Tales of the Barbarians

Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West

Greg Woolf

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444390803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

Tales of the Barbarians traces the creation of new mythologies in the wake of Roman expansion westward to the Atlantic, and offers the first application of modern ethnographic theory to ancient material.

• Investigates the connections between empire and knowledge at the turn of the millennia, and the creation of new histories in the Roman West
• Explores how ancient geography, local histories and the stories of wandering heroes were woven together by Greek scholars and local experts
• Offers a fresh perspective by examining passages from ancient writers in a new light

Chapter 1

Telling Tales on the Middle Ground

Pliny on Safari

What did Romans know of their western subjects, and how did they claim to know it? Pliny the Elder, in the short account of Africa that makes up the first thirty chapters of Book 5 of his Natural History, offers a convenient starting illustration of the texture of ethnographic writing on the Roman West. This is how he begins.

Africa, the Greeks called Libya, and the sea before it the Libyan Sea. Its limit is Egypt and no other part of the world offers fewer harbours, since the coastline extends from the west in a long curve. The names of its peoples and its towns are mostly impossible to pronounce, except by the natives who live almost entirely in fortresses.¹

Africa in the middle of the first century CE is presented as remote, difficult either to penetrate or comprehend, and its knowledge begins with the Greeks. Africa remains as unfamiliar as ever, indeed it is in some ways more ungraspable and fabulous for Pliny than for some of his predecessors.² I shall return to the apparently irreducible alterité of the West in chapter 4. Yet despite these apparent obstacles to comprehension, Pliny has in fact quite a lot to say. As the book proceeds we are introduced to the two Mauretanias, their legendary foundation by the giant Antaeus and his combat with Hercules deftly interwoven with more recent imperial interventions, Caius' reduction of client kingdoms into provinces, the civic foundations of Claudius and Augustus. When Pliny's account reaches the river Lixus he expands on the gardens of the Hesperides – no golden apples now, just some wild olives and the story of the serpent was perhaps based on a serpent-shaped river channel – and then a sideswipe at Cornelius Nepos for believing all the Greek lies about the region. Details of Roman colonies lead Pliny to the desert, herds of elephants and ‘the great mountain of Africa also known as the most fabulous Atlas’.³ The rugged west-facing crags, the wooded eastern approaches, its abundant springs and fruit and its eery daytime silence that at dusk is replaced by the sounds of dancing Pans and satyrs is indeed most fabulous. Pliny is less critical here than he was of Nepos: ‘These things famous authors have reported, alongside the deeds performed there by Hercules and Perseus. An immense and unexplored territory separates it from us.’⁴

From the Atlas, Pliny turns to the coast (ch. 8), citing the commentaries of Hanno the Carthaginian, followed by most Greek and Latin authors, and then going on to the explorations conducted by Polybios in a fleet provided by Scipio Aemilianus. I shall return to this expedition, and others like it, in chapter 3. A long coastal periplus follows,⁵ punctuated with comments on the animals found in each region. Pliny then turns to the first Roman military expedition into Mauretania during the reign of Claudius, an expedition that did reach the Atlas. Not only did senatorial generals campaign there, but Roman knights now govern the territory.

There are, as I have said, five colonies in this province and it might seem therefore an area on which it would be easy to gain reliable information. But this – and much else – turns out upon examination to be completely false. For those of high status who cannot be bothered to hunt out the truth, do not wish to seem ignorant and so tell lies. Nothing is so misleading as when an author of repute endorses a false statement.⁶

Pliny again has bad witnesses in his sights, senators corrupted by luxury this time, and corrects them on the basis of local testimony. Then follows (ch. 14) a summary of the report of Suetonius Paulinus, first to cross the Atlas at the head of an army, detailing the unfamiliar flora of the region, the barren desert beyond it, more elephants and a barbarian tribe, the Canari, who eat raw flesh like dogs. Next King Juba, ‘more famous for his research than for his rule’, is cited, again on the peoples and plants of the Atlas. Then (ch. 17) Pliny passes on to the tribes of Mauretania Tingitana, in which the location of various rivers and mountains is interspersed with historical references, some to the period of the Jugurthine War, others to Augustan and later foundations. The accounts of Numidia and Zeugitana are very similar, and Pliny seems a little bored. The land had no interest except as a source of Numidian marble and wild beasts.⁷ Both commodities were, of course, of vital interest to the generation that watched the Colosseum rise in the park of what had once been Nero's palace.

