, because of its duration and familiarity, ‘stands out in the very centre of human history, and may be called the foundation of the present civilisation of mankind’.² Such claims have underpinned the privileged position of the classical tradition in European culture for centuries; even when modern scientific knowledge came definitively and irrevocably to supersede ancient wisdom, the classical world was still taken as the point of origin for the rationalism and spirit of enquiry that now, in the myth of modernity, was reaching its maturity. Modern writers are more likely to recognise the existence of other living cultural traditions, whereas earlier commentators saw only a confrontation between Western civilisation and moribund Eastern culture or the primitivism of Africa and America; but for many of them, Rome remains central to the story of humanity: the source of Western superiority because other cultures have only drawn on its legacy at second-hand, or have indeed rejected many of its fundamental tenets. For example, of the five characteristics which Samuel Huntington regards as definitive of Western civilisation before the modern era, and hence as the basis for distinguishing it from all other (inferior) civilisations, three are directly linked to the influence of the Roman Empire in Europe – the classical legacy of Greek philosophy and rationalism disseminated by Rome, the influence of Latin on European languages and the rule of law inherited from the Romans – while the others were established when the Empire became Christian from the fourth century CE.³

The role ascribed to Rome in the foundation of Western civilisation, as both innovator and disseminator, is frequently taken as a justification for imperialism, ancient and modern. It underpins the claims of the imperial power to superiority over its subjects – not merely in military force or technology, but in its overall level of human achievement – and also justifies any action taken with respect to inferior cultures, provided that this is presented as being for their own good. Even if it begins in bloodshed, imperialism is seen to have beneficial effects on its subjects in the medium- and long-term:

‘In the first instance, indeed, Roman imperialism was little more than an Imperialism of conquest, but it was a conquest that ultimately justified itself as a furtherance to civilization.’⁴

This is not the problematic argument that ‘might is right’ found in debates about the actions of the Athenian Empire against other Greek states (Thucydides’ presentation of the Melian dialogue has been enormously influential in the development of ‘realist’ theories of international relations, from Thomas Hobbes onwards, but it has always been controversial); rather, Roman power is seen as the product of its superior culture, so that the exercise of its might is as much a duty towards inferiors as a show of strength. This idea of the civilising mission of empire has been brought forward as a justification of their activities, with explicit reference to Rome, by the Spanish in Latin America, the French in North Africa and the Italians in Libya and Abyssinia, as well as by the British in America, India and Africa.⁵ As Seeley suggested, discussing the introduction of Anglophone education into India, ‘it marks the moment when we deliberately recognised that a function had devolved on us similar to that which Rome fulfilled in Europe, the greatest function which any government can ever be called upon to discharge’.⁶ This did not necessarily require complete identification with the Romans; in Britain, France and Germany, some writers were equally interested in the experiences of the conquered natives whom they saw as their direct ancestors.⁷ However, the crucial element of such accounts was the recognition of the need of these ancestors for the civilisation which the Romans brought, as the means to full national development, building on the foundations laid by Rome (and perhaps avoiding the vices of over-refinement that were seen to have brought down the Empire). In other words, even a nationalist narrative that regarded the Romans as foreign conquerors still perpetuated the idea that natives were capable of being raised to a higher level through contact with a superior culture. Or at any rate, some natives were; if the Indians or Africans proved more resistant to change than the ancestors of the British or French had done, that was due to their inherent flaws rather than to any problem with the idea of the civilising mission of imperialism.

This licence for intervention in cultures perceived as inferior is undoubtedly the most problematic aspect of the legacy of Roman imperialism. However, the fact that this aspect of Rome’s history has been appropriated for dubious modern purposes does not automatically invalidate the account of its influence on later European culture, nor, more importantly, of the impact of the Empire on its subjects. There is widespread agreement amongst historians about the extent of the transformation of the provinces, especially in the western half of the Empire, under Roman rule. There was a dramatic increase in urbanisation, both the numbers of cities and towns and the proportion of the population living in them, along with the whole array of urban institutions, infrastructure and customs – markets, temples, bathhouses, fountains, theatres and amphitheatres, aqueducts, drainage, paved streets and so forth. There were changes in diet, with the spread of a taste for refined foodstuffs like bread, wine, olive oil and fish sauce; changes in housing, both in the design of residences and in the installation of features like mosaics and bath houses; changes in religion, with the spread of cults associated with Rome (above all, cults of the emperor) and changes in local practices; changes in language, with the displacement of native languages by Latin, and in the display of language through the adoption of the ‘epigraphic habit’ of commemorating one’s status and achievements through inscriptions; and changes in the conduct of everyday life, with the adoption of coinage, weights and measures and the law. The overwhelming impression is that the people of the Empire, over time, ‘became Roman’, whether through choice or coercion. The mechanisms by which this far-reaching cultural transformation was brought about have been a hotly-debated topic for decades, as will be discussed below, but there is little disagreement about the existence of a phenomenon that requires explanation.

One central issue is the nature of the relationship between political and socio-cultural structures, between cultural change and imperialism. The transformation of provincial society can be seen as the direct consequence of Roman rule, partly through the influx of Romans (soldiers, administrators, merchants and settlers) into a newly-conquered region, bringing their customs and culture with them, and partly through the active involvement of the Roman state in promoting cultural change. At the same time, however, as the passage from Tacitus makes clear, cultural change was one of the factors that made imperial rule on the Roman model possible; native people who had been ‘civilised’ did appear, generally speaking, to acquiesce in their rule by the Romans and to identify with the ruling power. From the perspective of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most striking achievements of the Roman Empire, in stark contrast to their own experiences in their overseas possessions, was its success in ‘assimilating’ the natives and making them into full Romans. The Roman Empire, it was believed, was far more than a structure of domination:

‘Bound together not only by a common ruler, but by a highly organized and uniform though elastic system of administration, and as time went on by a common system of law and a common citizenship, it became the most powerful engine of assimilation that the world has ever seen.’⁸

Particularly striking was the fact that the Romans had been able to extend full political rights to so many of their subjects: ‘the Romans stood out beyond almost all peoples in the extent to which they disregarded race, and in the liberality with which they widened their citizenship’.9 The creation of Romans out of foreigners and citizens out of subjects was the primary reason for seeing Rome as a relevant comparator for modern imperialism.

Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example in India, at every turn. The methods by which Rome incorporated and denationalised and assimilated more than half its wide dominions, and the success of Rome, unintended perhaps but complete, in spreading its Graeco–Roman culture over more than a third of Europe and a part of Africa, concern in many ways our own age and Empire.¹⁰

In contrast, the British experience of trying to assimilate the natives in India and Africa was judged to be an unmitigated failure.¹¹ Of course, it could be argued that, in some respects, the Romans had had an advantage in the nature of their conquests, since they had to deal with tribes rather than nations and with easy-going polytheism rather than ‘proper’ religion’, and they faced comparatively few racial problems: ‘the Romans were not called upon to deal with large numbers of coloured races’.¹² However, it was also seen as a matter of attitude; the Romans saw conquered natives as barbarians, undoubtedly, but barbarians capable of acquiring civilisation, whereas Europeans suffered from a basic prejudice against all other races. Roman civilisation was regarded as something that could be exported, and, more importantly, a native who had successfully adopted Roman ways could be accepted as a full member of Roman society – one simply had to list the number of leading Romans under the Principate, from a philosopher and imperial advisor like Seneca to a poet like Martial and a whole line of emperors, who came from provincial backgrounds:

In the third century A.D. a Gaul, a Spaniard, a Pannonian, a Bithynian, a Syrian called himself a Roman, and for all practical purposes was a Roman. The interests of the Empire were his interests, its glory his glory, almost as much as if he had been born in the shadow of the Capitol. There was, therefore, no reason why his loyalty should not be trusted, no reason why he should not be chosen to lead in war, or govern in peace, men of Italian birth. So, too, the qualities which make a man capable of leading in war or administering in peace were just as likely to be found in a Gaul, or a Spaniard, or a German from the Rhine frontier as in an Italian… It is far otherwise in India, though there was among the races of India no nation. The Englishmen does not become an Indian, nor the Indian an Englishman. The Indian does not as a rule, though of course there have been not a few remarkable exceptions to the rule, possess the qualities which the English deem to be needed for leadership in war or the higher posts of administration in peace. For several reasons…he can seldom be expected to feel like an Englishman, and to have that full comprehension of the principles of British policy which may be counted on in an Englishman.¹³

The importance of these two factors, the complete cultural transformation undergone by the natives and their subsequent acceptance by the imperial power as full and equal members, is also emphasised in more recent writings on empire. The nature of empire, incorporating a wide range of different groups into a single political body, means that imperial rule is above all concerned with and dependent upon the management of diversity.¹⁴ For Michael Doyle, the longevity of any empire – and Rome is once again his basic model – depends not only on administrative coordination but on continuing integration, passing the ‘Augustan threshold’ from conquest to domination and developing towards the ‘Caracalla threshold’ where the empire ceases to be organised around the domination of diverse groups by a single power – even if that is understood as assimilation under a common tyranny.¹⁵ Michael Mann similarly sees a shift from a conquering empire of domination to a territorial empire, based on the integration of its subjects into the imperial system; the crucial difference is that he sees this in terms of the integration of local elites into the common culture, with changes in the culture of the mass of the population regarded, implicitly, as irrelevant to the fate of the Empire.¹⁶ In other words, the cultural transformation of the provinces was not only Rome’s greatest achievement, bringing civilisation to the barbarians, it was also the foundation of Rome’s success in ruling a large and diverse area for so long.

‘Romanization’

The creation of a uniform world-wide civilization and of similar social and economic conditions is now going on before our eyes over the whole expanse of the civilized world. This process is complicated, and it is often difficult to clear up our minds about it. We ought therefore to keep in view that this condition in which we are living is not new, and that the ancient world also lived, for a series of centuries, a life which was uniform in culture and politics, in social and economic conditions. The modern development, in this sense, differs from the ancient only in quantity and not in quality.¹⁷

The term that is usually invoked in discussions of the transformation of the provinces is ‘Romanisation’. This approach is closely associated with the nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen and the British archaeologist Francis Haverfield, and in the development of the discipline of ancient history their work represented a significant shift in understanding.¹⁸ Mommsen’s writings, especially his book on The Provinces of the Roman Empire (1885; English translation 1886), drew attention away from the political history of the Principate, which tended in the nineteenth century to be understood in a fairly superficial manner – not least as a result of overly literal readings of the classical literary sources – as a story of tyranny and decadence, and focused it instead on the fate of the rest of the Roman world. He emphasised the fact that the Empire had not only persisted for centuries after the supposedly catastrophic end of the republic and the establishment of autocracy, but had in fact brought peace and prosperity to most of its inhabitants. Furthermore, in developing this perspective both Mommsen and his admirers considered a much wider range of evidence than the literary sources and works of art on which ancient history had traditionally been based. Mommsen was best known for his work on Latin epigraphy – collecting, editing and commenting upon the inscriptions put up by thousands of provincials, and making manifest their adherence to Roman values and culture. Haverfield and other British archaeologists meanwhile turned their attention to the wealth of material evidence, not as a desperate expedient to compensate for the lack of literary sources for Roman Britain but as a means of gaining access to the experiences of a far larger proportion of the population than was usual in ancient history. While the literary sources obsessed about intrigue and social degeneracy in the city of Rome, the material evidence gave an insight into the everyday life of the provinces and revealed that the majority of the Empire’s inhabitants were enjoying a wide range of new goods, different styles of housing and the delights of urban life. Metropolitan politics were a sideshow; the Empire’s enlightened rule of its conquests brought about the Romanisation of its subjects.

Contrary to the image of a uniform and inexorable process of ‘Romanisation’ that is sometimes brought forward as a straw man in current debates, Haverfield did at times offer a fairly nuanced picture of these developments:

Romanization was, then, a complex process with complex issues. It does not mean simply that all the subjects of Rome became wholly and uniformly Roman. The world is not so monotonous as that. In it two tendencies were blended with ever-varying results. First Romanization extinguished the difference between Roman and provincial through all parts of the Empire but the east, alike in speech, in material culture, in political feeling and religion. When the provincials called themselves Roman or when we call them Roman, the epithet is correct. Secondly, the process worked with different degrees of speed and success in different lands. It did not everywhere and at once destroy all traces of tribal or national sentiments or fashions. These remained, at least for a while and in certain regions, not in active opposition, but in latent persistence, capable of resurrection under proper conditions. In such a case the provincial had become a Roman, but he could still undergo an atavistic reversion to the ways of his forefathers.¹⁹

The triumph of Roman culture was not inevitable, therefore, but an ongoing struggle, in which some of the conquered peoples proved themselves more amenable to civilisation than others. Nevertheless, the effect of Roman rule in most regions was to draw the provincials into a common culture and way of life, raising them to a higher standard of living and a more refined sensibility and allowing them to participate fully in the political and social life of the Empire.

