Rome's Cultural Revolution (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rome's Cultural Revolution Barbara Kellum Andrew Wallace-Hadrill . Rome's Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xxi + 502 pp. 145 figs., 31 color plates, 1 table. Cloth, $130; Paper, $49. In 1989 Wallace-Hadrill published a now-classic book review article entitled "Rome's Cultural Revolution" which hailed Paul Zanker's The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus as the most significant interpretation to appear since Sir Ronald Syme's 1939 The Roman Revolution. At the same time, however, Wallace-Hadrill questioned whether identifying what was distinctive about the age of Augustus also required isolating it from the long process of cultural change and contrasting it to the vicissitudes of the period of the late Republic which preceded it. This question in many ways becomes the point of departure for Wallace-Hadrill's 2008 monograph, Rome's Cultural Revolution, which analyzes the longue durée of the transformation of Roman culture in Italy from the fourth through the first century B.C.E. in order to map a social and cultural revolution parallel to Syme's political one (14 and 36-37). Augustus himself claimed he had the allegiance of "tota Italia" at Actium (RG 25.2), and for Syme the ascendancy of Augustus marked the triumph of the "Italian bourgeoisie"—"parsimonious, successful in business life, self-righteous and intolerably moral"—over the Roman nobiles (Roman Revolution, 453). Thanks to Wallace-Hadrill's deft interpretation, the complexities of the multiple identities of "tota Italia" start to come into focus. Part I, "Cultures and Identities," provides a lucid and detailed overview of the historical debates over the interrelations of hellenization and romanization and the varying applicability of post-colonial models—creolization, hybridity—for [End Page 330] framing such a discussion (3-24). The author concludes that hellenization and romanization are interdependent processes that are decidedly not chronologically sequential (26). His metaphor for their relation is that of the heart and the circulation of the blood, with hellenization as the diastolic phase in which blood is drawn to the center and romanization is the systolic phase in which oxygenated blood is pumped back to the extremities (27). Moreover Wallace-Hadrill maintains that Greek and Roman cultural identities are not strictly parallel types: for the Greeks, shared language and education (paideia) were central to their concept of culture; for Romans, their morality and their way of life (mores) (34-35). Chapter 2, "Dress, Language, Identity," presents the toga, the marker of Roman citizenship, vs. the Greek pallium (38-51) and introduces the important concept of code-switching: the power dynamics of the interaction of two different cultures in a bilingual system brought about by the knowing shift from one to the other in a particular context. Part II, "Building Identities," shifts to the built environment where the pairings in the bilingual system can vary—for example, late second-century B.C.E. Asisium boundary stones were inscribed in Umbrian, but the six town officials (marones) announced a new cistern, terrace wall, and arch in a monumental public inscription in Latin in keeping with the public image of their Latin neighbors (87). Frequently, the system is multilingual as at Praeneste where Italic, Roman, and Hellenistic elements interrelate, culminating in the spectacular Temple of Fortuna (106-16) or at Aletrium in the late second century B.C.E. where a program of urban renewal has aspects of hellenization and romanization, but where, in the rebuilding of its circuit walls and acropolis, local "Hernican identity finds its alibi in the reassuring continuity of polygonal masonry" (120). For the Oscan-speaking territory of the Samnites to the south, the author sets up a rich conversation between urban coastal Pompeii and the remote hilltop sanctuary at Pietrabbondante, culminating in a comparison between the theater at Pietrabbondante and the small theater at Pompeii, and a discussion of Oscan identity (128-43). Chapter 4, "Vitruvius: Building Roman Identity," likens the Augustan author of On Architecture to the late Republican authors Cicero and Varro in as much as they all create a theoretical basis for Roman practice and generate a notion of what was Roman by comparing/contrasting what was Greek, while simultaneously aligning the...