Colonialism, Colonization: Roman Perspectives

Forthcoming in Daniel L. Selden and Phiroze Vasunia, eds., The Oxford Handbook of
Literatures of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
2015/16. Please cite according to the pagination in the published volume. Anyone
seeking a copy of the published text may contact the author.

Clifford Ando
clifford.ando@uchicago.edu

ABSTRACT: This chapter explores the practicalities of empire and colonialism as these
affected the conditions of cultural production under Roman rule and adumbrates contours
of inquiry within several such domains. It commences with general remarks on the fit
between ancient empire as a political form and the regular features of early modern and
modern experience that gave rise to contemporary postcolonial theory. Subsequent
sections explore the metropolitan desire for knowledge pursuant to governance; the
responses that this desire generated in colonial contexts, in both conduct and selfunderstanding; and the lingering power of imperial knowledge in ancient and modern
scholarship. The essay closes by inquiring into nature of elite cultural production under

2
Rome, asking how imperial were the empire's elites and how metropolitan were their
tastes.

KEYWORDS: Colonialism, imperialism, postcolonial theory, empire

Introduction

The ancient Mediterranean was a landscape of empires. Translocal and transregional

political formations regularly came into being and passed away, the passing of one often
occurring in contest with another such entity. Indeed, the regularity of this phenomenon
gave rise to a potent myth, according to which the mantle of imperial rule qua world
domination was a singularity that passed from race to race, the races in question varying
from telling to telling and context to context. Like hegemony itself, the myth too was
passed down and proved vital across a stunning range of literary and linguistic systems
(compare, e.g., Daniel 2:31-45, 7:1-14 with Velleius Paterculus 1.6.6 = Aemilius Sura fr.
1 FRHist; in secondary literature see Fuchs 1938: 62-73; Swain 1940; and Momigliano
1986: 31-57).
The literatures of the Roman empire were thus universally conditioned by the
experience of empire. Indeed, one might go further. All the great literatures of the
ancient Mediterranean now available to us in meaningful remainsEgyptian, Jewish,
Greek and Roman, and, indeed, those of the Fertile Crescentwere produced by peoples

3
who employed and approved the use of state violence to dominate and exploit other
races, even as they universally enslaved both those they deemed other as well as those
they deemed kin. The myth of succession to empire thus gestures to a fundamental
feature of ancient society, to wit, the imminent potentiality of domination for all persons,
as agent or object, if not in present time, then in the past and future of historical
imagination.
It is the object of this chapter to explore the practicalities of empire and
colonialism as these affected the conditions of cultural production under Roman rule, and
also to adumbrate contours of inquiry within several such domains. I commence with
some general remarks on the fit between ancient empire as a political form and the
regular features of early modern and modern experience that gave rise to contemporary
postcolonial theory. Subsequent sections explore the dialectic between a metropolitan
desire for knowledge pursuant to governance and the technologies and taxonomies
devised to realize that desire, on the one hand, and the languages deployed in colonial
contexts in response to the metropole. The essay closes by inquiring into nature of elite
cultural production under Rome, asking how imperial were the empire's elites and how
metropolitan were their tastes.
This chapter thus positions colonialism as establishing the material, demographic
and epistemic conditions of cultural production under Roman rule. Its concerns might
therefore be taken as prior to the more explicitly literary engagements of other chapters in
this volume. I would resist, however, any attempt to exclude, by dint of genre or medium
of publication, the texts discussed in this chapter from some corpus of the literary. As
this volume seeks to restore to view the multiplicity of literatures that flourished under

4
Roman rule, so we must beware any act that (re)imposes canons of taste upon the
diversity of ancient literary production.

Ancient empire, modern theory

Imperial states exist on many scales and exhibit many forms. They achieve a certain kind
of historical, political and theoretical salience when the parties involved each understand
some essential distinction to divide them, whether a difference of race, language, culture,
or what have you; and further reify that distinction such that one group, deriving from the
imperial center, rules over some dominated other(s). One might invoke here the
distinction drawn by Geoffrey Hosking between states that have, and states that are,
empires: states that have empires often claim to respect some notional equality before the
law of all persons holding metropolitan citizenship, such that those belonging to the
center are equal amongst themselves in contradistinction to those over whom they
collectively rule. In states that are empires, there exists a single or unified logic of social
differentiation that extends uniformly through the population and establishes
metropolitans and others in mutual relation to some suzerain in a single hierarchical
scheme (Hosking 1995). In ancient states that had empires, among the varied practices
by which domination was sustained was the situating or implantation of officials from the
metropolitan center in the landscape, and among the peoples, over which they ruled.
These acts of governance might be realized through many different institutional
arrangements, from autonomous and notionally autarchic city-states founded by the

5
imperial power within conquered territories, to outposts of soldiery situated within or
without conquered polities, to harmosts inserted into existing communities and civic
structures.
Official agents of the metropole might themselves be accompanied by unofficial
others, whether family members or businessmen, bankers or slaves. The spread of
imperial power was sometimes preceded by, and often promoted, the further diffusion of
a metropolitan diaspora, of individuals seeking profit or adventure in the wider world,
under the sheltering advantage of imperial citizenship. Indeed, the footprint of this
diaspora was undoubtedly nearly always and everywhere greater than that of any ancient
imperial bureaucracy, even that of Rome, whose infrastructural power vastly exceeded
that of any other ancient state. What is more, very often such individuals were
understood by provincial subalterns as exploiting the relations of power that structured
the overall relationship of their polity to Rome and were resented for it, though this was
not always the case (Wilson 1966; van Andringa 1998 and 2003; Purcell 2005; van
Andringa and van Haeperen 2009). Of course, human mobility is something of an
historical universal, but it has a particular cast in contexts of empire.
For classicists, the terms "metropole" and "metropolitan" have a special valence
and draw attention to two related problems in the study of colonialism in the ancient
world. First, they are not in classical antiquity general terms of art applicable to all
colonialist enterprises. Rather, they express something distinctive about the relationship
of city of origin to colonial foundation in the first instance within Greek culture. There,
colonies were generally conceived as autonomous political entities, and the relationship
of colony to its originating polity was therefore better figured in affective rather than