While this model of the cultural impact of Rome has held sway for decades as the theoretical basis for the study of Roman Britain and the other western provinces, in recent years serious criticisms have been made of the underlying assumptions of its creators and therefore of the way that it has shaped understanding of provincial culture. At the same time as the idea of ‘Romanisation’ influenced ideas about the cultural role of modern imperialism, and on occasion even influenced the policies of the imperial powers, it was itself influenced by contemporary intellectual and cultural currents.²⁰ Rome was read through the lens of modern imperialism as much as the modern experience was understood through comparison with Rome. The most obvious example is the tendency of many of these authors to identify with Roman culture and to take it for granted that its adoption was a progressive and desirable process.²¹ In many respects, for example, Haverfield was quite insistent on the differences between Roman and British imperialism – as he remarked, Roman history ‘provides few direct parallels or precedents; the wise man does not look for that in history’ – but the contrast was abandoned when it came to the distinction between civilisation and barbarism:

Our civilization seems firmly set in many lands; our task is rather to spread it further and develop its good qualities than to defend its life. If war destroys it in one continent, it has other homes. But the Roman empire was the civilized world; the safety of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside roared the wild chaos of barbarism.²²

The Roman conception of civilisation, and its practical expression in the provinces, matches our own expectations, since in part our expectations have been defined by the Roman tradition of humanitas; the combination of cities, political and economic institutions, technology and literary heritage is precisely what modern imperial powers believe they have to offer to the rest of the world.²³ The encounter between the Romans and their conquered subjects is therefore interpreted in terms of the meeting of culture and barbarism, or even culture and non-culture; the superiority of one system is taken entirely for granted, and the Roman Empire is evaluated in terms of the degree to which different regions conformed to the Roman template. The failure of some groups or regions to Romanise adequately is regarded as the result of the deficiency of the natives, what Haverfield referred to, tellingly, as an ‘atavistic’ reversion to the ways of their ancestors; the same line of rhetoric applied to the failure of contemporary Indians or Africans to appreciate the benefits of European manners or knowledge. There is no consideration of alternative interpretations, such as a failure to adopt Roman manners being understood in terms of resistance, since the natives are regarded as having no culture that could be defended or valued in the face of superior Roman civilisation.²⁴ In the eastern provinces, in contrast, the explanation of the relative lack of change under Roman rule is simply that the Greeks and their colonies were already in possession of a culture that was recognised as superior, one of the roots of Roman (and European) civilisation, and so there was no need for them to be Romanised.

This over-valuation of Roman culture supported a tendency to identify with those who brought it to the barbarians, and hence to excuse their ‘excesses’ in the process of conquest and to take an overly positive view of their motives. It also meant that the issue of agency in the processes of cultural change was largely ignored. ‘Romanisation’ is an ambiguous term that can be understood either as a policy or as a process – as the result of a deliberate attempt by the Romans at civilising their conquests, or as the unintended result of the incorporation of a region into the political, social and economic structures of the Empire, or as some combination of the two. Many writers in this tradition saw Rome as a self-consciously civilising power, focusing on the various texts (such as the passage of Tacitus quoted above) and inscriptions which showed Roman governors and emperors intervening to promote their ‘culture’ in the provinces. They were generally conscious enough of the limitations of Roman power, above all the small number of Roman officials in the provinces, to recognise that Roman culture could never have been imposed wholesale on the entire Empire; rather, the role of Roman officials was to embody their culture, to begin the process of urbanisation through the foundation of colonies and development of military camps, and to provide occasional encouragement and finance. The superiority of Roman civilisation, it was assumed, was such that it would spread through the provinces through a natural process of osmosis; it was enough for the natives to be brought into contact with Romans, whether soldiers, officials, colonists or traders, to recognise their superior status and wish to imitate them.

The close connection between these assumptions and the discourses of modern imperialism, which similarly see the colonised natives as uncultured or culture-free primitives in need of civilising, and as passive consumers overwhelmed by the superior power of European civilisation, is obvious. In recent decades, these modern discourses and ‘white mythologies’, the means by which non-Europeans are represented as inferior and hence in need of the benevolent intervention of European powers, have been fiercely criticised by various post-colonial theories, whose arguments have also been introduced into the study of the Roman Empire.²⁵ Several recent studies of Romanisation have therefore adopted what might be termed a ‘nativist’ perspective, emphasising the equal claims to attention of pre-Roman culture – it was not intrinsically inferior to Roman civilisation, simply different – and hence insisting on the active role of the provincials in choosing to adopt Roman culture, or elements of it, for their own purposes.²⁶ Cultural change is not the result of a natural process of osmosis or diffusion, but rather the product of decisions made by individuals in their own interests, above all in the pursuit of social status and position. Even before a region was conquered, the consumption of Roman goods, such as wine in Gaul, might be employed by the elite (or would-be elite) as a means of differentiating themselves from the mass of the population; the significance of such goods was that they were exotic and relatively rare.²⁷ After the conquest, such goods became more widely available, so that more people could seek to emulate their social superiors by changing their habits of consumption. More importantly, the elite could gain significantly greater power, and access to wider networks of power, through collaboration with the Romans; the adoption and adaption of an ever wider range of Roman practices and forms was a crucial element of their strategies of negotiation and accommodation, seeking to establish themselves as acceptable partners for their new rulers while maintaining their dominant position in local society.²⁸ In brief, the provincials became Roman, and indeed made themselves Roman, rather than being Romanised. In due course, these new practices became embedded in provincial society – part of the expectations of normal social behaviour rather than representing a deliberate choice to embrace ‘Romanness’; in other words, provincial society itself became increasingly Roman, and identification with the Empire became the norm.

The post-colonial turn in Roman history has produced a number of significant studies in recent years; unlike the ‘Romanisation’ approach, where the core of the theory quickly became unquestioned dogma, many of these contributions have continued to question the theoretical assumptions of the models used to interpret the ancient evidence, even those of post-colonial theory itself. The focus on provincials as agents in their own cultural transformation has, in the view of some archaeologists, led to the occlusion of the coercive aspects of the dominant Roman culture, and hence to an overly positive view of the impact of Rome. Certainly there has been little attention to the possibility of active resistance in any form other than outright rebellion; the limited penetration of some Roman practices such as house construction or Latin epigraphy into the countryside is interpreted as a function of distance from the mainstream of society, not as a deliberate rejection of Roman culture.²⁹ The approach remains focused on the activities of the elite; the major markers of ‘Romanisation’ are those associated with the wealthier members of society, in part because the traditional conception of Roman culture has tended to set the priorities for excavations and research over the last century and a half, while the reasons offered for the active participation of provincials in becoming Roman are, on the face of it, very much elite concerns. That is not to say that these accounts deliberately exclude or ignore the mass of the population, but their focus on the visible and impressive manifestations of cultural change can lead to a neglect of the possibility of discrepant experiences.³⁰

The same can be said of the geographical variation; if ‘Romanisation’ was primarily a matter of local elites negotiating their position under the new conditions of Roman rule, it is not immediately obvious why the elites of the eastern provinces should have made far less accommodation than those in the west. Studies of Romanisation tend, with very few exceptions, to focus exclusively on the west or on individual provinces in the west, because their subject is defined in terms of significant changes in material culture and that is where the changes are visible; if, however, the question were refocused on the nature and dynamics of the encounter between Roman and provincial cultures, it would be essential to consider the divergent experiences of regions across the whole of the Empire. One crucial question is whether the divergence visible in the material record (the number of villas and inscriptions, the persistence of indigenous burial customs and so forth) is the product of variations in the intensity of exposure to Roman culture – in other words, whether the countryside becomes less ‘Romanised’ than the cities because its inhabitants are more isolated from exposure to Roman culture and the incentives to adopt it – or whether different groups in provincial society and different regions of the Empire were presented with quite different incentives and pressures, concealed under the homogenising term ‘Romanisation’.

