Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy
Abstract
Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.
... In the surviving writings of the ancient inhabitants who lived around the Mediterranean, there is little interest in human mobility as a topic in itself. Migration as a general phenomenon does not appear as a matter of concern, either in terms of security or for the purposes of management and control (Isayev 2017a). Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the novelty of our modern conception of immigration-understood as a move across a national border for the purpose of permanent residence-which only took hold in the early 1800s (Shumsky 2008;Th ompson 2003: 195). ...
... But mobility in itself was not articulated as a distinct entity separate from the practices of the everyday. Scholarship has shown that in the ancient world it was recognized as being ongoing and cyclical (Horden and Purcell 2000;Isayev 2017a;Tacoma 2016). Hence, we struggle to fi nd any single term either in Ancient Greek or in Latin that categorizes all those on the move in the same way as the current usage of "migrant" does in English. ...
... Such an outlook fi ts a society in which mobility was perceived as an everyday norm, rather than something outside it. Th e issue for authorities, who anticipated such ongoing mobility in their policies, was not how to keep outsiders out, but how to keep one's own community members in the same place for long enough to count them, tax them, and recruit them into the army (Isayev 2017a). We would expect that historically, the protection, well-being, and the will of fellow citizens would have been the priority for any consideration and especially true for the decision makers whose positions of power depended on the will of the demos. ...
This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community, confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.
... In the surviving writings of the ancient inhabitants who lived around the Mediterranean, there is little interest in human mobility as a topic in itself. Migration as a general phenomenon does not appear as a matter of concern, either in terms of security or for the purposes of management and control (Isayev 2017a). Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the novelty of our modern conception of immigration-understood as a move across a national border for the purpose of permanent residence-which only took hold in the early 1800s (Shumsky 2008;Th ompson 2003: 195). ...
... But mobility in itself was not articulated as a distinct entity separate from the practices of the everyday. Scholarship has shown that in the ancient world it was recognized as being ongoing and cyclical (Horden and Purcell 2000;Isayev 2017a;Tacoma 2016). Hence, we struggle to fi nd any single term either in Ancient Greek or in Latin that categorizes all those on the move in the same way as the current usage of "migrant" does in English. ...
... Such an outlook fi ts a society in which mobility was perceived as an everyday norm, rather than something outside it. Th e issue for authorities, who anticipated such ongoing mobility in their policies, was not how to keep outsiders out, but how to keep one's own community members in the same place for long enough to count them, tax them, and recruit them into the army (Isayev 2017a). We would expect that historically, the protection, well-being, and the will of fellow citizens would have been the priority for any consideration and especially true for the decision makers whose positions of power depended on the will of the demos. ...
This article provides a historical perspective to understand better whether hospitality persists as a measure of society across contexts. Focusing on Homer and later Tragedians, it charts ancient literature’s deep interest in the tensions of balancing obligations to provide hospitality and asylum, and the responsibilities of well-being owed to host-citizens by their leaders. Such discourse appears central at key transformative moments, such as the Greek polis democracy of the fifth century BCE, hospitality becoming the marker between civic society and the international community, confronting the space between civil and human rights. At its center was the question of: Who is the host? The article goes on to question whether the seventeenth-century advent of the nation state was such a moment, and whether in the twenty-first century we observe a shift towards states’ treatment of their own subjects as primary in measuring society, with hospitality becoming the exception to be explained.
... Em primeiro lugar, existem outros autores antigos que também mencionam uma expansão samnita no final do século V a.e.c. (Isayev, 2017), diminuindo a probabilidade de que se trata de uma invenção de Lívio. Mais significativo ainda, contudo, é o conjunto de evidências independentes que parecem apontar na direção de uma tal expansão: trata-se, principalmente, da proliferação de inscrições em língua e alfabeto osco, desde as montanhas da Itália central até as zonas litorâneas, ricas e urbanizadas da Campânia, em torno do momento em que as narrativas historiográficas falam da chegada de samnitas em Cápua e cidades vizinhas (Bourdin, 2012(Bourdin, , p.1076Isayev, 2017). ...
