Rome's Cultural Revolution by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

Abstract

460 PHOENIX despite certain shortcomings, Ando has given students of religion—Roman or otherwise— a complex and engaging look at several aspects of Roman religion and its interaction with Christianity. University of Michigan Celia E. Schultz Rome's Cultural Revolution. By Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press. Pp. xxiv, 502. Rome's Cultural Revolution represents at once the fulfillment of a program laid out by Wallace-Hadrill in 1997 and a very considerable expansion upon it ("Mutatio morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution," in T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro (eds.), The Roman Cultural Revolution [Cambridge 1997] 3-22). That program in its expanded form might be regarded as having two distinct historiographie ancestors. On the one hand, Wallace-Hadrill follows Syme both in discounting the importance of mere constitutional arrangements as an index of historical change in antiquity, and in regarding the gradual integration of the socio economic elites of the Italian municipalities into a Romano-Italian governing class as the great social revolution of the late republic and the Augustan age. But Wallace-Hadrill departs from Syme in regarding that revolution as at once concomitant to, and an accelerant for, a cultural revolution, which was also a product of empire. In that revolution, the wealth generated by imperial action, however unevenly distributed, combined with the influx of luxury goods from the varied regions of the east, worked to provoke higher and higher demand for such goods. This in turn spurred the development of hellenistic, Italian, and later provincial industries to meet this demand. The result was a remarkable cultural koine, in which varied forms of hellenistic, Italian, and Egyptianizing styles and motifs found expression in local media, adapted to local tastes and modes of production, and, crucially, available in different registers suited to the economic capacities of the varied, internally differentiated populations of the (western) empire, not least the freed (summarized at 37, 354, 360-361, 436-437, 439-440). This last strand in Wallace-Hadrill's argument, the focus of Part IV of Rome's Cultural Revolution, hearkens to the other intellectual ancestor of his project, Mikhail Rostovtzeff, whose work The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford 1926), as Wallace-Hadrill observes, was conspicuously neglected by Syme. (As Wallace-Hadrill notes [442, n. 12], Syme cited Rostovtzeff only once in The Roman Revolution, giving an erroneous account of his position on a minor issue before dissenting from it.) Throughout Part IV, Wallace-Hadrill suggests that the cultural revolution at issue might be understood at least in part as a "consumer revolution": the influx of new luxury goods, and the discourse on luxury that issued from it, both enabled the use of objects and practices as markers of social differentiation and spurred the mimetic development of analogous symbolic systems in less expensive media, involving (where appropriate) less elaborate forms of literacy, as well as alternative monumental, gestural, and symbolic spaces (329-338, 352-355, 370-371). Looking back in the "Epilogue: A Cultural Revolution?" on the argument of Part IV, Wallace-Hadrill observes its essential sympathies with Rostovtzeff s analysis in 1926 of the Roman revolution as consisting above all in the rise of an Italian, gradually western bourgeoisie. This seems to me correct, and the analysis in support of that claim is exceptionally well and usefully done. (If there is a major fault in this part of the work, it is the unfortunate absence from its intellectual apparatus of Bourdieu's Distinction.) BOOK REVTEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 461 The other parts of the book take up different themes and place them within different frameworks of analysis. Parts I and II, "Culture and Identities" and "Building Identities," strike me as less successful overall: Wallace-Hadrill moves somewhat uneasily between assorted modern theories of identity, many explicitly elaborated from the study of linguistic data (bilingualism, creolization, hybridization, métissage). The difficulties are thus both idiosyncratic and theoretical. They are idiosyncratic insofar as Wallace-Hadrill seems less at home in this material—the writing, elsewhere pellucid, is here sometimes crabbed. The difficulties are theoretical for two reasons above all. First, as often, litde or no effort is made to correlate any given modern theory of identity...