Some of the most far-reaching criticisms of the new orthodoxy of self-Romanising natives have indeed been based on questioning the whole concept of Romanisation; not only the dynamics of its development, but its ontological status.³¹ Underpinning both the original and the modified theories is the nineteenth-century conception of a culture as an integrated system, closely related to the special qualities of the race or nation that created it, in which every aspect of life reflects as well as constitutes the whole.³² When an object or a practice associated with Roman culture is identified in a provincial context, therefore, it is interpreted by archaeologists as either an indication of the presence of Romans or as an example of provincials adopting elements of Roman culture. However, objects have no fixed, intrinsic meaning; we actually have no way of knowing whether, for example, a Gaul drinking wine in the first century CE thought of himself as consuming a Roman drink rather than a prestigious drink, or whether mosaic decoration in a country residence was associated with Romanness by provincials to the same extent that it is by modern scholarship. Certain objects must, we may imagine, have been difficult to disassociate wholly from their origins – the toga, for example – but even then, we cannot know whether the primary motivation of a Briton wearing a toga was to assert his identity as a Roman and emulate his rulers, or rather to mark himself out from his social inferiors through a distinctive form of dress. The progressivist view that all manifestations of ‘Roman’ goods and practices in the provinces must represent a movement towards the wholesale adoption of Romanness may in fact conceal a wide range of different reasons for changes in material culture.

In addition, the idea of ‘Roman culture’, conceived as a homogeneous and clearly-defined set of social, material and intellectual practices, is itself an invention. In part, it was invented by the Romans themselves, seeking to define their own identity, from the development of a Latin literary tradition in the second century CE to the furious arguments about what it was to be Roman (or a ‘proper’ Roman) in the vast literary and artistic output of what is sometimes called the ‘Roman cultural revolution’ under Augustus.³³ There was no single model of ‘being Roman’ which a provincial could have imitated, even if he had full information about the debates going on in the metropolis, rather than, we might imagine, developing a partial and idiosyncratic image of what was involved from his encounters with Romans in his locality and from different media of communication like coins, literature and sculpture. Rather, the adoption of certain practices can be understood as an attempt at defining what it is to be Roman, part of an empire-wide discourse on the subject, as much as an assertion of Roman identity.³⁴ The different conceptions of Romanness found in different regions of the Empire were not imperfect copies of a pure Roman identity established in the centre; on the contrary, the cosmopolitan nature of the capital, drawing in influences from every corner of the Empire, meant that Roman identity was arguably a far more problematic concept there than in any individual province.³⁵ Looking over the Empire, there was clearly no such thing as ‘Roman identity’ or ‘Roman culture’; better to think of multiple ‘Roman identities’ and ‘Roman cultures’, all hybrids, sharing some elements in common but with significant differences, all undergoing a constant process of development and debate.

The modern conception of Roman culture is much broader than the Romans’ own definitions; inspired by the wish to look beyond the culture of the elite, it incorporates practices such as the use of terra sigillata pottery and coined money which were not, as far as we know, specifically associated with Roman identity by any contemporary. There is no doubt that there were significant changes in a whole range of material practices in the Roman provinces, and a tendency towards greater homogeneity of material culture in at least some regions, both phenomena that require explanation. What is in question is the assumption that they represent a progression towards ‘Roman culture’ and that the only explanation required is an interpretation of the nature of this progression. Interpreting the material evidence from different provinces in terms of minor variations on a single homogeneous ‘Roman culture’ leads to the assumption that it must be the product of a single process, rather than being the result of a number of different processes that modern scholars have interpreted as a unity. It is clear evidence of the power of the idea of the Roman Empire, bound together in and by a common culture, that the Romans sought to identify the ideas and behaviour that united (or ought to unite) its diverse inhabitants. Modern historians have been equally spellbound by the idea, to the extent of taking it for reality.³⁶

Processes of Cultural Change

Although the idea of a single empire-wide process of Romanisation has proved misleading and unhelpful, and has all too frequently involved a problematic degree of identification with the imperial power and the discourse of modern imperialism, it is possible to identify a number of processes of social and cultural change that operated, to greater or lesser degrees, in all parts of the Roman Empire, and generated the phenomena that have been gathered together under the label ‘Roman culture’. The effects of these processes were highly varied, depending on, among other things, the structures of pre-conquest society in a particular area, the manner in which the region was incorporated into the Empire, the wealth of the region, its location and its degree of involvement in wider networks of trade, migration and communication. Different regions were exposed to greater or lesser degrees of external influence and stimulus; different regions and groups had different capacities for choosing how far to resist these forces and how far to participate in the opportunities they presented. Nevertheless, as it is possible to discuss the parameters of modern globalisation, identifying the forces that shape the lives of everyone on the planet to a greater or lesser degree without claiming that every experience of globalisation must be identical, so we can discuss the emergence of global cultures under the Roman Empire without implying that this was a single, simple process.

The first such process can be labelled integration, the construction of a common sense of identity and a shared world-view as a basis for the rule of the empire and its local collaborators. ‘Culture’ operates within society as a source of ideological power, generating the capacity to compel obedience and acquiescence through the creation and manipulation of a shared set of beliefs that sanction the existing social order.³⁷ Ancient elites invested heavily in the creation of meaning and the communication of official ideology through all the media available to them; it was always far cheaper to persuade people to accept their rule and believe in its essential rightness than to employ more direct and coercive methods. The aim of the Roman ideological project was not to create homogeneity and absolute conformity amongst its subjects, but to establish the empire as a higher focus of loyalty and source of communal solidarity that superseded, without necessarily destroying, their diversity. It is most visible in the products of the central power, especially in the context of the Augustan revolution; the need to legitimise the new autocratic regime led to the employment of every available medium in the city of Rome, especially literature and visual images. These were used to anchor Augustus’ claims to legitimacy in a subtly revised account of the whole of Roman history and a new conception of the role, and the necessity, of the supreme ruler in bringing peace and prosperity to the empire.³⁸ There is considerable scope for debate about how far the ‘Augustan programme’ represented a coherent and directed propaganda system, rather than the result of different coin producers, artists and writers seeking to anticipate what might please the emperor, and about whether the message of these images, poems and histories was always clearly legible or received in the way it was intended by the producers. Nevertheless, the overall effect was the establishment of the set of ideas and symbols that would be employed by the Empire for centuries to come, communicated beyond the city of Rome as a means of naturalising the Roman order.³⁹

…the nurse and parent of all other lands, elected by the gods’ will in order to make heaven itself brighter, to bring scattered peoples into unity, to make manners gentle, to draw together by community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of nearly countless nations, to give civilisation to humankind, and to become throughout all the lands the single fatherland of humanity.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 3.39

Roman ideology offered a number of different images which could be read as mutually reinforcing or contradictory, according to taste. On the one hand there was an emphasis on the overwhelming power of the Empire, especially its military power, with monumental celebrations of victories and triumphs, and images of the emperor accepting homage from defeated regions like Britannia (invariably personified as female) and resting his foot on the globe appearing on coins.⁴⁰ In literature, the Empire is presented as unlimited, all-encompassing, historically unprecedented: ‘Your possession is equal to what the sun can pass.’⁴¹ New myths and genealogies gave the Romans a central place in the narrative of world history, emphasising their descent from the Trojans and the divine sanction for Roman victory and domination.⁴² At the same time, however, there was also an emphasis on the civilising mission of the Empire, whose divinely-ordained task was to bring peace and impose order for the benefit of all, and to extend the benefits of civilisation to the farthest reaches of the world.⁴³