... (Isayev, 2017), diminuindo a probabilidade de que se trata de uma invenção de Lívio. Mais significativo ainda, contudo, é o conjunto de evidências independentes que parecem apontar na direção de uma tal expansão: trata-se, principalmente, da proliferação de inscrições em língua e alfabeto osco, desde as montanhas da Itália central até as zonas litorâneas, ricas e urbanizadas da Campânia, em torno do momento em que as narrativas historiográficas falam da chegada de samnitas em Cápua e cidades vizinhas (Bourdin, 2012(Bourdin, , p.1076Isayev, 2017). Embora tais evidências não reflitam necessariamente uma conquista samnita, elas no mínimo sugerem um aumento da conectividade entre as comunidades montanhesas da Itália central e as cidades prósperas das planícies costeiras vizinhas. ...
Resumo: As discussões sobre o imperialismo romano vêm se atendo aos primeiros momentos desse processo, na Itália dos séculos IV e III a.e.c. Devido à natureza fragmentária das fontes, é difícil entender como o começo da expansão romana foi percebido pelos agentes históricos envolvidos, especialmente por aqueles que vivenciaram o lado mais brutal do processo. Entre esses estavam as comunidades semiurbanizadas das montanhas da Itália central, chamadas imprecisamente de “samnitas” nas fontes greco-romanas. Embora os relatos historiográficos antigos disponíveis sejam tardios e romanocêntricos, podem servir de base para delinear aspectos de como essas comunidades teriam enxergado sua própria subordinação: propõe-se que esses agentes históricos podem ter mantido uma forte e talvez anacrônica percepção de sua própria independência.
... 29-59. ISSN 1853-7049 a los análisis holísticos y estructurales (LaBianca y Scham, 2014), conectando así con aquellos investigadores que, de forma esporádica y no con gran recepción, aplicaron la teoría de los sistemas-mundo de Wallerstein al pasado antiguo(Cunliffe, 1988).A este respecto,Moatti (2013) ha advertido que, para obtener un mejor conocimiento de las transformaciones en el contexto romano-mediterráneo, es importante tener en consideración no solo su propia globalidad y cosmopolitismo, sino también el carácter performativo de la intensa circulación de personas y objetos que tiene lugar en su seno.La movilidad, la conectividad y las dinámicas de consumo, bajo esta óptica, pasarían a ser elementos constitutivos de la propia historicidad de las comunidades mediterráneas, y de ahí deriva, en consecuencia, que se hayan convertido en cuestiones absolutamente centrales para las perspectivas globales(Lo Cascio y Tacoma, 2016;Isayev, 2017). Sin embargo, dichas perspectivas atienden también con preferencia a otros temas y debates, tales como la "descentralización globalizada" -no homogéneadel urbanismo, la cultura material o el arte romanos, las redes de intercambio, el impacto interno y externo de la integración político-económica, la universalización de los saberes y las cosmovisiones -aquí, en particular, despuntaría un helenismo ya hegemónico antes del auge de Roma-o la propia imagen global que sobre su mundo tenían los autores grecolatinos. ...
En el presente trabajo se presta atención a tres de las tendencias historiográficas que, centradas con preferencia en “lo identitario”, han adquirido durante los últimos veinte años un considerable peso en el estudio del mundo romano, propiciando importantes cambios a la hora de concebir las pertenencias colectivas. Desde los empeños por “decolonizar” la ciencia histórica al creciente auge de las interpretaciones globales, pasando por la incorporación de la perspectiva de género y la teoría feminista, las maneras de entender la llamada “romanización” y las identidades romanas se caracterizan hoy no solo por la adhesión general a una óptica alejada de los viejos esencialismos, sino también por focalizarse en nuevos temas, tales como el factor étnico, el papel de las comunidades locales, la conectividad y movilidad, el multiculturalismo, las hibridaciones o los grupos tradicionalmente invisibilizados. No obstante, este panorama novedoso ha hecho emerger nuevas problemáticas, como las reesencializaciones y la sobrerrepresentación de aspectos como la diversidad, el contacto, las resistencias o la mezcla cultural.
