Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World

Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity

Ralph W. Mathisen, Danuta Shanzer, Ralph W. Mathisen, Danuta Shanzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317061687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

One of the most significant transformations of the Roman world in Late Antiquity was the integration of barbarian peoples into the social, cultural, religious, and political milieu of the Mediterranean world. The nature of these transformations was considered at the sixth biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 2005, and this volume presents an updated selection of the papers given on that occasion, complemented with a few others,. These 25 studies do much to break down old stereotypes about the cultural and social segregation of Roman and barbarian populations, and demonstrate that, contrary to the past orthodoxy, Romans and barbarians interacted in a multitude of ways, and it was not just barbarians who experienced "ethnogenesis" or cultural assimilation. The same Romans who disparaged barbarian behavior also adopted aspects of it in their everyday lives, providing graphic examples of the ambiguity and negotiation that characterized the integration of Romans and barbarians, a process that altered the concepts of identity of both populations. The resultant late antique polyethnic cultural world, with cultural frontiers between Romans and barbarians that became increasingly permeable in both directions, does much to help explain how the barbarian settlement of the west was accomplished with much less disruption than there might have been, and how barbarian populations were integrated seamlessly into the old Roman world.

PART I
Constructing Images of the Impact and Identity of BarbariansA. Literary Constructions of Barbarian Identity

Chapter 1
Catalogues of Barbarians in Late Antiquity1

Ralph W. Mathisen

The human desire to create tangible lists of stuff is at least as old as the Babylonian king lists, the Turin papyrus, the Egyptian Nile records, and the Homeric catalogue of ships. Some lists, of course, were of a practical nature: the Roman consular fasti gave a chronological framework to the Roman state. Others served a less practical, but nonetheless important, purpose. Of particular interest to Greek and Roman writers were lists of exotic places and the peoples associated with them. This study proposes to look at the creation of catalogues of barbarian peoples during the Roman and, in particular, the late Roman periods, and consider what they can tell us about interests, ideologies, and mentalities.2

The Cataloguing Tradition

Many aspects of the nature of barbarian alterity, and the place of barbarian otherness in Roman intellectual, political, and ecclesiastical ideologies, have been well studied in the past.3 But an aspect of Roman perceptions of barbarians that hitherto has been little noticed or understood, and can help us to nuance even further the conceptual positions of barbarians in the Roman world, is what one might dub the “cataloguing tradition.” This related to the way that Romans conceptualized groups of barbarians not for their specific traits but for their collective appearances with other groups of barbarians.

In the cataloguing model, barbarians lacked most or all of the identifying characteristics that were de rigueur in other models; indeed, they had little or no individual identity at all. In the most extreme manifestation of this model, catalogued barbarian peoples did not even have names, but were merely totaled up for each region of the world under consideration. For example, the geographical survey at the beginning of Orosius’ History against the Pagans enumerates 44 gentes inhabiting India, 32 between the Indus and the Tigris, 18 from the Tigris to the Euphrates, 12 between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean Sea, 24 in Upper Egypt, and 53 in northern Europe.4

More commonly, barbarian peoples were catalogued as lists of exotic names, the longer the better. These lists are as early as classical literature. Homer, for example, along with his catalogue of Greek ships also included a list of the Trojans and their allies, each accompanied by a brief identifying characteristic.5 But the early Greek interest in exotic peoples and places is best represented by Herodotus, whose history of the Persian wars is replete with ethnographic catalogues listing, for example, the Scythians, Tauri, Agathyrsi, Neuri, Androphagi, Geloni, Budini, and Sarmatians.6 In the earlier Greek lists, outlandish peoples were simply “out there,” a natural, necessary, and even defining corollary of the civilized world, and a manifestation of the polarity between Hellenes and barbarians, between civilization and barbarism, and between “here” and “there.”7 In the Greek mind, these non-Greeks were uniformly classified as “barbarians,” although the chauvinistic sense of superiority that the civilized Greeks felt toward their barbarian neighbors did not at all detract from their interest in them.

The tradition of creating catalogues of barbarians continued in the Roman and late Roman periods. Late antique catalogues include “simple lists,” in which names are cited without any intervening commentary, and “descriptive lists,” in which each entry is combined with a brief description.8 In addition, the creators of lists of peoples also sometimes created hierarchical taxonomies, in which some peoples were subsumed as sub-groups of others. It will be suggested here that the late Romans, perhaps because of their much more intimate interactions with and greater sympathy for barbarian peoples, also used catalogues of barbarians as a means of integrating barbarian peoples into the Roman conceptual world.