Central to this aspect of Rome’s image was the emergence, out of fierce internal debate, of a new conception of citizenship and of what it might mean to ‘be Roman’. In place of the traditional model of an exclusive citizenship based on birthright, Rome took the unprecedented step – ‘there is nothing like it in the records of all mankind’, according to one Greek commentator – of opening it to the world.⁴⁴ The story that the original population of Rome was, in contrast to pure-bred Greek city-states (in theory, at any rate), a heterogeneous mix bound together by mutual interest and solidarity rather than kinship, was an essential component, legitimising the future admission of those who wished to join the commonwealth. ‘In a short time a scattered and wandering multitude had become a body of citizens by mutual agreement’, Cicero declared.⁴⁵ Sallust’s slightly longer account emphasised the expectations of the Romans in all such situations:

After these two peoples, different in race, unlike in speech and mode of life, were united within the same walls, they were merged into one with incredible facility, so quickly did harmony change a heterogeneous and roving band into a commonwealth.

The War against Catiline, 6.1–2

Those who wished to become Roman, and who displayed sufficient conformity to Roman expectations, would be accepted, whether free-born or former slave. The question of how easy it was to gain admittance in practice – what proportion of slaves could hope to be manumitted, what level of wealth and influence was required to win a grant of citizenship – was largely irrelevant to the ideological power of this institution. What mattered was the belief that Rome had become the patria, the highest focus of loyalty, to all rather than to a single people:

You have caused the word Roman to be the label, not of membership in a city, but of some common nationality, and this not just one among all, but one balancing all the rest… The division which you substituted is Romans and not-Romans. To such a degree have you expanded the name of your city. Since these are the lines along which the distinction has been made, many in every city are fellow-citizens of yours no less than of their own kinsmen, though some of them have not yet seen this city.

Aristides, Oration, 26.63–4

Collective rituals for all citizens, whether those associated with the taking of the census or the formal swearing of oaths of allegiance to the emperor, emphasised their common identity, directing attention away from any differences in status between provincials and focusing it instead onto the higher authority they all obeyed.⁴⁶

The task of uniting all the peoples of the Empire fell above all to the emperor, or to his public persona: he was the father of his people, caring for all his subjects, directing all the affairs of the Empire, personally responsible for its well-being. There is a striking image in one of Martial’s poems about the games in Rome, offering a catalogue of all the different races gathered there to watch: ‘These peoples speak in different voices – but then with one voice, when you are named the true father of your country’ (On the Spectacles, 3.11–12). The emperor personified imperial power, and presented it as magnificent and all-powerful but also benevolent, generous and compassionate. His image was everywhere throughout the empire, in every city, on coins and statues and even on cakes made for sacrifice; there is some evidence that official portraits were distributed as models, to be employed by provincials who wanted to demonstrate their loyalty by erecting yet another statue, but he might also be represented in the local idiom – as a pharaoh in Egypt, for example.⁴⁷ He was the emperor of every individual city and province as much as he was the emperor of the Empire as a whole. The phenomenon of religious cult offered to the emperor is found throughout the provinces, but there was no organised Imperial Cult; rather, every city had its own cult of the emperor, with its own minor variations in rituals and festival days.⁴⁸ The birthdays of members of the imperial family, the monthly and annual birthdays of the emperor, and the birthdays and dates of accession of his predecessors structured the year; there was no single imperial calendar of festivals and other significant occasions – Augustus’ birthday was the official start of the year in the province of Asia, for example, but not elsewhere – but all provincial calendars were organised around the celebration of the emperor.⁴⁹ The numerous petitions sent to him from individuals and communities with requests for his intervention or assistance make manifest the widespread belief in his power and benevolence – even if an answer could never be relied upon.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, regular reports on his great deeds circulated to every part of the Empire, to ensure that the image was maintained. The assiduity of imperial bureaucrats in promoting that image enabled it to survive the reigns of individual emperors who fell far short of the ideal, while faith in the emperor’s benevolence worked to excuse the failures of the imperial bureaucracy – if a petition was not answered, or a court’s decision was obviously corrupt, it could only be because the emperor was misled or kept in ignorance by his advisors.

The creation of this empire-wide ideology was not a simple top-down process. It was undoubtedly encouraged by the emperor and by many governors, who provided the models and sometimes the finance, but its implementation was mainly left to locals: the integration of the Empire into a common political culture was achieved largely through the active efforts of those who wished to become Roman rather than those who sought to create an empire of Romans. The provincial elites competed for favour by trying to guess what form of honours would be most pleasing to their rulers, gradually learning to speak the language, both literary and visual, of imperial power – a language which did of course include reference to the fate of those who showed insufficient loyalty.⁵¹ They also furthered the development of an empire-wide elite culture through their efforts to gain power through collaboration and gain access to the higher levels of imperial authority, and through their efforts to exert ideological power over the mass of the population in order to legitimise their rule. The advent of Rome offered a range of new techniques of self-presentation and examples of how to gain the acquiescence of the masses in elite rule; above all, the power of the city.⁵² The attempts of provincial elites to establish their own dominance, as well as display their adherence to what they thought of as Roman civilisation, was a key factor in the spread of a relatively uniform urban culture through the western provinces.

The other key factor in urbanisation, and other changes in elite behaviour, was the process of differentiation: accumulating ideological power and legitimising their rule by marking themselves off from the mass of the population. This was scarcely a new phenomenon; rather, the advent of Rome increased the resources available to the aspiring notable, with access to a much wider range of prestige goods, new forms of social behaviour (for example, the extension of literary culture and education as a means of claiming higher social status) and new techniques, as well as the prestige to be gained through association and collaboration with the ruling power. In some respects, differentiation worked hand in hand with integration, fostering the development of an increasingly homogeneous elite culture. However, this was at the expense of the integration of the Empire as a whole, with wide discrepancies in power and access to power undermining any notion of the equal status of all Romans under the emperor. The establishment of a legal distinction from the early second century CE between honestiores and humiliores, the worthy and the humble, grouping together both citizens and non-citizens in each of those categories and giving different legal rights to each, simply confirmed the success of this process of differentiation; the extension of citizenship to all inhabitants of the Empire in 212 CE can be seen as acknowledge-ment of the degraded status of citizenship as much as a masterstroke of integration. Furthermore, the fact that ‘Roman identity’ was an essentially contested concept rather than a clear set of expectations and rules meant that there was continual debate (in Rome, at any rate) concerning means of social differentiation that might appear to threaten elite solidarity; the discourse concerning the acceptable limits of ‘luxurious’ behaviour – which shaped modern discussion of economic development for centuries – is the most obvious example, including the portrayal of the unacceptable vulgarity of the freedman Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon.⁵³ The meaning and acceptability of a particular practice depended, of course, on context; traditional forms of consumption in Asia Minor, for example, might appear unacceptably decadent in Rome or Gaul, while the adoption of ‘Roman’ practices by the Judaean elite, perfectly innocuous and commonplace in most of the Empire, undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