6
juridical terms. (As a corollary, those relations might also be figured in terms of
disaffection.) Roman colonies, by contrast, were construed as constituent parts of a
unitary political community centered in Rome. Their relationship to the center was
juridical, and their inhabitants retained and likely felt their Roman citizenship as primary.
In consequence, the affective terminology common in Greek, which expressed a
relationship of descent but also ontological distinction between colony and mother city, is
largely absent in Latin: the term metropolis, for example, first enters Latin through
transliteration, on inscriptions of the Severan period in Asia Minor (TLL s.v.; cf. Ando
1999, 22). Such considerations caution us to reflect carefully on the particularist nature
of colonial enterprises (as well as the imperial quality of archaic Greece colonization),
nor is this the only issue on which comparison between Rome and Greece can enlighten
such inquiry.
As with metropole and metropolitan, so colony and its derivatives have meanings
in contemporary empire and postcolonial studies strongly discrepant from those they
carry in classical studies, where unsurprisingly a certain etymological purity in respect to
terms of art in Greek and Latin has long obtained. Some reflection on distinctions
between ancient and modern colonialism is thus in order before theoretical and
interpretive apparatus developed in response to modern contexts of empire and
decolonization are imported to the ancient Mediterranean.
The dynamics to which theories of modern European empire and the cultural and
social dynamics of its successor states respond are, of course, quite well known (for
surveys see Gandhi 1998; Young 2003). A description designed to draw out distinctions
with ancient empires more generally, and Rome more particularly, might nevertheless be

7
useful. In early modern Europe, which is to say, among the imperial states of Europe in
the ages of Enlightenment and liberalism, relative peace within a network of recognized
peers was purchased through the systematic conquest, dehumanization and exploitation
of peoples deemed incapable of self-governance or insufficiently respectful of the norms
of the law of nations (Pitts 2012, citing much earlier bibliography; on the nature and
limits of liberal dissent see Muthu 2003). The result was an irresolvable tension between
a project that both required and sustained ideological and institutional practices of
structural differentiation between conquerors and conquered, on the one hand, and the
justificatory claims generated by European self-regard, according to which the project of
empire was precisely to enable non-European subalterns to enter the network of civilized
peoples and so self-emancipate. As a further matter, the interplay of nationalism and
racialism in the birth of modern states has made ideologies of cultural autonomy a potent
force in contemporary postcolonial politics (and theory); but its very potency and
apparent universality in contemporary life has induced some to take it for an historical
universal, too.
The context and practices of Roman imperialism may be distinguished from this
paradigm on a number of grounds of importance to this chapter. There is first the
universality of the experiences of ruling and being ruled in turn. In consequence, one
witnesses in every major literature of the ancient Mediterranean patterns of triumph and
despondency in success or failure, but also massive acceptance of empire as the
normative form of regional rule. Indeed, until the modern era, empire was by an
extraordinary margin the regular form of supra-local political formation the world over.

8
Second, broad technological, ecological and demographic factors constrained the
ability of imperial states to penetrate local societies, and practices and ideologies of
governance developed accordingly. Most notably, by and large ancient empires governed
through the cultivation and management of difference, and employed, selected and
sustained local elites to govern on their behalf (Ando 2010: 17-21; idem 2012a; idem,
forthcoming a; see also Doyle 1986: 130; Maier 2006: 5-7, 29-36). In consequence, far
from striving for the uniform penetration of metropolitan culture throughout the
territories and populations over which they ruled, ancient empires generally sought to
rive subject populations one from another and encouraged each to have exclusively
bilateral relations with the metropole. Sustaining and betimes celebrating local cultures
as normative within some territory encouraged this pattern of distinction (for an
exemplary study of Persia in this regard, see Lincoln 2012, 107-186). Another
ideological expression of this basic pattern in governance, itself deriving from material
constraints on infrastructural power, is the absence in Greek and Latin of any unitary
conception of state sovereignty (Ando 2011b, 64-80). On the contrary, Greek and Latin
distinguished carefully between the use of one's own laws in the domestic sphere and
freedom of action in foreign affairs precisely because few imperial states even attempted
systematic interference in local affairs. The normative vocabulary of state sovereignty
thus bracketed matters truly of interest to imperial hegemony, to wit, military and foreign
affairs beyond the boundaries of domestic jurisdiction, from those regularly ceded to
subaltern self-governance. In consequence, a primary index of moral evaluation was not
whether one's state was independent so much as the question, whether one lived under a
good or bad empire or, perhaps, a good or bad emperor.

9
In consequence of these considerations, it must remain an open question whether
a series of standard assumptions regarding the practice of imperial power and its effects
in European and post-European modernity are apposite to ancient experience. These
include most importantly the massive delegitimation effected by European empire upon
local systems of norms, whether social or cultural, and, as a related matter, the systemic
alienation of colonized peoples from self and society that regularly followed upon such
delegitimation. In saying this, I do not intend to discount the effect that European
colonialism had on the priorities of classical scholarship in the 19th and early 20th
centuries in particular (on which see, e.g., Vasunia 2013), but the problem of disjuncture
between modern decolonization and ancient experience abides nevertheless.
What should not be in doubt are the effects of matrices of power relations on
knowledge production at every level: knowledge of the colonized among the Romans, of
course, but also more generally of oneself and one's culture among both ruler and ruled.
It was among the great achievements of Edward Sad to demonstrate how the project of
sustaining peace within some network of European states was aided by the attribution to
it of a shared and unitary stable and historic nature, whose articulation in metropolitan
literatures was concretized by drawing structural distinctions between that image of
Europeanness and the cultures of its colonial subjects (Sad 1979; see also Chakrabarty
2007). The exhortation of both Sad and Dipesh Chakrabarty to investigate the
structuring of knowledge in both colony and metropole, of each and their constitutive
other, and likewise the focus of both scholars on the importance of colonialism to the
conditions of knowledge production, offer essential lessons to classical studies.

10
Discourse at the center: (Not) knowing the other

The astonishing appetite of Roman government for information about its subjects was a
major theme of provincial literatures. Consider for example the following reflection in
the Babylonian Talmud:

The sages said in the name of Rav: If all the seas were ink, all reeds were pens,
all skies parchment, and all men scribes, they would be unable to set down the full
scope of the Roman government's concerns. And the proof? The verse, said R.
Mesharsheya, "Like the heaven for height, and the earth for depth, so is the heart
of kings unfathomable" (Prov. 25:3). (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 11a,
excerpted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah 5.5.93, translated by William G. Braude)

The Roman passion for inventory brackets the Jewish experience of Roman rule. A half
millennium before the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, we are told, "a decree went
out from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be registered" (Luke 2:1). That
registration involved more than reeds, parchment and pens. As Luke understood, it was
an act of inventory that both moved persons across the landscape and fixed their identities
in relation to the empire, each other, and the land. What is more, in bringing Mary and
Joseph to the city where they held domicilium, or residence, the Augustan registration of
Judaea and Galilee brought about the fulfillment of a prophecy, and so the Lucan census,
Augustus and Rome itself came to occupy a particular and essential place in Christian
providentialist historiography.