Once again, a few places are picked out for their historical interest. Utica is famous for the death of Cato, the colony of Great Carthage lies on the ruins of the Punic city, the boundary of Africa Nova and Africa Vetera is a ditch marking the limit agreed between Scipio Africanus and the kings. The Greater and Lesser Syrtes are described (ch. 26): Pliny provides their dimensions, a desert full of snakes, a forest filled with wild beasts and (inevitably) yet more elephants, then the Garamantes and other peoples of the interior. The place the Lotus Eaters once inhabited and the altars of the Philaeni and the swamp of Tritonis, named by Kallimachos the lake of Pallas Athena, add a slightly mythic air to this last wilderness before the province of Cyrenaica. Chapter 29 summarizes the 516 peoples of Africa, listing Roman colonies, Latin and tributary cities and tribes.

I have summarized Pliny's African ethnography at some length to give a flavour of the sort of things included in accounts of this kind, and in particular to illustrate the very wide range of data he sees suitable for inclusion. Legends of Hercules, Antaeus and Perseus and information about the locations of the Hesperides and the Lotophagoi rub shoulders with turgid administrative detail and detailed itineraries, and with accounts of expeditions, military and otherwise, conducted over a period of half a millennium. How (and how far) ancient writers reconciled mythological knowledge with more scientific accounts will be the subject of chapter 2. But for the moment I want to flag the incommensurability of the data that Pliny gathers.

There is, to be sure, a conventional answer to this sort of disparity when it arises in Pliny's Natural History or other compendious encyclopaedic works such as Diodoros' Library. This is to claim that the author is a ‘mere’ compiler, uncritically following his sources, and not particularly interested in the consistency or plausibility of the materials he had gathered. The Natural History is particularly liable to such charges since Pliny's own practice of citation makes it rather easier than usual to engage in Quellenforschung, the search for the origins of individual data. Pliny constantly represents his great work as a summation of the efforts of countless earlier researchers.⁸ Within this portion, the text refers to Nepos, Hanno (at second hand), Polybios, Agrippa, Suetonius Paulinus, Juba and Kallimachos. Pliny certainly also used Pomponius Mela's shorter account of the same area.⁹ The final chapter has been shown to derive from an administrative document that may be dated with some certainty to the mid-40s BCE.¹⁰ There are numerous references too to what ‘the Greeks’ say. The list Pliny provides in Book 1 of the auctores consulted for Book 5 as a whole includes fourteen Latin authorities, the fasti triumphales and forty-five foreigners, mostly Greeks or writing in Greek. Which were useful for Africa we can only guess – Varro? Poseidonios? Diodoros? Timaios? Many are just names. There are, however, a few surprising omissions. Pliny does not name either Sallust or Strabo.¹¹ This is a sobering reminder of how incomplete were even the most compendious of ancient synoptic works.

Yet the notion of the Natural History as an ill-disciplined and indiscriminate jumble of facts does not convince. Indeed it flies in the face of the most recent readings of that work.¹² Quite apart from the detailed opening exposition of the structure of the work as a whole and the itemized list of sources, and the conventional organization of his geographical section as a tour (periplus) of the known world, the Natural History as a whole is unified by consistent preoccupations with the nature of the cosmos and the place of man and human history – including that of the Roman empire – within it.¹³ The image of Pliny as an indiscriminate, eccentric and obsessive collector of ‘facts’ derives ultimately from his nephew's epistolary memoirs of him, not from the Natural History itself, and these letters had their own agenda.¹⁴

Besides, Pliny was not unusual in combining materials we would regard as incompatible. Myth and science already rub shoulders in Herodotos and the Hippokratic corpus.¹⁵ Nor, as some of the passages I have quoted show, does he present himself as an uncritical compiler. Quite the reverse. Falsehoods and credulity are clearly marked as flaws, and there is an attempt to adjudicate between rival accounts. Autopsy is praised, and his auctores are often treated as authorities. The painstaking inclusion of precise distances and lists of civic statuses asserts an aspiration to accuracy. The range of his ethnography cannot be understood simply as a sign of his imperfections as either compiler or critic.