... For the Iron Age, this is demonstrated by the southward diffusion of material culture (e.g., La Tène swords and brooches) originating in the transalpine regions (Kruta, 2009;Vitali, 2001). Modern archeological theories are increasingly critical about traditional hypotheses about one-way mass migrations at the basis of the observed archeological patterns, rather privileging more nuanced interpretation centered on individual or small group moves and gradual processes (Anctil, 2021 and references therein;Isayev, 2017). In any case, the available data would agree with ancient Greek sources (Appianus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus) in placing the earliest important presence of "Celtic/Latenian" populations in the Italian Peninsula around the 4th century BCE (Grassi, 2009;Kruta, 1977Kruta, , 1988. ...
Objectives
The Late Iron Age in continental Europe featured complex demographic processes including, among others, the establishment of transalpine “Celtic” communities on the Italian peninsula between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE. To date, only few data are available about mobility and migration in these populations. Here we explore these topics among the Cenomani of Seminario Vescovile (SV-Verona, Italy, 3rd–1st c. BCE) through a multi-isotopic approach and test the possible associations with sex, age and funerary treatment.
Materials and methods
We analyzed isotopic ratios of oxygen (δ18O) and carbon (δ13C) from bone phosphate and collagen, respectively, of 49 individuals (23 males, 17 females, and 9 nonadults). In addition, we explored possible intraindividual lifetime changes by comparing collagen δ13C from bone and dentine of 26 individuals. We assessed nonlocality based on individual deviation of isotopic values from the population mean plus three times the median absolute deviation from the median (±3MAD). We then checked for isotopic differences between sexes and type of funerary treatment using Mann–Whitney tests.
Results
One individual shows isotopic values consistent with a nonlocal origin. Five more individuals may have originated from a different locality. No statistical differences separate sexes and types of funerary treatment.
Discussion
Results suggest a local origin of most of the individuals of SV with the few exceptions pointing especially to an Alpine origin. The low frequency of nonlocals at SV suggest a reduced mobility in this population, or the preeminence of short distance movements undetected by our analyses.
... We need to think harder about the consequences of the movement of objects. It is often noted that ceramics and other goods were mobile, but the significant advances in understanding mobility more generally have not perhaps been sufficiently applied (see Isayev 2017). There may also be value in long-term analysis and comparisons, for instance, between the preconquest period and our increasing knowledge of late Roman Etruria, when the structures enabled and empowered by the reach of Roman imperialism were either not in place or beginning to falter. ...
The Etruscans, who dominated central Italy for much of the first half of the first millennium BC, are ripe for new analysis: the quantity of data for their culture is now substantial, wide ranging, and qualifies for large-scale comparison. In this paper, we survey how research in the last decade has affected our understanding of settlements, of changing models of the transfer of ideas, and of Etruscan religious behavior, among other topics. We place them into complex spatial, architectural, and economic narratives to show that the interplay between microhistorical case studies and macrohistorical trends has now achieved what ought to be a paradigmatic status. Despite the continuous flow of specialist publications and an industry of exhibitions, however, the Etruscans have not broken through into mainstream archaeological awareness. We argue that this could be achieved if future research becomes more thematic and agenda driven and embraces comparative study.
... 14 Romans, at the beginning of empire, from the third-century BCE onward, in their origin stories and foundation myths imagined their community as the product of migrations. Rome's beginnings, according to one legendary strand, show how the city originated from the creation of an 'asylum' by Romulus who invited others to join him at the site, including vagrants and refugees (see Isayev, 2017a;Dench, 2005). Rome's other mythical strand, recounted in Vergil's Aeneid, also envisions refugees as ancestors of the original populace of the city, but here speci cally from Troy, thus allowing them to be tied into the most proli c Mediterranean myths of the time, with the Trojan War at their centre. ...