11
The rationality and punctiliousness of Roman government penetrated the
consciousness of the rabbis at a different level. That it did so at all, in a culture so
implicated in the skills of literacy, itself merits notice. But by the time of the
conversation recorded in the Talmud, the actions of Roman government had become so
naturalized, the sages' identification with its processes and aims so complete, that
reflecting on them caused the Rabbis to think of their own scriptures. For the contextual
power of the verse quoted by Rabbi Mesharsheya will have depended in part on his and
his interlocutors' assenting to the verse that precedes it: "It is the glory of God to conceal
the rationale for things, and the glory of kings to honor the things themselves." The
associative network behind the conversation of the sages thus sets Jewish God and
Roman emperor, world-empire and world-embracing knowledge, in mutual relation. In
making of the Roman emperor a Solomonic king, the rabbis constructed themselves as
Roman subjects.
I will turn in a moment to the very important questions of what kinds of things the
Romans wished to know about the objects of their rule, as well as what the effects were
of bringing this knowledge into being in conditions that endowed it with social power.
The success of Roman government on many levels rested upon the efficacy of its data
collection, including the census, and therefore upon its knowing the discrete persons and
contexts over which it ruled in their particularity. Indeed, the long-term survival of
Roman power rested to a very large degree on the social effects of this interpellation of
peoples and individuals by the actions of government (Ando 2000).
For the moment, however, let me focus on a different aspect of imperial
discourse, namely, its tendency to operate through polarities of self and other. Roman

12
laws on jurisdiction, for example, routinely differentiated areas where Roman legal
actions might be validly employed (most fundamentally, in Roman courts at Rome), and
all other areas. For example, it is very nearly the phrase "who there" by itself that enables
scholars to restore the law on a bronze tablet discovered at Veleia as a jurisdictional
clause, written at Rome about some non-Roman context. Those words signal the issuing
of an instruction to a local magistrate, namely, "he who holds jurisdiction there (is quei
ibei [ius deicet ---]" (Roman Statutes no. 29, l. 5). In such texts, it is tempting to see the
enormous variety of the non-Roman world erased in a juridical lens that distinguished
only citizen from alien, not aliens from each other.
The actual practice of government, however, subverted this tendency to
distinguish radically between Romans and others in a number of ways. On the one hand,
maintaining social order required the administration of justice according to predictable
norms, and in many contexts Roman magistrates simply did not know local law. Eliding
for the sake of efficiency very complicated practical and theoretical issues about
knowledge of law in provincial contexts, let me point out that Roman authors, jurists and
legislators regularly imagined the overcoming of this difficulty in knowing local norms
through the use of legal fictions, in which colonized aliens were re-imagined as Romans
(see, e.g., Velleius 2.118.1; Ando 2011a; idem 2015c). In the municipal charter written
at Rome under the Flavians for use in Spanish municipalities, for example, a clause on
civil procedure runs as follows:

13
Rubric. According to what law notice for the third day may be served, the
day may be postponed or have been postponed, a matter may be judged, a
case may be at the peril of the iudex, a matter may cease to be under trial:

... if judgment has not taken place within the time laid down in Chapter 12
of the lex Iulia that was recently passed concerning iudicia privata and in
the decrees of the senate that relate to that chapter of the statute, so that the
matter be no longer under trial; the statute and law and pleading is to be as
it would be if (siremps lex ius causaque esto adque uti esset si) a praetor
of the Roman people had ordered the matter to be judged in the city of
Rome between Roman citizens... (Lex Flavia municipalis chapter 91 =
Gonzlez 1986, 179 [Latin], 198 [English])

The Julian law to which this text refers was a reactionary statute passed by the emperor
Augustus, which restricted the use of Roman legal forms to the city of Rome and the first
milestone beyond it, and likewise required that, even at Rome, Roman legal forms be
employed only in disputes the parties to which were all Roman citizens (Gaius Institutes
4.103-105). At a formal level, the Flavian municipal law makes no revision in the
Augustan statute. Indeed, it genuflects before its principles: Roman justice is best
administered by a Roman praetor, judging a case between Roman citizens in the city of
Rome. But one might also say that the Flavian municipal law preserves the distinction
between Rome and elsewhere only to upend it, by means of a fiction that operates on two
levels, geographic and social. For it dissolves both distance in space and distinctions in

14
the legal status of persons: disputes between potentially alien citizens of the municipality
are to be resolved "as if a praetor of the Roman people had ordered the matter to be
judged in the city of Rome between Roman citizens." Provinces and provincials are
thereby assimilated to Rome and Romans.
A similar move is made by the second century jurist Gaius in his remarks on the
religious status of provincial land in Roman public law. The passage in Gaius runs as
follows:

That alone is thought to be sacred, which is consecrated on the authority of

the Roman people, either by law or by decree of the Senate. We make
things religious in private actions by bearing our dead to particular sites....
But on provincial soil it is generally agreed that the soil cannot be
religious, since there ownership rests with the Roman people or with
Caesar, while we seem to have only possession or use. Nevertheless, even
if it is not religious, it is treated as though it were (utique tamen, etiamsi
non sit religiosum, pro religioso habetur). Similarly, whatever in the
provinces is not consecrated on authority of the Roman people is properly
not sacred, but it is nevertheless treated pro sacro, as if it were (item quod
in prouinciis non ex auctoritate populi Romani consecratum est, proprie
sacrum non est, tamen pro sacro habetur). (Gaius Institutes 2.5-7a)

As the Flavian municipal law cited the text that it subverted, so here, two principles are
stake, both of which the Romans wished to uphold but which the situation brought into

15
tension: a desire to respect the particularities of their own law, which distinguished
between the status of land in Italy and land elsewhere; and an equally principled desire to
display piety before all forms of the divine. What is more, not only does Gaius cite
precisely that distinction between Italian and provincial soil, he neither challenges nor
revises it. Rather, by means of a fiction, he simply attributes exactly and precisely the
efficacy of ritual action on Italian soil to that conducted on provincial soil. It is tempting
to attribute real political meaning to such assimilations of non-Roman things to Roman
ones, and no doubt this mattered, up to a point. At the same time, they were also acts of
power, which regulated indigenous realities by re-imagining them in Roman garb.
Occasionally, of course, social, material and ecological realities in provincial
landscapes were simply too different, along whatever axis, to be assimilated to Roman
taxonomies, and so threatened to escape the hegemonic grasp of imperial ways of
knowing (Ando 2015b, chapter 2; see also Nicolet 1996, a very different but inspiring
essay). But that would have left those realities essentially ungovernable. The linguistic
and cognitive work undertaken to perform this feat of imagination is most visible in
juristic sources, it being the task of administration specifically, and government more
generally, to know the state. We witness an example of this labor in Ulpian's remarks on
the application of the Roman law of wood to the materials "used in the place of wood"
around the empire:

The term lignum is a general term but one should distinguish between
materia, "timber," which is one thing, and lignum, "firewood," which is
another. Materia is that which is necessary for building and supporting;

16
lignum is that which has been readied for burning. Is wood firewood or
timber, if it has been cut up or not? In his second book Quintus Mucius
says that if the ligna (qua "firewood") on a farm has been left as a legacy,
trees cut up for timber are not owed.... Ofilius in the fifth book of his
Classification of Law wrote: if ligna are left to someone as a legacy, all
ligna belong to him that are not designated by some other name (quae alio
nomine non appellantur), such as twigs, charcoal, and olive pits, which
can be used for nothing other than burning, and also balani and any other
nuts (sed et balani vel si qui alii nuclei)....
In certain regions, for example in Egypt, where reeds are used pro
ligno, in the place of wood, reeds and papyrus are burned, and these, as
well as certain grasses and thorns and briars, are all embraced lignorum
appellatione, under the term "wood." Why the surprise? For they call it
xulon, "wood," and they call the boats xulgas, "wood-hauling" that bring
it apo tn heln, from the marshes. In certain provinces they even use
cow dung for this purpose....
Whole cones from the pine are included ligni appellatione, under
the term "firewood." (Ulpian bk. 25 Ad Sabinum fr. 2679 Lenel = Dig.
32.55 & 50.16.167)

To begin with, Ulpian here performs a series of metonymic operations by which things
not directly implicated in the normative vocabulary of the law are nevertheless brought
under its umbrella: things that are not wood but are used pro ligno, "in the place of

17
wood" (or, perhaps, "as if they were wood") are thus described as being included "under
its name." At the same time, even Ulpian, a native of Beirut, shies before the apparent
violence of calling marsh grasses wood. His text thus brings to the fore the tension
between imperial heterogeneity and metropolitan language that is a structural feature of
all imperial epistemes: observe, inter alia, Ulpian's use of Greek in discussing Egypt, as
though marking the foreignness of the phenomenon under study by asserting that it can
only be explained through recourse to pseudo-native terminologypseudo-native, of
course, because Greek was only the language of Egypt as the result of earlier imperial
action. Consider, too, the means by which papyrus and other reeds are embraced within
the law of lignum: they are emphatically not wood but are used in practice, and treated at
law, pro ligno, as if they were.

Classifying people(s)

Empires (and states) do not sort, label and count goods and matriel alone. On the
contrary: they map the land and classify people and populations. These are among the
most potent forms of state power (Scott 1998). Even acts of naming have profound
effects. "Magna Graecia" and "Ionia," for example, are lexical glosses on an exercise of
colonialist power, and the use of those names, then and now, renders the indigenous
population alien in its own home. In the Roman case, such efforts including the drawing
of boundaries, forced relocation of populations, and the constraining of geographic
aspects of social and economic conduct (Ando 2010; idem 2014; idem forthcoming a).
Within particular localities, Roman agents or their proxies also censused individuals and

18
surveyed the land. On one level, the effect of such actions was to interpellate individual
subjects as objects of governance and subjects of empire, and thus to bring a new and
distinctive form of political subjectivity into being (Ando 2000: 336-362, and elsewhere).
On another, these acts by the superordinate polity forced a recalibration in purely local
conduct and self-understanding (Whitmarsh 2010a). And nearly everywhere in the
ancient Mediterranean, Roman action in these domains existed in historical imbrication
with those of earlier empires (Mitchell 2010 is an excellent example of an historical essay
with due regard for the longue dure of imperialist power).
Consider, for example, the interrelated acts of naming performed by the
populations of the province of Asia in respect of themselves as a collectivity and by
Romans referring to them over the course of the first century BCE. The territory from
which the Roman province of Asia was carved had a long history as a playground of
imperial and colonizing powers, not least Achaemenian and Greek (Mitchell 1999 and
2008 provide useful background about the province specifically; for a more sweeping
narrative see Mitchell 1993). When the Romans created the province of Asia through
selective acceptance of the territory that they received in the testament of Attalus of
Pergamum, they became sovereign over a territory of great linguistic, social and
ecological diversity. That said, awareness of this diversity in all its particularity largely
eludes us, in great measure because of our reliance on archaeological and especially
epigraphic remains deriving from urban contexts. Those are, of course, the evidences
that professional classicists have long esteemed and trained themselves to see. For what
it is worth, epigraphic rather than more purely archaeological material is much more
likely to be susceptible to indexing against some fine-grained chronology of political

19
affairs, and to the extent that chronology and politics were co-dependent domains of
historical inquiry in ancient history, the priorities of epigraphy did in fact serve historical
understanding writ large. But the consequence of this modern focus on the remains of
poliadic life is that we "know" far more about reactions to the "arrival" of Rome in Greek
cities of the coast than in any indigenous community of the interior (Wrrle 2000; Jones
2004).
But it lies in the nature of interaction with a superordinate political entity that the
residents of subordinate administrative units must at times collectively address and be
addressed by it (cf. Whitmarsh 2010b). (The problematic may be so described even with
the caveat that no mechanism existed by which anything but a tiny minority might
approve the speech directed to the center on behalf of the whole, or by which speech
from on high might come to the awareness of all those whom it notionally addressed.)
Such moments may lay bare discrepancies in the classificatory regimes employed by the
varied voices among the colonized and that employed in the metropole. It so happens
that there survives from first century BCE Asia a range of texts, generated both in Asia
and Rome, in which, over time, discrepancies of this kind are both revealed and resolved.
The relevant evidence has been collated and studied three times in recent years
(Drew-Bear 1972; Ferrary 2001; Ando 2010: 31-40). Drew-Bear framed the problem in
editing and commenting on a decree of the league of Asia, written sometime between
Sulla's reorganization of the province in 85/84 B.C.E. (which probably received
confirmation at Rome only in 81) and the further reforms made by Lucullus fourteen
years later. The members of the league refer to themselves in at least four different ways
in the surviving lines of the decree, as "the league of the Greeks," "the Greeks," "the