Pliny's ethnography is carefully devised. Notice for example the subordination of history to geography.¹⁶ One effect of his choosing an organizational schema adopted from periplus narratives (and not all Pliny's authorities made a similar choice, so his decision to organize his account in this way was a conscious one) was to minimize a sense of change. The ethnographic structure of the world, it insinuates, derives from its overall shape, not from the contingent chance of the moment at which Pliny surveyed it. Pliny has not exactly created an ethnographic present in the modern sense of the term. There is a clear differentiation between a mythological stratum (Hercules and Antaeus), a period from which odd anecdotes may be recalled (Scipio's camp, the death of Cato) and the most recent period characterized by Roman expeditions and interventions, mostly in fact those of Pliny's own lifetime. Perhaps surprisingly there is only a handful of references to republican campaigns, and none at all to Punic Africa before Scipio's sack of Carthage. This too is a deliberate choice, since a great deal of information would have been available on both subjects. Mela's account – which Pliny knew – is quite different in this respect.¹⁷ The issue of the suppression of time in ancient ethnographic writing will recur in chapter 4. Pliny's ethnography is not, then, the sum total of what he knew. It is a selection from a larger body of writing and, we must presume, from an even greater body of knowledge. All this makes the nature of that selection all the more important to understand.

Pliny's account of Africa has offered a convenient starting point for this investigation in several ways. Most important, it illustrates nearly the entire range of materials employed by those who composed passages of what I shall be terming ethnographic writing: Greek myth and Roman military history, accounts of marvels, records of military expeditions and voyages of exploration, administrative documents, and the observations and theorizing of natural philosophers. As my own compilation of stories draws in more examples, they will add speculations based on oceanography and astronomy, medicine, sociology and anthropology; eye-witness accounts of peoples, places and monuments; and the results of the interrogation of priests and other locals.

Pliny's Africa also exemplifies a problem that will recur as I mine Diodoros, Strabo and others for tales about the barbarian inhabitants of Rome's Wild West. Although literary works that were primarily ethnographic and geographic in nature clearly once existed, almost all have been lost. In practice, what we mostly have to deal with are ‘compilatory’ works, like the Natural History. Some were organized as universal histories, some as geographies or as periplus, others as miscellanies. Pliny's magnum opus is not the only one of these to have suffered a poor reputation until recently among scholars. Compilation has often been seen as a secondary activity, and compilers have sometimes been regarded as secondary intellects. Those prejudices derive partly from the habit of rating ancient works on stylistic and rhetorical grounds, partly from modern views of the primacy of original research, and partly from the problems of credibility posed by works of this kind. At best their procedures of selection, paraphrase and compression stand in the way of our access to original observations and formulations. Hence the search to identify and evaluate the lost sources used by those compilers, like Diodoros, who are less explicit than Pliny about the origins of their information, and to reconstruct their methods of compilation. All this is legitimate even if – like the eccentric travesty of Pliny as a scholar presented by his nephew – all we are after is a list of trustworthy facts.

Yet these compendia, like the universal histories to which they are related, responded to a particular set of desires in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods. However odd it seems to us, there evidently was a need felt to link the myths of Hercules and Antaeus to Paulinus' account of his conquest of the Atlas. Works like Pliny's Natural History which fashioned a vast whole out of so many parts, were one way to satisfy this desire. Diodoros and Pliny also explicitly claim that their huge works would save the reader the trouble of consulting so many separate sources themselves.¹⁸ The modern encyclopaedia offers one image of what they tried to achieve: Diodoros preferred the image of a library. The desire to connect up the disparate parts of knowledge, and a sense of the overwhelming quantity of books already written, were both characteristic of the late republic and early empire. This was the intellectual world by which the barbarian West was encompassed. It is not necessarily a disadvantage for us to observe it through these great contemporary effort of synthesis.

Ethnography, Ancient and Modern

It is time, perhaps, to define terms. Ethnography in conventional usage – by which I mean not that of classicists – describes both a practice and a genre. The term was first coined in the early nineteenth century, and is now inextricably associated with a profession, a discipline and a genre of exposition. For some practitioners at least, ethnography connotes above all an exercise in recording: the recording in words, pictures, audio- and videotapes and other media, of the distinctive customs, artefacts and bodies of alien peoples.¹⁹ At least some ethnography was envisaged as an exercise in recording primitive ways of life that were believed to be vanishing, and as a result tended to edit out obvious recent intrusions and rely on the testimony of those informants who remembered earlier days. As a mode of collecting, one that purported to be dispassionate and scientific, it had much in common with the taxonomic fiel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Translations Used
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Telling Tales on the Middle Ground
• Chapter 2: Explaining the Barbarians
• Chapter 3: Ethnography and Empire
• Chapter 4: Enduring Fictions?
• Notes
• References
• General Index
• Index of Main Passages Discussed