Whereas processes of integration were driven almost exclusively by the political elite in support of its own power, differentiation occurred much further down the social scale. The obvious problem in exploring this issue is that the consumption habits of the masses have to be reconstructed from material evidence alone, which shows how individuals were changing their practices but not why, whereas our perspective on elite behaviour comes in part from their reflections and self-presentation in literature and epigraphy.⁵⁴ However, we can reasonably assume that that consumption could be used as a means of establishing social position and membership of society, especially as citizenship no longer conferred significant political rights and duties as an alternative basis for social identity. The development of systems of distribution gave easier access to a wider range of goods, at least to those living in the cities, which could be employed as social markers; and the expansion of economic opportunities meant that at least some families had increased means at their disposal. Indeed, the process may have become self-perpetuating in the course of Rome’s development into a society organised around the consumption of goods rather than collective activities; poverty became more visible because lack of resources meant an inability to imitate the practices of one’s neighbours, and so there was an added incentive for those who could afford it to continue to spend to ensure that their freedom from shameful poverty and their full participation in social activities was properly advertised.⁵⁵ There is no way of knowing how far customs such as bathing, new styles of dress, new foodstuffs or the use of terra sigillata pottery were seen as explicitly or specifically ‘Roman’, nor how far ordinary provincials, unlike the literate elite, thought of themselves as Roman in ideological opposition to everyone outside the Empire. While the degree of change in the material practices of the wealthier non-elite members of provincial society is impressive, especially in the west, the consumption habits of the Empire were never completely homogeneous; for example, an analysis of meat consumption indicates that north-western regions continued to eat more beef, sheep or goat while southern Gaul and Italy remained pork-eaters, exactly as the situation before the Empire came.⁵⁶

The society, culture and habits of consumption of the eastern provinces were, as has been noted, much less dramatically affected by the advent of Roman rule. One obvious reason is that their elites were already well established, and indeed had contributed significantly to the development of the model of elite culture and urbanism that was now extended westwards. However, they played an important role in a third process of cultural change, which can be termed re-evaluation: local customs and ideas were reviewed and revised in the face of the rise of Rome and the establishment of a more interconnected, globalised society, which brought with it a flood of new ideas and information. Writers from the Greek east thought deeply about Rome’s history and its place in the grander narrative of world history, in the course of considering their own place within the new order and negotiating an accommodation with Roman power.⁵⁷ This echoed the re-evaluation of Roman history and identity that had begun in Rome itself towards the end of the republic, in response to the encounter with alien cultures and with Greek culture in particular, and the consequent anxieties over whether Roman traditions were adequate to negotiate this new world.⁵⁸ By the time of Augustus, the cultural heritage of the Greeks was becoming accepted and firmly established in Rome – in Horace’s famous line, ‘Captive Greece took her savage victor captive’.⁵⁹ The Greek literature of what is known as the ‘Second Sophistic’ developed in response to the sort of attitude expressed by Pliny in a letter to a friend who was about to take on administrative responsibilities in the province of Achaea:

Pay regard to their antiquity, their heroic deeds, and the legends of their past. Do not detract from anyone’s dignity, independence or even pride, but always bear in mind that this is the land which provided us with justice and have us laws, not after conquering us but at our own request… To deprive them of that last shadow and trace of freedom which is all that their title is, would be the harsh and wild act of a barbarian.

Letters, 8.24

Greek writers established common ground with their new rulers in the dialectic of civilisation and barbarism, presenting their own nation as the originators of civilisation and treating the Romans as the agents of the diffusion of their culture to the world. A major theme in their writings is the consideration of the nature of Greek identity; almost all of them were Roman citizens, and the invention of an idea of ‘Greekness’ as something that could be acquired through education rather than birth ran in close parallel, and doubtless involving mutual influence, with the invention of ‘Romanness’.⁶⁰ Meanwhile, many Greek cities became transformed through the construction of new buildings commemorating past greatness, some built by Roman Hellenophiles and some by local elites, into theatres of memory, reflecting and reinforcing the claims of Greece to a special place in the grand narrative of Roman power.⁶¹

The Greek experience of Roman rule was strikingly different from that of many other provinces, above all because of its past. Elsewhere in the Empire, the process of re-evaluation can be seen above all in the area of religious practice and ideas. The Romans chose to interpret the religions of foreign peoples in terms of their own; rather than regarding, say, the Carthaginians’ Baal as an alien God, they identified him as Saturn. Caesar’s description of the religion of the Gauls is typical:

They especially worship Mercury among the gods. There are many images of him. They claim him as the inventor of all crafts, guide for all roads and journeys; they believe that he has special power over money-making and trade. After him, they worship Apollo and Mars and Jupiter and Minerva. They have roughly the same view of these deities as other peoples – that Apollo dispels sickness, that Minerva grants the principles of the arts and crafts, that Jupiter rules heaven, and that Mars controls wars.

Gallic Wars, 6.17

The Romans made no attempt at exporting their own cults, which were closely tied to specific locations in Rome and its environs.62Roman colonies were expected to imitate metropolitan practices in such matters as the appointment and organisation of priests, and measures were taken in some provinces to reduce or remove the power and independence of sanctuaries and religious groups like the Druids; insofar as the Empire could be said to have a religious policy, it was to export the Roman concept of religion, especially its control by the political elite, rather than its content.⁶³ Nevertheless, there were significant changes in the location and appearance of many cult sites, with an increasing focus on temples built in the traditional Graeco–Roman style and located in the cities. This development could be seen as another manifestation of the elite’s drive to control the population through the deployment of ideological power and the crystallisation of institutions in the cities, and another example of the deployment of resources and imitation of new models as a means of asserting superior status and/or Roman identity. Other developments, however, are less easy to explain in these terms; above all, changes in the content of provincial religion. To judge from the epigraphic record, some provincials worshipped Roman deities, or the traditional local deities under their Roman identification; others worshipped composite deities – Sulis Minerva of Bath, for example – or apparently hedged their bets: ‘To the god Mars Lenus or Ocelo Vellaunus and to the divinity of the emperor’.⁶⁴ Another approach is found in relief carvings that show images of ‘divine marriage’ between a male Roman god and a native goddess; these could be seen as representing the subordination of the native tradition, if we assume the relief’s creator or viewer shared the Roman view of the status of women, but it seems equally possible that the intended message was the domestication and control of the Roman by the native.⁶⁵ In either case, what is happening in such reliefs and in the ‘syncretism’ of Roman and native deities is the active re-evaluation and reinterpretation of each religious tradition in the light of the other. The advent of Rome brought new ideas about gods, religious practice and religious art, forcing the provincials to review their previously unquestioned traditions; not only the shifting identities of the gods they worshipped but also the changes in religious practice and the architecture of cult sites should be understood not as the unthinking adoption of the superior culture and rejection of the old ways – as it was of course understood in the ‘Romanisation’ tradition – but as the active reinterpretation of religion in the light of new knowledge and ideas.⁶⁶ Just as the intellectuals of the Greek east had been compelled to reconsider their cultural traditions in the light of dramatically changed circumstances, a process which we can follow in much more detail, so the inhabitants of the western provinces re-evaluated their beliefs and practices under the influence of the Empire.