The following chapter proposes a way of thinking into that other space beyond the nation-state by bringing into dialogue two different contexts: today’s Dheisheh refugee camp in Palestine and ancient Rome in a post-exilic moment. The two cases are by no means comparble in terms of their circumstances; rather, the aim of examining them together is to consider alternative constructions of the imagined community and their ambivalent relationship to the land and fabric of any site. In each case, the formation and persistence of collective identity is articulated through a spatio-temporal juncture, but with important differences. The seeming rootedness of Rome to its site is destabilised by the ancient historian Livy in his projection of its absence and removal to elsewhere. Conversely, the case of Dheisheh and its suburb subverts the condition of temporariness that emerges out of exile and displacement, which defines the camp and refugeeness as a liminal existence – an absence. Instead, it shows the possibilities for constructions of exceptional place, politics and forms of collective identity. Setting the camp (Dheisheh) and the city (Rome) exposes the paradoxes of territorial thinking in a world demarcated by neither nation-states nor spatially contained citizenship, thus destabilising the relationship between territoriality and political subjectivity.
... Horden and Purcell's (2000) ideas of connectivity are the pillars of this debate; de Ligt and Tacoma's (2016) introduction surveys the history of the study of migration especially with respect to Rome, and includes discussions of demographic data. Also valuable are the introduction and second chapter in (Isayev 2017a) (especially for ancient Italy); (de Ligt and Tacoma 2016), who trace and outline the scholarly interest in migration studies over the last 25 years; and (Lo Cascio et al. 2017). Outside of Classics, see (Lucassen and Lucassen 2005;Hoerder et al. 2007;Lucassen et al. 2010). ...
My response to Susanne Lachenicht’s thought-provoking article is a brief attempt to take up her call to write histories that lead not to absolute certainties but to more understanding of the complexities of the past. I focus on documentation, border control, and citizenship in the Early Roman Empire to illustrate some of the radically different ways these were conceptualized and practiced in a premodern multiethnic empire like Rome than in a contemporary nation-state today. Passports, for example, and border control as we know it, did not exist, and migration was not tied to citizenship status. But the account I offer is deliberately tentative and full of qualifications to emphasize the real methodological challenges the study of this subject poses on account of fragmentary literary and material records and the numerous difficulties of interpreting these. I conclude by pointing out both the benefits and the limitations of framing history as a discipline from which one can learn. On the one hand, understanding how seemingly universal categories such as ‘citizen’ and ‘migrant’ are dynamic and constructed rather than static and natural can nuance public debates in nation-states which receive high numbers of migrants (like Germany, Lachenicht’s starting point) by countering ahistorical narratives of a monolithic and sedentary identity. On the other hand, knowledge of the past does not necessarily lead to a moral edification.
... Also, only a few of the small rural sites have been excavated and studied in detail. We should not rule out the possibility that migrants were among the incomers to the Canusine countryside, given the historical evidence for mass migration in third-and second-century BCE Italy (see Isayev 2017). To take one example, in 177 BCE, 4000 Samnite and Paelignian families are said to have moved to the Latin colony at Fregellae (Livy 41.8.8;Isayev 2017, pp. ...
This article approaches the agency of displaced people through material evidence from the distant past. It seeks to construct a narrative of displacement where the key players include human as well as non-human agents—namely, the environment into which people move, and the socio-political and environmental context of displacement. Our case-study from ancient Italy involves potentially marginalized people who moved into agriculturally challenging lands in Daunia (one of the most drought-prone areas of the Mediterranean) during the Roman conquest (late fourth-early second centuries BCE). We discuss how the interplay between socio-political and environmental forces may have shaped the agency of subaltern social groups on the move, and the outcomes of this process. Ultimately, this analysis can contribute towards a framework for the archaeological study of marginality and mobility/displacement—while addressing potential limitations in evidence and methods.
... On mobility as key to Roman identity, and the various consequences summarised here, see, for example,(Purcell 1990;Dench 2005;Isayev 2017a). ...
