BOOK REVIEWS Roman Social Imaginaries: Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire. By CLIFFORD ANDO. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. x + 124. Hardcover, $45.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-5017-6. This is an interesting study about ancient Roman ways of thinking with some insightful things to offer about Roman culture as its empire developed. The chapter topics are “Belonging,” “Cognition” and “The Ontology of the Social,” although other subtopics such as political and ethnic identity, territoriality and conceptual affinity are also addressed. The author also studies the use of “archetypal concepts” to give “Roman social theory” particular meanings. These include patterns of “metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation” that serve to guide social thought. The author’s general concern is for the relationship between the “social imaginary” and “structures of language” (4–5 and n. 3). All this relates to the Roman Empire in that the political realities of empire sometimes required new forms of language or metaphorical imagery to make sense of new situations. Chapter One, “Belonging,” focuses on the concepts of civitas (“citizenship”) and also territory as being both political, denoted by civitas, and physical, denoted by urbs (“city”). As the Romans occupied other territories, such as Sicily, and broughtthem intoitslargerempire,adistinctionwasestablishedbetweencivillaw (ius civile) of a particular people and natural law (ius gentium) created by natural reason and observed by allpeople (9).The empire wassaid to be “tessellated”into a pattern of constituent states that were all subject to the Roman center while also maintaining to some extent their own distinctive systems of law. The matter of Roman soil (ager publicus) is also discussed in this chapter: the Romans had strongsenseofbelonging(“affectiveattachment”)totheland(soil)thattheirstate encompassed. Cicero and Livy both referred to the solum patriae (“soil of the fatherland”) that symbolized both liberty and connectedness for the Romans. Chapter Two, “Cognition,” emphasizes the role of ideation and analogical reasoning in making Roman government possible. The Roman Empire was variegated and had to be described and regulated, but how to do this despite the chaotic diversity of the imperial world was a problem. Also, there was the need to extend citizenship without destabilizing the “self-understanding of the metropolitancentre”(29–30).Forthe“languagesofanalogy,”Andodistinguishes between two types: (1) the metaphorical language of vicinitas, which compares BOOK REVIEWS 239 similarity to “geographic proximity,” thereby asserting a “relationship” between the things that are compared; and, by contrast, (2) quasi (“as if, just as”), which raises doubts about the capacity of language to give a full and accurate account of something. An example of the latter concerns the “Twelve Tables,” the traditional source of Roman law that contain no quasi. Later interpreters felt the need to apply qualificationstothemtofitmatterscurrentlyathand.Thisillustratestheprinciple: plura suntnegotia quam vocabula (“there are more things than words,” 40). Later, in discussing distinctions between the Greeks and the Romans, Ando concludes that for the Greeks, it was “descent or race” that bound communities of people together. Conversely, for the Romans, “juridical status, political membership, and affective belonging” were all connected: what kept Romans together was ius Latinum (“the Latin right”). Chapter Three, “The Ontology of the Social,” begins with the observation that in the classical period, the Romans saw the “separate systems of law” as parallel ratherthanhierarchical.Theiusgentiumwasseenasthe“aggregate”oftheworld’s various iura civilia. This understanding gave Roman law an element of “moral relativism.” In discussing the Roman institutions of law and religion, Ando contrasts other cultures in which these institutions had a “divine aetiology” that gavethem“socialauthority”;theRomansdidnotapplythisreasoningtotheirown institutions,butrathercombinedasense“historicalself-understanding”withways of describing needed innovations. Thus “Roman historical self-understanding” was related to the “ontology of the social.” In regard to law Ando discusses Roman borrowing from others in ways that improved what they borrowed as well as Roman intellectuals’ use of Greek nationallawtheory.Alongtheway,heobservesthatthenewerversionsofalawdid not replace the older law but instead refined it (62–3). Likewise in regard to the institution of Roman religion, changes in ritual were understood to take place as circumstance dictated, and innovation in ritual was also thought to work through “substitution” (69). So, as in law, change in ritual was made with respect to earlier forms. Still, unlike the Christian Augustine who taught that God and his law preceded...
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Mar 1, 2024
Penny Harvey Newell 
Open Access