This process was encouraged above all by the concentration of people and resources, and the crystallisation of religious, political and social institutions in the cities. Those who wished to participate in social life under the new dispensation had to travel to these urban centres, where they encountered larger numbers and a wider range of people than their ancestors had ever done. Social interaction was intensified, and increasingly anonymous and segmented; more and more encounters were with strangers rather than kin or friends, focused on business transactions, and governed by external law rather than trust. The cities were the main point of contact between the locality and the wider world, the places where provincials were most likely to encounter new ideas as well as new goods, both brought in through the increase in connectivity and movement across the Empire. This confrontation with alien practices and ways of thinking need not necessarily lead to changes in behaviour – but traditional practices and ideas were now unavoidably recognised as one lifestyle choice amongst many rather than a given. The establishment of one’s social identity was now a matter of negotiation amongst different possibilities; provincials were presented with choices, and indeed with the necessity of making a choice, about who they were.

The Costs of Globalization

One way of thinking about the processes of Roman globalisation is as the expansion and proliferation of networks, shared forms of social coordination which require the acceptance of certain standards in order to be accepted into membership.⁶⁷ The obvious example is the network of the imperial elite, which gave access to the higher levels of social, political and ideological power to those who met the standards of wealth, education, behaviour, shared literary culture and so forth needed to be accepted into membership. However, one might equally talk of the networks of Latin speakers or the users of Roman law. One of the crucial insights of this approach is that it explains the way in which, in the experience of modern globalisation and hence arguably in the Roman case, a free choice to change one’s cultural practices can feel constrained. Power, in this model, operates as much through social structures and the apparently willing acquiescence of its subjects as through overt coercion. For example, in order for a member of a native elite to maintain his power in local society under the Empire, it was necessary for him to gain admittance to the network of the imperial elite, and hence to adopt the whole range of ‘Roman’ behaviour and culture; what appears in the record as voluntary Romanisation may have been experienced to varying degrees as Hobson’s choice, unavoidable because the costs of not joining that network would have been too high. The effect was the same, the creation of an empire-wide elite bound together by a common set of attitudes and expectations, making Roman rule possible, and the spread of Roman material practices across a wide area; what this approach offers is a middle way of understanding these developments, mediating between the ideas of imposed Romanisation and the whole-hearted embrace of Roman culture by the provincials.

This approach is most interesting when it is applied not to networks that could equally be described in more traditional terms as classes or status groups but to networks defined by the use of a particular standard.⁶⁸ Roman rule, as noted previously, led to the widespread adoption of certain standards: weights and measures, coinage, law, language. The decision to embrace one of these standards was in principle entirely voluntary, but might in practice be unavoidable, if one wanted to do business or had to interact with Roman officials (who, in the western provinces, would use only Latin); the costs of being unable to communicate with those in power, or of the business falling through because of the transaction costs involved, might be too high to leave any choice. The act of adoption of these standards does not require or imply identification with them, though in time that might develop simply through the habit of use.

The adoption of a standard is not necessarily a straightforward act; it may bring with it unintended effects. Membership of a network brings an individual into contact with new information, interpretations and practices, whether that individual likes it or not. The user of Roman coinage, for example, motivated solely by its practical utility (or, in some cases, compelled by the demands of the state or his landlord for payment in cash), was as a result constantly exposed to imperial propaganda in the images on the coins; moreover, the regular use of coins or official weights emphasised and entrenched the claims to legitimacy of the ruling power, expressed through its definition and enforcement of such standards. Latin spread through the provinces for a variety of reasons, among them the demands of army service (where orders were given in Latin) and the convenience of a common language for business; it was not necessarily adopted for its own sake, or for becoming more Roman, but the usual mode of acquisition, learning the language through the traditional literary canon, exposed the learner to the Roman cultural world and, in the case of canonical authors like Virgil, to the ideology of imperialism.⁶⁹

Over time, certain standards became ever more dominant across the Empire, replacing local practices, and their adoption became less a matter of a choice than an unavoidable necessity in order to participate in social life. This development was not only, if at all, because of the superiority of these global standards, but because they had the backing of the dominant political and economic players. Just as the development of a more homogeneous culture and a more unified set of beliefs and attitudes made ruling the empire cheaper and easier for the Romans and their collaborators, so the adoption of empire-wide standards favoured those who operated, whether in the political, social or economic spheres, at a trans-regional level. The benefits for peasant farmers from the adoption of Roman weights and measures or coins in place of local standards were marginal at best; the benefits for merchants and for the Empire itself were enormous.

Once we discard the assumption that Roman civilisation was intrinsically superior to provincial culture and hence unquestionably desirable, the increasing homogenisation and standardisation of the cultures of the Empire appears as a process whose benefits were unevenly distributed and in some cases of questionable value. ‘Network power’ could (and can) be experienced as quite as restrictive and tyrannical as cruder forms of coercion and control, not least because it appears to involve the free choice to accept or reject new practices in favour of old ones. Moreover, it is more insidious and pervasive than the overt manifestations of globalisation, such as the imposition of Roman rule or the articulation of an ideology of empire. Even if ‘Romanisation’ in its traditional sense remained for the most part a veneer, largely confined to the elite, not affecting in the least the sense of identity of the majority of provincials, nevertheless the development of standards based on sociability influenced and constricted individual freedom of action far more than the constraints of formal sovereignty. This is precisely the concern identified in Hardt and Negri’s conception of ‘empire’: it colonises every available space, influences every discourse and is impossible to escape without setting oneself outside normal social interaction altogether. The limited technical resources of Roman imperialism meant that there were always spaces within its borders that were largely free from its influence, but the dynamic of the system, as well as the ambitions of its ideological agenda, was to extend its reach as far as possible into everyday life and thought.