Some dominant traditions in Refugee Studies have stressed the barrier which state citizenship presents to the displaced. Some have condemned citizenship altogether as a mechanism and ideology for excluding the weak (G. Agamben). Others have seen citizenship as an acute problem for displaced people in conditions, like those of the modern world, where the habitable world is comprehensively settled by states capable of defending their territory and organised in accordance with interstate norms, which leaves very limited space for the foundation of new communities with their own meaningful citizenship (H. Arendt). This paper engages with these prominent approaches, but also with more recent arguments that, when handled and adapted in the right way, the practices and ideology of citizenship also present opportunities for the displaced to form their own meaningful communities, exercise collective agency, and secure rights. It is argued that the evidence from ancient Greece shows that ancient Greek citizenship, an early forerunner of modern models of citizenship, could be imaginatively harnessed and adapted by displaced people and groups, in order to form effective and sometimes innovative political communities in exile, even after opportunities to found new city-states from scratch became quite rare (after c. 500 BC). Some relevant displaced groups experimented with more open and cosmopolitan styles of civic interaction and ideology in their improvised quasi-civic communities. The different kinds of ancient Greek informal ‘polis-in-exile’ can bring a new perspective on the wider debates and initiatives concerning refugee political agency and organisation in the ‘provocations’ in this special issue.
Religious Architecture and Roman Expansion uses architectural terracottas as a lens for examining the changing landscape of central Italy during the period of Roman military expansion, and for asking how local communities reacted to this new political reality. It emphasizes the role of local networks and exchange in the creation of communal identity, as well as the power of visual expression in the formulation and promotion of local history. Through detailed analyses of temple terracottas, Sophie Crawford-Brown sheds new light on 'Romanization' and colonization processes between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. She investigates the interactions between colonies and indigenous communities, asking why conquerors might visually emulate the conquered, and what this can mean for power relations in colonial situations. Finally, Crawford-Brown explores the role of objects in creating cultural memory and the intensity of our need for collective history-even when that 'history' has been largely invented.
How is wealth created? And how is it distributed? These are the foundational questions of political economy, and they can be understood in radically different ways from the NIE approach prevalent in Graeco-Roman history today. Drawing on intellectual tactics culled from the fields of Law and Racial Capitalism, I suggest that these questions should be the subject of open-ended historical inquiries focusing on how the creation of wealth and inequality worked at a technical level and what it meant for the people involved. By investigating how contemporaries partook in and experienced what historians today have tended to render as graphs and curves stretching over centuries, this new understanding pierces the quantitative membrane in which the questions of political economy are often enveloped, introducing different forms of time (more human, less millenarian) into investigations thereof. Ultimately, I contend, it allows us to grasp the true import of the economic: the fact that the creation of wealth and inequality is imbricated in so much more than economic value. As such, this approach not only offers a promising handle on the intersection of different forms of inequality in the Graeco-Roman past but may also afford our students new and different ways of relating to this past. To substantiate these claims, I present some of my ongoing research on the processes of resource accumulation, primitive and other, in the hands of Romans and Italians that accompanied the establishment of Roman provinces during the middle and late republic.
Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period.
It is almost universally supposed on general principles that Roman citizens who did not live near the city of Rome were effectively disenfranchised by the logistical difficulty of traveling to the capital to vote, and thus that citizen participation in state decision-making was derisively small; this poses a difficulty for the ‘popular’ model of the functioning of the Roman Republic that has won considerable adherence in recent years. However, a systematic review of evidence for voting by citizens who lived around the peninsula and even for non-citizens’ travel to Rome before 90 BC to apply direct pressure on major votes, shows that distance did not present an insurmountable obstacle to meaningful participation in Roman political life by Italians and extra-urban citizens. It also demonstrates the great importance citizens attached to the vote (suffragium) – a guarantee of their freedom, and the key mechanism by which they influenced their political leaders. This in turn helps to clarify why many Italians, including those of modest means, would have desired Roman citizenship in the run-up to the ‘Social War.’