20
Peoples and Tribes in Asia" (for which understand, "the (Greek) peoples and (non-Greek)
tribes") and "the league of the Greeks in Asia" (Drew-Bear 1972: 444 = Reynolds 1982,
no. 5, ll. 4, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23-24, 24-25, and 28). As Drew-Bear observed, following
Keil, the collocation of "peoples" and "tribes," and the implicit contrast between them,
can be read as embracing but also differentiating Hellenized populations living in cities,
in poleis, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of the less Hellenized interior, who did not
live in recognizably Greek cities, on the other (1972: 448-449). In so writing, Greeks in
Asia obeyed a logic visible elsewhere and indeed encoded in Greek language itself,
according to which only those who dwell in poleis can exhibit individual and collective
forms of conduct distinctive to true/proper (read: Greek) political life (Ando 2012b,
contrasting the attribution of cognate words like politikos, politiks, and
politeu/politeusthai to poliadic contexts with their absence in descriptions of peoples
living kata kmas or kmdon, scattered in villages).
But this is not the only formulation used in documents of the first century BCE.
On the contrary, not only does one find very early documents referring to "the Peoples
and Tribes and those individuals adjudged Friends of the Roman People," but one finds
later documents, generated by particular Greek cities, honoring the Romans as
benefactors of "the Greeks," "the other Greeks," and "the Panhellenes" (Ferrary 2001;
Ando 2010, 38). The first formulation, referring to "Friends of the Roman People,"
clearly betrays Roman influence. But the others do, too. Indeed, in coming to employ
"Greek" to describe all residents of the province and not just those ethnically Greek or
dwelling in poleis, Greek usage in Asia gradually aligned with Roman practice, in which
by the Augustan period "Greek" was used of the eastern provinces to refer broadly to all

21
those juridically alien in respect to Rome, regardless of ethnicity or, indeed, the selfunderstanding of those to whom the label was applied.
The politics of the situation are thus complex, involving a Greek colonizing
population that used to run, and in many ways still did run, an extractive economy that
exploited non-Greek indigenes, whose exploitation was to a point justified, even as their
existence was effaced, by a system of moral and social evaluation that bracketed their
way of life or, perhaps one should say, the way of life attributed to them, as not worth
thinking about. Over them all was suddenly situated a non-Greek suzerain, whose
policies and language presupposed a quite different set of priorities and privileged quite
distinctive qualities as essential to the classification of persons. The tendencies of Roman
government thus ran counter to the ideological predilections of contemporary Greek
thought. Despite the occasional allowance by Hellenizing intellectuals that Greekness
was a matter purely of self-fashioning, Greek law and language throughout the classical
and Hellenistic periods remained highly racialized. On some readings, this schizophrenia
in regard to ways of being or becoming Greek played itself out in Greek literature of the
Hellenistic and Roman period in the form of an on-going tension between notions of
culture and political belonging as inextricably tied to descent and others that viewed
Hellenicity as fundamentally a matter of performance (Richter 2011; but cf. Ando 2004).
But we should not mistake this latter discourse about self-fashioning as intended
to reconceptualize culture as simply the product of education, attainable by anyone. If
there were in some very sense, all those who spoke Greek might have some claim to
prestige, and that outcome an ancient elite would not tolerate. What was therefore at
stake in claims to the learning or, rather, learnedness of Greekness, was rather an issue of

22
distinction, such that there were Greeks by descent, to be sure, but also others, their
betters, who performed, exhibited and inhabited a purer form of Greekness.
(Re)incarnation of this supposedly purer, ancestral form of contemporary culture was
then identified by ideologues as a necessary and perhaps sufficient qualification for
elevated social authority. It is the status of this learning as symbolic (in one register) and
both useless and expensive (in another) that made it ideally suited for this role in a
colonial economy of social power (Schmitz 1997; Whitmarsh 2001:90-130). Indeed, its
implication in just this economy is revealed by the conceptual and linguistic
transformation of its terms of art effected in the late Hellenistic period, in Judaea in the
context of empire. For it is in remembrances of the policy of Antiochus Epiphanes
toward the Jews that helleniz and its cognates begins to be used transitively, indeed, by
its victims: one could (forcibly) make another Greek. In some very abstract sense, for
the author of II Maccabees, too, Greekness was a matter of fashioning, like changing
one's cloak, itself a common ancient metaphor for cultural bilingualism, except that his
people did it at the point of sword (the practice behind the metaphor is illustrated at
Seneca, Controversiae 9.3.13, and see Pliny, Ep. 4.11.3; Greek metaball may be used
with many terms, including water, to indicate a change in style of life).
Into this dynamic came the Romans, with their profound uninterest in the
essentializing ontology that underlay Greek (colonial) taxonomies of persons. The power
that underlay Roman knowledge of its subjects compelled a transformation in the
language Greeks applied to themselves and others. As Ferrary observes, this history runs
parallel to developments in Roman Egypt, where, in a process we now understand to be
typically Roman, a taxonomy of concrete ontologynamely, a division of the population

23
according to ethnicitywas abstracted and transformed into a purely juridical scheme.
That Egyptian history received masterful study by Joseph Mlze Modrzejewski, albeit
not in the terms used above (Modrzejewski 1989; see also idem 1983, Nelson 1979).
What is more, its social dynamic has received exciting further study by Ari Bryen, who
demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the Constitutio Antoniniana, new forms of
distinction emerged, drawing on earlier vocabularies, in order to sustain patterns of social
differentiation that had been threatened by the sudden imposition of juridical equality on
the residents of the empire (Bryen forthcoming).

Apart and together in landscape and memory

Graeco-Roman difference was, of course, a major theme of ancient literature. The most
conspicuous topic in this body of material concerns citizenship, which famously drew the
attention of Philip V long before Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean was
assured. Indeed, the practical wisdom and long-term political benefits of Roman
willingness to raise aliens to citizenship remained a preoccupation of Greek literature
under Roman rule, where it served as one among many causes for which the Greek
blamed themselves for their own subjugation (SIG 543; in later literature see, exempli
gratia, Dionysius 1.9.4, 2.16.1, and elsewhere; Aelius Aristides Or. 26.59-63).
Colonialism was another such theme, less often remarked in modern scholarship,
but notable nonetheless. Perhaps the locus classicus is Livy's digression on Empries
(Roman Emporiae), inserted in his narrative of the year 195 BCE. According to GraecoRoman narrative, the settlement "began" as a Greek trading post aloof and apart from its

24
Iberian context (the name, which derives from Greek emporion, erases the site's preGreek past, a problem to which we shall return):

Even then Emporiae consisted of two towns divided by a wall. One was
held by Greeks who originated from Phocaea, as did the Massilians; the
other town was held by Spaniards... As a third type there were Roman
colonists, added by the deified Caesar after the children on Pompey were
defeated. Now all are poured into a single body, the Spaniards first and
later the Greeks having been taken up into Roman citizenship. (Livy
34.9.1-10 at 1, 3)

Although Strabo seems to know nothing of the deduction of Roman colonists under
Caesar, he does make clear that the exterior walls of the Spanish and Greek towns were
coterminous: the wall that divided the two populations was thus interior to what might
otherwise have been a single conurbation (Strabo 3.4.8). Livy goes on to explain that the
Greeks admitted no Spaniard to their town and themselves only sallied forth in numbers.
What is more, the history of the material articulation of the city appears to have followed
a pattern structurally identical to that outlined by Livy's remarks on the patterning of
sociability: the Roman grid embraced indigenous incolae from the beginning; only later
was the Greek settlement effectively demolished, as part of a wholesale reorganization of
the urban grid into a unified whole (Kaiser 2000; Aquilu, Castanyer, Santos and
Tremoleda 2006).