Endnotes

1. But apart from all that …? Monty Python, Life of Brian, 1979.
2. Seeley, J.R., The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp.238–9.
3. Huntington, S.P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 69–70.
4. Montgomery, W.F., ‘The imperial ideal’, in Goldman, C.S. (ed.), The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905), pp. 5–28; quote from p. 7.
5. Mattingly, D., ‘From one colonialism to another: imperialism and the Maghreb’, in Webster, J. & Cooper, N. (eds), Roman imperialism: post-colonial perspectives (Leicester: Leicester Archaeology Monographs, 1996), pp. 49–70; Terrenato, N., ‘Ancestor cults: the perception of ancient Rome in modern Italian culture’, in Hingley, R. (ed.), Images of Rome: perceptions of ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the modern age (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 44, 2001), pp. 71–89.
6. The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 253.
7. Hingley, R., Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: the imperial origins of Roman archaeology (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).
8. Montgomery, ‘The imperial ideal’, p. 7.
9. Lucas, C.P., Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 94.
10. Haverfield, F., ‘An inaugural address delivered before the first Annual General Meeting of the Society’, Journal of Roman Studies, 1911 (1), pp. xi–xx; quote from p. xvii.
11. Baring, E., Earl of Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism [1910] (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), p. 89.
12. Lucas, Greater Rome, p. 97; Bryce, J., The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), pp. 58–9.
13. Bryce, Ancient Roman Empire, p. 41.
14. Sinopoli, C.M., ‘Imperial integration and imperial subjects’, in Alcock, S.E., et al. (eds), Empires: perspectives from archaeology and history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 195–200.
15. Doyle, M.W., Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 92–8.
16. Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 250–300.
17. Rostovtzeff, M.I., A History of the Ancient World Vol. I, trans. Duff, J.M., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 10.
18. On the history of scholarship, see Freeman, P.W.M., ‘Mommsen through to Haverfield: the origins of Romanization studies in late 19th-c. Britain’, in Mattingly, D.W. (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism: power, discourse, and discrepant experience in the Roman Empire (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 23, 1997), pp. 27–50; Hingley, R., Globalizing Roman Culture: unity, diversity and empire (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 14–48.
19. Haverfield, F., The Romanization of Roman Britain (4th edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 22.
20. Freeman, P.W.M., ‘British imperialism and the Roman empire’, in Webster & Cooper (eds), Roman Imperialism, pp. 19–34.
21. Woolf, G., Becoming Roman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 4–7.
22. Haverfield, Romanization, p. 10.
23. Mattingly, D., ‘Introduction’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, p. 9.
24. cf. Hingley, R., ‘Resistance and domination: social change in Roman Britain’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, pp. 81–100.
25. See the papers in Webster & Cooper (eds), Roman Imperialism. Generally on post-colonial theory, see Young, R.J.C., White Mythologies: writing history and the West (London & New York: Routledge, 1990); Said, E., Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993); Loomba, A., Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London & New York: Routledge 1998); Chakrabarty, D., Provincialising Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). There is an outline summary and discussion in Bush, B., Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow: Pearson, 2006).
26. Millett, M., The Romanization of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Woolf, Becoming Roman. Discussed by Hingley, R., Globalizing Roman Culture, pp. 40–8.
27. cf. Morley, N., Trade in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 36–49 on theories of consumption.
28. Terrenato, N., ‘Introduction’ and ‘A tale of three cities: the Romanization of northern coastal Etruria’, in Keay, S. & Terrenato, N. (eds), Italy and the West: comparative issues in Romanization (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), pp. 1–6, 54–67.
29. cf. Hingley, ‘Resistance and domination’.
30. Generally, Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism.
31. Barrett, J.C., ‘Romanization: a critical comment’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, pp. 51–64.
32. Kain, P.J., Schiller, Hegel and Marx: state, society and the aesthetic ideal of ancient Greece (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982); Williams, R., Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 89–90.
33. Wallace-Hadrill, A., ‘Rome’s cultural revolution’, Journal of Roman Studies, 1989 (79), pp. 157–64; Habinek, T.N. & Schiesaro, A. (eds), The Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Habinek, T.N., The Politics of Latin Literature: writing, identity, and empire in ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
34. Woolf, G., ‘The Roman cultural revolution in Gaul’, in Keay & Terrenato (eds), Italy and the West, pp. 173–86.
35. Edwards, C. & Woolf, G. (eds), Rome the Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
36. Barrett, J.C., ‘Romanization: a critical comment’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, pp. 51–64.
37. Mann, Sources of Social Power, pp. 22–4; Ando, C., Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2000), p. 5.
38. Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Shapiro, A. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Rome’s cultural revolution’.
39. Whittaker, C.R., ‘Imperialism and culture: the Roman initiative’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, pp. 143–63.
40. e.g. Beard, M., North, J. & Price, S., Religions of Rome Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 225.
41. Aelius Aristides, Oration 26.10.
42. Woolf, G., ‘Inventing empire in ancient Rome’, in Alcock, S.E., et al. (eds), Empires, pp. 311–22.
43. Ando, Imperial Ideology, pp. 49–70.
44. Aristides, Oration 26.59; Dench, E., Romulus’ Asylum: Roman identities from the age of Alexander to the age of Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
45. Republic I.40.
46. Ando, Imperial Ideology, pp. 350–61.
47. Ibid., pp. 206–73.
48. Beard, North & Price, Religions of Rome Vol. I, pp. 348–63.
49. e.g. IGR IV.353 from Pergamum, quoted in Beard, North & Price, Religions of Rome Vol. II, pp. 255–6.
50. Generally on the role of the emperor in administration, Millar, F., The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC – AD 337) (London: Duckworth, 1977), with Hopkins, K., Death and Renewal: sociological studies in Roman history II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and on the later empire, Kelly, C., Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).
51. Revell, L., Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
52. Whittaker, ‘Imperialism and culture’, pp. 144–8.
53. Edwards, C., The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Berry, C.J., The Idea of Luxury: a conceptual and historical investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Morley, N., ‘Political economy and classical antiquity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1998 (26), pp. 95–114.
54. Hingley, Globalizing, pp. 91–116.
55. cf. Morley, N., ‘The poor in the city of Rome’, in Atkins, M. & Osborne, R. (eds), Poverty in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 21–39.
56. King, A., ‘The Romanization of diet in western Europe’, in Keay & Terrenato (eds), Italy and the West, pp. 210–23.
57. Generally, Swain, S., Hellenism and Empire: language, classicism and power in the Greek world, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
58. Gruen, E.S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
59. Epistles, 2.1.156.
60. Whitmarsh, T., Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: the politics of imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
61. Alcock, S.E., ‘The reconfiguration of memory in the eastern Roman empire’, in Alcock et al. (eds), Empires, pp. 323–50.
62. Beard, North & Price, Religions of Rome, pp. 313–48; Revell, Roman Imperialism, pp. 110–49.
63. Rüpke, J., ‘Urban religion and imperial expansion: priesthoods in the Lex Ursonensis’, in de Blois, L., Funke, P. & Hahn, J. (eds), The Impact of Imperial Rome on Religions, Ritual and Religious Life in the Roman Empire (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2006), pp. 11–23.
64. Inscriptions of Roman Britain 309, quoted in Champion, C. (ed.), Roman Imperialism: readings and sources (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 265.
65. Webster, J. ‘A negotiated syncretism: readings on the development of Romano–Celtic religion’, in Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism, pp. 165–84.
66. Woolf, ‘Roman cultural revolution’, pp. 176–8.
67. This section draws heavily on the ideas of Grewal, D.S. Network Power: the social dynamics of globalization (New Haven & London: Cornell University Press, 2008).
68. Grewal, Network Power, pp. 71–88 on language as standards.
69. Hingley, Globalizing, pp. 94–100; Morgan, T., Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Chapter 4 (102-127) from The Roman Empire: Roots of Imperialism, by Neville Morley (Pluto Press, 08.04.2010), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.