تتناول هذه الدراسة السنوات الأولى من التاريخ السياسي لروما في آسيا الصغرى مع ملوك المملكة الآتالية في برجامون([1])، والدور الذي قاموا به في تنفيد السياسة الرومانية في تلك المنطقة سياسيًّا ودبلوماسيًّا، وإظهار مدى استغلال هذه المملكة لتلك العلاقة في نشؤها وتطورها عبر عصورها المختلفة، حتى قيام أتالوس الثالث بإعلان وصيتة بالتنازل عن مملكته لصالح روما عام 133ق.م، التي تعد من أبرز الأحداث الغريبة التي شهدتها روما خلال العصر الجمهوري، فمن خلال هذا الجانب سنحاول تسليط الضوء على تاريخ العلاقات السياسية لهذه المملكة خلال الفترة من 197- 133 ق.م.
Within the ancient corpus we find depictions of people seeking refuge and protection: in works of fiction, drama and poetry; on wall paintings and vases, they cluster at protective altars and cling to statues of gods who seemingly look on. Yet the ancient evidence does not lend itself easily to exploring attitudes to refugees or asylum seekers. Hence, the question that begins this investigation is, representation of whom? Through a focus on the Greco-Roman material of the Mediterranean region, drawing on select representations, such as the tragedies Medea and Suppliant Women, the historical failed plea of the Plataeans and pictorial imagery of supplication, the goal of the exploration below is not to shape into existence an ancient refugee or asylum seeker experience. Rather, it is to highlight the multiplicity of experiences within narratives of victimhood and the confines of such labels as refugee and asylum seeker. The absence of ancient representations of a generic figure or group of the ‘displaced’, broadly defined, precludes any exceptionalising or homogenising of people in such contexts. Remaining depictions are of named, recognisable protagonists, whose stories are known. There is no ‘mass’ of refuge seekers, to whom a single set of rules could apply across time and space. Given these diverse stories of negotiation for refuge, another aim is to illustrate the ways such experience does not come to define the entirety of who a person is or encompass the complete life and its many layers. This paper addresses the challenges of representation that are exposed by, among others, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Liisa Malkki and Gerawork Gizaw.
In the 5th c. BCE, Rome is understood to have experienced a moment of transition. Scholars highlight evidence for warfare absent widespread triumph, social conflict within Rome, and regional disruption in established power dynamics, trade networks, and material cultures. Despite a revised understanding of the period, wherein narratives of decline were superseded by those of transformation, the long century after the purported fall of monarchy, especially in its middle and later portions, remains segregated in scholarship from the Archaic period and Middle Republic. This article seeks to reframe the moment as integral to events both before and after it. By way of an examination of material remains of architectural projects, I argue that disciplinary preferences for periodization, a Rome-centered historical telos, and hierarchical material taxonomies have manufactured an absence of remains and activity, and I suggest that the field categorically moves away from these practices.
In this book, Maggie Popkin offers an in-depth investigation of souvenirs, a type of ancient Roman object that has been understudied and that is unfamiliar to many people. Souvenirs commemorated places, people, and spectacles in the Roman Empire. Straddling the spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics, they serve as a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of a broad range of people - beyond elite, metropolitan men - who lived in the Roman world. Popkin shows how souvenirs generated and shaped memory and knowledge, as well as constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire's heterogeneous population. At the same time, souvenirs strengthened local identities, but excluded certain groups from the social participation that souvenirs made available to so many others. Featuring a full illustration program of 137 color and black and white images, Popkin's book demonstrates the critical role that souvenirs played in shaping how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world, and their relationships to the empire that shaped it.
‘J'ai passionnément aimé la Méditerranée, sans doute parce que venu du Nord, comme tant d'autres, après tant d'autres.’
Situated at the disciplinary boundary between prehistory and history, this book presents a new synthesis of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, from the rise and fall of Mycenaean civilization, through the "Dark Age," and up to the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period. This period saw the growth and decline of varied political systems and the development of networks that would eventually expand to nearly all shores of the Middle Sea. Alex R. Knodell argues that in order to understand how ancient Greece changed over time, one must analyze how Greek societies constituted and reconstituted themselves across multiple scales, from the local to the regional to the Mediterranean. Knodell employs innovative network and spatial analyses to understand the regional diversity and connectivity that drove the growth of early Greek polities. As a groundbreaking study of landscape, interaction, and sociopolitical change, Societies in Transition in Early Greece systematically bridges the divide between the Mycenaean period and the Archaic Greek world to shed new light on an often-overlooked period of world history.