25
Aelius Aristides similarly contrasts Athenian practices of domination, principally
the imposition of garrisons on subject states, with Roman extension of control through
the cooptation of local elites (Aelius Aristides Or. 26.52). He offers two criticisms of
Athenian practice. First, garrisons were impractical, it being impossible to make them
large enough truly and securely to control the populations over which they were
stationed. Second, their use created the suspicion that Athens performed everything
through force and violence. Athenian practice was thus self-subverting: the garrisons
were insufficient to the task and yet their presence attracted hatred. In sum, Athenian
practice reaped the evils rather than the goods of empire.
Distinctions in many registers may carry weight in metropolitan discourse. They
often prove difficult to sustain in colonial landscapes. This is so not least because,
metropolitan narratives to one side, few sites of colonial occupation or imperial action in
the age of literacy were uninhabited when occupied or seized. The attractiveness of these
already-occupied sites sometimes derived from the simple fact that an earlier population
had already identified the most propitious site; at others it was due to improvements in
the site effected by those inhabitants; and sometimes of course the existence of such a
population was a precondition for the trade that motivated the colonialist enterprise; or all
of the above. Two questions then arise of salience to the present chapter: First, what did
one do with such inhabitants or, perhaps, what would contemporary ideological strictures
allow one to remember having done? Second, what representations did the varied
discourses of empire permit regarding such interactions as inevitably then took place
between the metropolitan diaspora and the indigenes among whom it resided?

26
It was of course possible for a people to remember itself as having exterminated
all humans or even all animal life in territory that it seized, as did the Jews about the
lands that their god gave them as their own (Deuteronomy 20:10-20; cf. Fentress 1996,
81 n. 10; Ruscu 2004). Narratives of genocide, even prideful ones, likely reveal more
about anxieties about purity in post-conquest landscapes, especially when, as in the
Jewish case, the conquering population was small in comparison with that from whom it
seized property and control. Such narratives to one side, in actual practice, as with the
deduction of Roman colonists into Empries or the foundation of the Greek trading post
that preceded it, some accommodation was made with the indigenes who preceded one
(for a survey derived largely from literary and epigraphic material, see Brunt 1987, 246255). At times, it seems possible to detect such accommodation in the archaeological
record (Fentress 1996, 82, 84-85). At others, legal instruments generated at the
metropole, or ones metropolitan in form, record the on-going presence of members of
pre-Roman populations in Roman communities. So, for example, the Roman agrarian
law of 111 BCE refers to members of colonial communities who were not colonists but
were nonetheless "enrolled among [their] number" (Roman Statutes no. 2, l. 66); and the
cadastral map of Arausio, though inscribed in the Flavian period, appears to distinguish
land assigned to veterans, land assigned to other colonists, and land left to the Tricastini,
in whose territory the colony had been implanted a hundred years before (Piganiol 1962,
53-62).
The physical presence of prior inhabitants, and the need to accommodate them in
legal instruments, calls to mind another tension visible in metropolitan literature, to wit,
that between official memory and normative (imperial) conceptions of historical time, on

27
the one hand, and historical memory more broadly conceived, on the other. Official
forms of memory, like civic dating systems, often represented foundations as having
occurred ex nihilo, when in fact they occurred de novo. The encoding of official memory
thus represents a secondary act of power, enacting an effacement of a colonial landscape's
prior inhabitants. That said, it was the task of historical narrativeincluding
metropolitan narrativesto describe the contexts of such acts of power. This double
function of historical memory produced a sustained tension in Roman historical
awareness. On the one hand, the prior existence of some polity in spaces now occupied
by a Roman colony was necessarily obscured by the institutions of public memory
common to Roman civic life, in which the past before the new beginning became
knowledge one must remember to forget. At the same time, the Romans tended to
preserve awareness of the pre-colonial past as a fundamental feature of metropolitan
knowledge, not least when that past was the context of Republican political action.
Hence notices of colonial foundations in Roman authors often quite specifically recall a
site's pre-Roman past at the moment of its erasure (Livy 9.28.7 or 10.1.1-2; Festus s.v.
Saticula 458L; Ando 2015d).
As a related matter, the forms of intermingling and integration that must regularly
have occurred in colonial contexts receive varied judgment when they are represented in
metropolitan literatures, but within that variety there is a discernable trajectory across
time. For example, Livy reports on an embassy to the Senate from Spain in 171 BCE,
claiming to represent a population of offspring born from Spanish women and Roman
soldiers:

28
Another embassy came from Spain, of a new type of person (novi generis
hominum). They had been born, they said, from Roman soldiers and
Spanish women, between whom there had been no right of marriage; they
were more than four thousand persons; and they asked that a town be
given to them in which to dwell. The Senate decreed that they should give
their own names before (the praetor) Lucius Canuleius and also the names
of any person whom they had manumitted. It was decided that they be
settled at Carteia by the ocean; the opportunity was granted to any of the
Carteians who wished to remain at home, that they should be among the
number of colonists, with land assigned to them. The colony was to be of
Latin status and called "of freedmen." (Livy 43.3.1-4)

Livy's text has received much scrutiny, it being implausible that these were in fact the
first children born between Roman soldiers and women with whom they had no right of
marriage; and likewise unclear why, or with what force, the colony is called Colony of
Freedmen. But it seems likely enough that Rome had not previously been confronted by
an embassy from a population of such people, and from outside Italy, to boot; and indeed,
the resulting foundation was the first Latin colony outside the peninsula. The persons "of
a new type" sprang from illicit unions; they stood outside normative taxonomies of
persons; and metropolitan language strained to accommodate them (cf. Livy 34.42.5-6,
on the novum ius of Latins conducting themselves as if they were Roman citizens by
virtue of enrolling in a Latin colony).

29
A century or more later, Tacitus wrote his famous epitaph for Cremona, the
colony in Cisalpine Gaul founded just prior to the Hannibalic invasion (for a history of
the region see Ando 2015a). In 69 CE, Cremona became embroiled in the civil wars that
erupted after the death of Nero, being held first by troops of Vitellius against those of
Otho. Later, troops loyal to Vespasian occupied the city and, motivated by greed and
spite, turned on the populace: the entire urban fabric of public and private buildings was
destroyed (Tacitus, Histories 3.26-33). "Cremona sufficed them for four days; when all
its buildings, sacred and profane, settled into flame, the temple of Mefitis alone remained,
before the walls, protected either by its location or the god" (Tacitus Histories 3.33.2).