Simple Lists

Roman encyclopediasts continued the Greek tradition of creating simple catalogues of barbarian peoples. Circa 40 CE, Pomponius Mela, in his Description of the World, offered laundry lists of the peoples who inhabited different parts of the world. In Asia, for example, lived “Medi, Armenii, Commageni, Murrani, Veneti, Cappadoces, Gallograeci, Lycaones, Phryges, Pisidae, Isauri, Lydi, Syrocilices.”9 And at the end of the first century CE, in the full glory of Roman cultural and military supremacy, Tacitus catalogued in his Germania the peoples who lived beyond the northern pale of Roman authority.10 Barbarians were organized using the Aristotelian practice of inventorying different traits, listing singularities, placing them in order, and organizing in subcategories within gentes. Just as Caesar had listed the Condrusi, Eburones, Caerosi, and Paemani as being subsumed under the single category of Germani,11 Tacitus opined, regarding the Suebi, “they are not a single people … they are divided among nations and names, although they are commonly called Suebi.”12 In none of these catalogues was there any sense of threat or hazard, merely a genteel curiosity about the strange people who lived “out there,” and a chauvinistic sense of how the outlandish names and customs of barbarian peoples provided a striking contrast to Roman values, and of how much better “we” are than they.

In contrast to Greek ethnography, however, Roman lists almost always concerned peoples who actually existed (or were reasonably thought to): there were few of the monstrous races that regularly crop up in Greek ethnographers. Thus, Tacitus, when he finished his discussion of the Suebi, commented, “But other accounts are fabulous, such as that the Hellusi and Oxionae have the faces and visages of humans but the bodies and limbs of wild beasts. I leave this hanging because it is unconfirmed.”13

Citing simple lists of barbarians could serve several purposes. For example, barbarians were the stuff of humor. The poet Martial, for example, rattled off a list of barbarians—Parthians, Dacians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Egyptians, Indians, Jews, Sarmatians, and Alans—with whom the prostitute Caelia had slept, and wondered why she avoided Romans.14 And on another level, the listing of names may reflect an old commonplace of folk magic: to know something’s name is to be able to control it.15 And to know all its names would be to control it absolutely, as seen in spells that attempt to list all the known epithets of a particular deity.16 When it came to barbarians, the Roman writers certainly knew their names.

Cataloguing defeated barbarians became more and more a standard aspect of Roman imperial ideology. On a trophy in the Pyrenees, for example, Pompey the Great listed 876 towns that he had reduced,17 and in 6 BCE Augustus, on a trophy at La Turbie in the Alps, listed forty-eight Alpine peoples defeated by his generals,18 as quoted in full by Pliny the Elder:

The Senate and the Roman People to the imperator Augustus Caesar, son of the divine one, chief pontiff, imperator for the fourth time, tribune for the seventh time. In that under his leadership and authority all the Alpine peoples that spread from the upper sea [the Adriatic] to the lower sea [the Mediterranean] have been brought under the authority of the Roman people. The defeated Alpine peoples are the Trumpilini, Camunni, Venostes, Vennonetes, Isarci, Breuni, Genaunes, Focunates, four nations of Vindelici, Cosuanetes, Rucinates, Licates, Catenates, Ambisontes, Rugusci, Suanetes, Calucones, Brixentes, Liponti, Uberi, Nantuates, Seduni, Varagri, Salassi, Acitavones, Medulli, Ucenni, Caturiges, Brigiani, Sogionti, Brodionti, Nemaloni, Edenates, Vesubiani, Veamini, Gallitae, Triullati, Ecdini, Vergunni, Eguituri, Nemeturi, Oratelli, Nerusi, Velauni, Suetri.19

But later in imperial times there was a subtle paradigm shift. Conquered barbarians became more than merely names in a list, and the presence of barbarian peoples became even more closely connected with imperial policies. When the Roman state laid claim to the entire orbis terrarum, or oikumēnē, barbarians became an integral part of the Roman conception of their world. They were not just “out there,” not just part of the landscape, but were intimately interrelated to the empire in a co-dependent sort of relationship.20 Martial, for example, wrote to the emperor Domitian, “What people is so distant or so barbarous, Caesar, that it does not have a representative in your city? … Different languages of peoples are heard, but nevertheless all is one, because you are said to be the true father of the country.”21 And Florus, the second-century epitomator of Livy, summarized well the Roman imperial attitude toward world rule that had obtained ever since the reign of Augustus:

With all of the nations pacified toward the west and the south, and also to the north, at least between the Rhine and the Danube, and likewise in the east between the Kura22 and the Euphrates, those remaining peoples, who were free of our rule, nevertheless sensed our greatness, and esteemed the Roman people as the victor over the nations. For the Scythians sent ambassadors, as did the Sarmatians, seeking peace, and the Chinese, and the Indians living under the same sun … The Parthians, too.23

In subsequent Roman ideology, other barbarian peoples, too, were incorporated under the umbrella of Roman world rule.

An early fourth-century list of 53 peoples...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: CONSTRUCTING IMAGES OF THE IMPACT AND IDENTITY OF BARBARIANS
• PART II: CULTURAL INTERACTION ON THE ROMAN/BARBARIAN FRONTIERS
• PART III: CREATING IDENTITY IN THE POST-ROMAN WORLD
• PART IV: EPILOGUE: MODERN CONSTRUCTIONS OF BARBARIAN IDENTITY
• Index