Architecture in Ancient Central Italy takes studies of individual elements and sites as a starting point to reconstruct a much larger picture of architecture in western central Italy as an industry, and to position the result in space (in the Mediterranean world and beyond) and time (from the second millennium BC to Late Antiquity). This volume demonstrates that buildings in pre-Roman Italy have close connections with Bronze Age and Roman architecture, with practices in local and distant societies, and with the natural world and the cosmos. It also argues that buildings serve as windows into the minds and lives of those who made and used them, revealing the concerns and character of communities in early Etruria, Rome, and Latium. Architecture consequently emerges as a valuable historical source, and moreover a part of life that shaped society as much as reflected it.
This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque , do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history.
This article argues that the concept of migrant literature, developed in postcolonial studies, is a useful tool for analysing Greek literature of the Early Roman Empire (27 BC-AD 68). The city of Rome attracted huge numbers of migrants from across the Mediterranean. Among them were many writers from Hellenized provinces like Egypt, Syria and Asia, who wrote in Greek. Leaving their native regions and travelling to Rome, they moved between cultures, responding in Greek to the new world order. Early imperial Greek writers include Strabo of Amasia, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes of Alexandria, Crinagoras of Mytilene, Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus. What connects these authors of very different origins, styles, beliefs, and literary genres is migrancy. They are migrant writers whose works are characterized by in-betweenness, ambivalence and polyphony.
To move towards an understanding of displacement from within, and the forms of its overcoming, the following chapter brings into dialogue the ancient experience of wandering and the 21st century condition of permanent temporariness. It explores whether these are the same or different phenomena, and whether the latter is a uniquely modern experience. In particular, it is interested in the turning points that lead to the defiance of the condition and its regime. It traces modes of existence that subvert the liminal state and allow for possibilities of living beyond the present moment through returns and futures that are part of everyday practices, even if they are splintered. Such actions, it is argued, allow for the repositioning of the self in relation to the world, and thus the exposition of cracks within the status quo. The investigation confronts experiences that appear to be uniquely those of the present day—such as non-arrival and forced immobility. In its exploration it engages current responses to de-placement by those who have experience of the condition first hand. It is a dialogue between the work of such creators as the architects Petti and Hillal, the poets Qasmiyeh and Husseini, and the community builders of Dandara, with ancient discourses of the outcast that are found in Euripides’ Medea, the experience of Xenophon and such philosophers as Diogenes the Cynic. In so doing, it seeks to expose the way seemingly exceptional forms of politics and existence, instead, reveal themselves as society’s ‘systemic edge’.
A geoarchaeological coring survey of the Forum Boarium has shed considerable light on Rome's archaic landscape. We present the first empirical evidence that substantiates ancient and modern assumptions about the existence of a river harbour and ford in early Rome. Prior to the growth of the city, the riverbank — reconstructed as a high ledge at the base of the Capitoline Hill and a low-lying shore north of the Aventine — was particularly advantageous for river-related activities. However, the river valley changed significantly in the sixth century b.c.e. , as a result of complex fluvial processes that were arguably spurred by urbanisation. Around the beginning of the Republic, Rome's original harbour silted up, and a high, wide riverbank emerged in its place. The siltation continued until the Forum Boarium was urbanised in the mid-Republic. In order to build their city and maintain river harbour operations, the Romans therefore had to adapt to dynamic ecological conditions.
