Hellenism, Cultural Assimilation, and Resistance in the Roman near East

Abstract

HELLENISM, CULTURAL ASSIMILATION, AND RESISTANCE IN THE ROMAN NEAR EAST by Walter Ward Kevin Butcher, Roman Syria and the Near East (Los Angeles: Getty Museum Press 2003) 472 pp., ill.; Maurice Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome, trans. Catherine Porter and Elizabeth Rawlings with Jeannine Routier-Pucci (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2005) xiv + 665 pp., ill. Late-nineteenth century scholars’ understandings of the ancient world were obscured by presentist frames, which equated Greco-Roman culture with the then-dominant European empire and the native cultures of the ancient Near East to the “decadent” and declining power of the Ottoman Empire. Influenced by the theoretical frameworks of “new imperialism ” and the “white man’s burden,” these scholars saw the Roman period (ca. 64 B.C.E.–middle 7th c. C.E.) as the high point of civilization in the Near East and ignored the role that natives had in constructing that civilization. While our understanding of the agency of subaltern peoples has developed substantially in the past one hundred years, certain nineteenth-century perspectives persist in contemporary scholarship on the Roman Near East.1 For example, Fergus Millar’s seminal 1993 opus, The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337, did not address the agency of indigenous peoples in constructing culture in Rome’s Near Eastern provinces. His assumption that natives in the region assimilated fully into Greco-Roman culture led him to conclude that the culture of the Roman Near East was entirely Greek.2 1 For recent scholarship on identity and Roman imperialism, see J. Webster and N. Copper, Roman Imperialism: Post-colonial Perspectives (London 1996); R. Laurence and J. Berry, eds., Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (London 1998); G. Woolf, Becoming Roman (Cambridge 1998); and S. Mitchell and G. Greatrex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London 2000). The studies of I. Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century (Washington 1984), Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century (Washington 1989), and Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century (Washington 1995) are important for the analysis of Arab identities and ethnicities during this period. 2 F. Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 33 (Cambridge 1993). This article uses both the Near East and Middle East interchangeably as convenient ways to refer to the various regions of ancient Syria, which stretched from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to Arabian Peninsula and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates river (and somewhat beyond). Ancient Syria did not include Egypt, which was quite different culturally and politically. WALTER WARD 194 Publication of The Roman Near East opened up an essential discourse about the effects of colonization on cultural vitality and creativity in the Roman Near East;3 however, as with all new scholarship, debates were initially very polarized. The first book-length response, Warwick Ball’s Rome in the East (2000), challenged Millar’s assumption that natives assimilated fully and concluded instead that the culture of the region remained Near Eastern despite Greco-Roman political control. To Ball, Hellenism was merely a “thin veneer,” a façade that obscured the power and persistence of Near Eastern culture. While Ball can be credited for considering the agency of Near Eastern peoples, his conclusions too are limited because they trivialize the colonizer’s coercive power. Post-colonial scholars have shown us that political domination does influence culture, but they have also led us to recognize that people—although colonized, marginalized, and subjugated—shape culture. Thus, more recent work on the Roman Near East is forcing scholars to consider the inevitable amalgamation of cultures that results from colonization. The two works under review here, Butcher’s Roman Syria and the Near East (2003) and Sartre’s The Middle East Under Rome (2005), represent the most recent developments in the debate over Middle Eastern culture under Roman rule. Employing a more sophisticated understanding of cultural negotiation and accommodation, Butcher and Sartre argue that a complex and dynamic relationship formed between Greco-Roman and Syrian cultures during and after colonization. This new framework leads them to conclude that the culture of the region was neither “Roman” or “Syrian” but a unique hybrid culture, which reflected both eastern and western...