This was the end of Cremona, in the 286th year since its founding. It was
founded when Tiberius Sempronius and Publius Cornelius were consuls,
as Hannibal was entering into Italy, as a bulwark against Gauls acting
across the Po and if some other force should cross the Alps. Thereafter,
thanks to number of colonists, the convenience of the rivers, the richness
of its fields and association and intermarriage with indigenous peoples
(adnexu conubiisque gentium), it grew rich and flourished, untouched by
foreign wars but unlucky in civil ones. (Tacitus, Histories 3.34.1)

Of course, the incorporation of Cisalpine Gaul into metropolitan discourse and politics
advanced much farther, and did so much earlier, than did that of Spain. Indeed, by the
time Tacitus wrote, Gaul south of the Alps had long since been reclassified as a region of
Italy. Nonetheless, Tacitus preserves an awareness of Cremona's status as a bulwark of

30
empire against non-Italians across the Po, and so his conjoining of "association and
intermarriage with indigenous peoples" alongside other factors as causal in the
flourishing of the colony speaks volumes.
To return briefly to the Tricastini: they constitute a particular case of a
phenomenon familiar in Roman colonialism but virtually unknown to Greek thought, to
wit, a non-poliadic, indigenous population that is ultimately reclassified as metropolitan
(for comparative remarks on Greek and Roman anthropologies of colonial contexts see
Ando 2012b). The victims of expropriation of some, at least, of their land at the
foundation of Arausio under Caesar, a town of the Tricastini was granted Latin status in
the next generation, under Augustus, and so named Augusta Tricastinorum (Pliny Nat.
3.36). A half century or more on, it is granted the status of Roman colony under the
Flavians, under the name Colonia Flavia Tricastinorum (HD016699 = AE 1962, 143).
Not only are its residents granted Roman citizenship, the fiction is implicitly entertained
that they were Romans all along, who had emigrated to a colony in subject lands. But
their true history abides, preserved in their new Roman name.

Elite cultural production: Which elite? Whose culture?

The remains of ancient cultural production selected for study by present-day scholars
were overwhelmingly produced by or for local and imperial elites. To what extent were
these elites themselves produced and sustained by colonialist dynamics? And what
inflection was lent to their tastes by their implication within a world empire? These are
of course enormous questions, to which many different answers, and many different

31
kinds of answers, might legitimately be given. Let me attempt to sketch a framework for
answering them.
As regards the formation and reproduction of an elite, it is perhaps useful to
distinguish between a phase of conquest and consolidation, on the hand, and one of ongoing governance, on the other, which might likewise be distinguished by the
contemporary optics of imperialism and colonialism. During the period of conquest, two
dynamics obtained that were substantially diminished in the aftermath of the civil wars.
First, foreign agents remained surprisingly ill-informed about the realia of Roman politics
much longer than one might have expected (see, famously, I Maccabees 8:14-16, or
Wrrle 2000, 568-571). Second, the instability created by the rise of a new power in the
west allowed for the continuance of, and in some respects exacerbated, destructive
tendencies toward anarchy and militarist rivalry between factions within polities, between
cities and among supra-regional powers (Eckstein 2006, 79-117; idem 2008). As we
shall see momentarily, the uncertainties and instabilities arising from Rome's civil wars
made all these tendencies far more poisonous and certainly more fraught. The
contestation of hegemony between the great powers of the late Hellenistic Mediterranean,
and the subsequent fractious politics internal to late Republican Rome, allowed for a
certain form of interstate politics within and between cities at the fringes of empire, not
least in peninsular Greece (Gruen 1984, 359-730). The resolution of the civil wars of the
first century BCE in monarchy and concord constrained the practice of politics of this
kind. But it might also be said to have ushered in a period of stability, and familiar
stability, at that: the cities of the eastern Mediterranean were practiced in the politics of
empire and knew how to greet the ruler of the world. A vigorous diplomacy therefore

32
rapidly developed and indeed thrived in the coming centuries, organized around the
acquisition and sustaining of privileges within the political economy of empire (Millar
1984). By contrast, local politics of the sort fostered by uncertainty in geopolitical
affairs, e.g., negotiating the advancement of one's city by playing off rivalries among
politicians at Rome, rapidly devolved into the watching of the imperial house and the
cultivation of possible heirs to the throne (Bowersock 1984).
In consequence, although at a formal level, Rome re-organized the constitutions
of cities under its control as democracies with property qualifications for office-holding
(Ando 2006, 181-182 summarizes the evidence and cites relevant bibliography), the
collapse of ordinary politics and the civil wars of the mid-first century BCE wars made
life for all populations in their path extraordinarily difficult. A symptom as well as an
index of the stresses produced by violent upheaval at the highest level of the Roman elite
was the grotesque elevation in wealth and power bestowed upon the Greek friends of
Roman triumvirs. The most famous record of such enactments is likely the dossier of
letters and an edict from Octavian to the city of Rhosos concerning its citizen Seleukos:
Octavian granted Seleukos Roman citizenship as well as exemption from local taxes and
public service, and added the right to take any court case in which he was involved to
whatever forum he deemed most favorable. Later documents reveal friction between
Seleukos and his former fellow-citizens, such that Octavian somewhat peevishly stresses
that the people of Rhosos do not understand how great a privilege they suffer, having one
of his friends in their midst (Raggi 2004; for the text, see SEG 58, 1733).
Very rapidly after he had eliminated his rivals, Octavian moved to impose the rule
of law and norms of conduct on many aspects of political, legal and religious life. A

33
signal instance of this was the establishing of rules of jurisdiction that eliminated the kind
of space that Octavian and his peers had themselves created and in which Seleukos
flourished, rules known from their publication in Cyrene (SEG 9, 8). It was of course a
space symptomatic of many colonial situations, and, indeed, of many political contexts in
which obtain vast differentials in power and weak regard for juridical equality even
within social ranks. One significant evidence of the success of this and related moves by
Augustus and his successors is the tralatician language employed in later grants of
citizenship, to the effect that they occur "with local law preserved," meaning,
presumably, that the recipients of such grants remained embedded within, and bound by,
the norms that regulated local social, political and economic life (IAM 94; for the
situation of the newly enfranchised within this system see Gardner 2001).
Nearly the totality of the elites now known to us from Roman antiquity were thus
created and sustained as elites by the institutions of Roman governance. What is more,
an enormous percentage of all authors of surviving literary texts were Roman citizens.
This is, of course, but one fact about them, but it merits recollection nonetheless. But
even as a fact, it must be qualified, particularly in respect to the western Mediterranean,
by the absolutely essential matter of the democratic nature of local office. For in the west
in particular we know that many members of local elites received Roman citizenship as
an automatic matter upon completion of high local magistracy, but those persons were
elected to office by populations that were perforce overwhelmingly alien. In the west,
therefore, the structural difference between imperial and local citizenships in any given
context must have calqued particularized local forms of social differentiation (Ando