In 167/6 BCE, the Roman senate granted a request from Athens to control the island of Delos. Subsequently, the Delians inhabiting the island were mandated to leave and an Athenian community was installed. Polybius, who records these events, tells us that the Delians left and resettled in Achaea in the Peloponnese. Scholars have tended to focus on Rome’s motivations for siding with the Athenians rather than on what happened to the Delians. Furthermore, translations have tended to use the broad terminology of ‘migration’ to describe the Delians’ movement. Comparatively, this contribution suggests that modern categories connected to ‘displacement’ can help us recover aspects of the Delians’ experience. Particularly, a shift to the vocabulary of ‘displacement’ highlights the creative agency of the Delians in holding the Athenians accountable for their expulsion and in seeking recognition from Rome of their integration into the Achaean state. The application of these modern categories necessitates reflection on differences in the political, institutional landscapes that have shaped the experience of displacement in the ancient Hellenistic and modern contexts, as well as on variations in experience amongst the Delians. Ultimately, recognizing what these individuals experienced within the evolving third-party arbitration system of the ancient world leads us to think about the indirect violence of expanding political institutions in ‘globalising’ worlds, both ancient and modern.
For this issue of NBC, we investigate a range of different approaches to the archaeology of ritual. The attribution of unexplained phenomena to ritual practice is something of a cliché in public perceptions of archaeology (just try googling ‘ritual archaeology cartoon’!), and even within the discipline there are those who remain sceptical that we can ascend Hawkes's ladder of inference (1954) to such dizzy heights. Yet several recent books coming in to the Antiquity office show how both theory and method are advancing our understanding of this complex concept. Sparked by the publication of two major volumes from Cambridge, we here take the pulse of the archaeology of ritual, and find it in rude health.
This article aims at positioning the agency of the displaced within the longue durée, as it is exposed in contexts of hospitality and asylum, by articulating its key modes: contingent, willed and compelled. Using the ancient world as its starting point, the article exposes the duplicity in conceiving of the current condition of displacement as transient or exceptional. As such, it argues for the urgent need of a shift in the perception of displaced persons from that of impotent victims to potent agents, and to engage with the new forms of exceptional politics which their circumstances engender.
Cumae was the first city founded by Greek colonists on the mainland of Italy. It attained pre-eminence for a time in the Bay of Naples and its influence was exercised over a wide area for more than 500 years. Yet the detailed phases of its long history are still very nebulous and patchy. References in ancient writers deal mainly with its contacts with the rising power of Rome. Little excavation has been carried out on the site (apart from the cemeteries) and the published information is mostly of a general nature, more suited to tourist appreciation than to that of serious students. Serious students do not lack interest in the problems presented by Cumae, but they may perhaps lack familiarity with its topography. Whatever its faults of scholarship may be, this present study is at least the product of eight years' residence and assiduous delving into the archaeology of the Cuma/Bacoli Peninsula.
The story of Cumae is naturally divisible into two stages; the Greek and the Roman. Most accounts begin with a discussion about the date of its foundation, and where the colonists came from. But it is not the date that interests us here in this enquiry; it is the reason why exploring sailormen not only visited here but chose Cumae as their trading station, when there were apparently more attractive sites at Misenum and other places round the Bay of Naples; to say nothing of all the sites they will presumably have passed by on their voyage from Greece.
The supply and use of money are topics which lie at the heart of our understanding of the Roman economy and fiscal system. The view we take of these matters affects both our picture of everyday life and the economic models we construct to describe the structure and development of the Roman world. Monetary history is also relevant to social and political change, as medieval historians know well. In the great commercial revolution of Europe in the thirteenth century it was the increasing availability of money which allowed the payment of knights and civil servants and thus broke the hereditary grip on these functions, enabling the first post-feudal states to emerge. So in the Roman world the availability of money permitted the creation of a professional standing army and of a system of salaried officials.
One of the ways in which Plautus investigates friendship is through his use of the stock characters so central to Roman comedy. Among the twelve stock characters of comedy that Apuleius lists, appears the figure of the sodalis opitulator (the 'helpful mate'), who has not so far drawn much attention. Not only does Plautus use this character frequently, in five of his twenty extant plays he employs not one friend, but two, as a double motif. In these plays, Plautus uses these double stock characters to parody the ideals of friendship which had developed in the literary tradition, and to play with the conventions of drama as part of a metatheatrical approach to comedy. By a doubling of this motif, Plautus highlights friendship, in order to look at other literary or dramatic themes that include the ideal literary friendship, the supremacy of the Plautine slave and drama itself.