34
forthcoming b). The imperial elite was thus to a point created by indigenous subalterns,
acting on their own priorities.
I have thus far spoken of the local and the imperial as if these were two distinct
worlds, constituting foci for affective attachment for different populations. But as the
reference to the extension of metropolitan citizenship to local elites suggests, the two
worlds were in fact highly intertwined. Indeed, the gradual extension and ultimate
universalization of Roman citizenship is only the most famous mechanism by which the
two were brought together, and the ancient discourse on this process, which was
sustained virtually wholly by authors descended from aliens, is itself an important index
of their conjoining (Sherwin-White 1973: 397-468; Ando 2000: 49-70). Nor were the
civic and the imperial the only planes upon which social ambition and social preeminence
might be performed: provincial leagues, and trans-local courts, were important if
underexplored domains in which an overall imperial elite of multiple strata was
ultimately forged. What is more, as regards the theme of this chapter, the
interconnectedness of these strata is best revealed to us through the careful study of the
careers and personal connections of the educated, whether of orators who interrupted
their star performances to conduct embassies for cities or whose performances were
themselves disquisitions on the condition of an elite of culture under imperial rule, often
with the self-serving aim of justifying their elite status or claiming an exemption from
labor or taxes by virtue of their culture (a short list of exemplary studies in a vast
scholarship would include Bowersock 1969, Jones 1978, Millar 1983a, Ferrary 1988:
395-494, Millar 1999, Whitmarsh 2001: 181-246).

35
The unity of this elite, and indeed, the unity of imperial culture, such as these
were, was nearly wholly the product of human mobility. Not for nothing are narratives of
"early" culture contact between Rome and others often focused on ideologically
exaggerated and, frankly, slightly improbable tales of intellectual and cognitive
dissonance upon the occasion of (first) visits by one party to the other. The embassy of
Carneades to Rome is only the most famous of these (Ferrary 1988: 349-394). A full
accounting of the movement of intellectuals and its contribution to the formation of
fashion is a massive desideratum, but it seems possible even now to sayas perhaps
should have been expected all alongthat the canons of taste, and in particular of
classicism, that come to prominence in the Second Sophistic were largely forged at Rome
in the late Republic and only later exported back to the Greek world and peninsular
Greece in particular, through the circulation of Greek intellectuals to Rome and back
again, on the one hand, and the influence of Roman patrons seeking some imagined other
to the present world of contemporary Achaea (Ando 2003, Spawforth 2012). Much the
same can be said of cultural movements in the west, though the work required to
vindicate such claims before the flowering of literary Latin in late antique Gaul, Spain
and Africa is daunting (for exemplary studies of this kind focused on the early Principate
see Woolf 1998: 169-205 and Edmondson 2009).

Conclusion: Languages of power

36
In conclusion, it might be useful to consider two background conditions of cultural
production that exist prior to any approach we might make to the literatures of the Roman
period, choice of language and non-participation/non-survival.
The literatures of the Roman empire that remain visible today in the priorities of
contemporary literary scholarship are written in a handful of languagesLatin, Greek,
Aramaic, Hebrew and Demotic. Even these few were not accorded then, and are not
accorded now, equal status, whether for the production of literature, the debating of
metaphysics, or the articulation of norms. This was, and is, a matter of power. In the
words of Themistius, Latin was the ruling tongue or, as Libanius put it in the same era, it
was the language of the powerful (Themistius Oration 6.71c; Libanius Ep. 668; see also
Arrian Periplous 6.2, 10.1; and Gregory Thaumaturgus Address to Origen 1.7-8). What
is more, it was well understood in antiquity that language, like customs, law and even
names, belonged to the victors to impose (see, e.g., Servius ad Aen. 4.618; see also ad
Aen. 1.6).
As with Latin, so with Greek: it does not matter whether Greek landlords of late
antiquity knew Syriac or not. They represent themselves as refusing to learn it and
instead forcing others, the managers of their estates, to learn Greek, in order to deliver
their commands to those who merely toiled. We are not far from the posturing of
Aemilius Paullus, who was fluent in Greek but delivered the terms for the settlement of
Macedon in Latin to a wholly Greek audience (Livy 45.29.3). Patterns of structural
differentiation qua systems of prestige, including those of language difference, thus
required continual re-affirmation through performance. Even in late antiquity, it is only
in social spaces that brought speakers of various languages together that we find regular

37
acknowledgement of the linguistic complexity of the eastern Mediterranean (especially in
the provision made for polyglot liturgies), and even then, it is only among non
Grecolatini (to use Egeria's term, 47.3-4) that allowance is made that each language
might have its own purpose: "Greek for song, Latin for battle, Syriac for lamentation,
and Hebrew for conversation" (Sefer Ha-Aggadah 3.3.18, translated by William G.
Braude, excerpted from the Esther Rabbah (4:12) and the Palestinian Talmud (Megillah
1:9)).
Not to participate in these prestige tongues, whether because one opted out or was
excluded from appropriate education, was to efface oneself from the domain of the
literary. Any number of languages are well represented in epigraphy of the Roman
period but have not served as vehicles for the transmission of "literature": Punic and
Nabatean are notable examples (see in general Millar 1968 and cf. idem 1983b). What is
more, whether because specific forms of knowledge were associated with, or cognitively
demanded articulation in, particular tongues, or because subaltern knowledge was
deemed unworthy of elevation into Latin, information as well as literatures of the preRoman past and non-Roman present throughout the western Mediterranean have almost
entirely vanished (Woolf 1996). It is of course one of the aims of this volume to expose,
critique and explore just this situation.
This situation undoubtedly has multiple causes, none of them innocent. Two
deserve mention here. First, there is the tight nexus of social prestige and the material
conditions for the preservation of information: public writing on permanent media, and
the transmission of texts on manuscript, were the privilege of the elevated. At every
stage of inscription and transmission, the odds were against the preservation of non-

38
Roman texts. The second cause for the effacing of non-Roman cultures is silence, even
among indigenes, arising from the iterated, local delegitimation of prior cohomologies of
social and cultural authority. As Greg Woolf has written of elites and subalterns as
consumers of culture in Gaul, when their relations become clear to us again after the
conquest period, the elite produces and consumes as a Roman elite (Woolf 1998: 202203). Their failure to claim any attachment to the pre-Roman past was an interested act
of self-abnegation in pursuit of distinction over their non-Roman subalterns in the
present.

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