Roman Identity Research Articles

Roman emperors and identity constructions in modern Serbia

Drawing from the constructivist approach to heritage that defines it as a reflection of contemporary social circumstances, we attempt to outline the key agencies and processes shaping the reception of the Roman heritage in contemporary Serbia. Our case study points to the process of creation of the main narrative of Roman heritage in the country as Serbia – homeland of the Roman Emperors and to its role in the construction and promotion of social ideologies and identities. Analysis of the increasing popularisation of the legacy of the Roman past in public discourse presents considerable opportunities for questioning the social reality reflected by the reception of Roman heritage in Serbian context.

Romanness: a multiple identity and its changes

In the often controversial debates about early medieval ethnicity and identities, Romanness has received little attention. But it should, because it is a particularly interesting case of the transformations of identity. What did it mean to be Roman after Rome? Early medieval Roman identities could be civic, regional, imperial, religious, cultural, legal or military; by self‐identification or by outside ascription; they could constitute one facet in a complex web of affiliations, or a stubbornly maintained point of reference for the survival of a community. The ‘Byzantine’ empire, the city of Rome, the Catholic church, an educated elite or a regional population could provide foci of post‐Roman Romanness in the west. Romans could be counted as one gens among others, or still measured by their imperial pretences. These ambivalences about Roman identity are not simply a result of the fall of the western empire. Numerous recent studies have dealt with the significance of Romanness in antiquity, and have shown that this was a paradoxical construction from the start, creating a wide variety of ways to be Roman. At times, Romanness was also ethnicized, although usually its political, legal and cultural definitions were in the forefront. The present contribution sketches some ways in which the classical multiplicity of romanitas affected its early medieval development.

Romana urbs: levels of Roman and imperial identity in the city of Rome

This contribution investigates how the urban Roman identity of the popes and the papacy developed in relation to the Romanness of the Roman empire of the eighth century and the perception of a ‘state’ (res publica, but also imperium). It then shows examples of how the city of Rome itself was used and perceived in papal writings of the time and how all these concepts were consciously altered by the papacy in the course of the eighth century to enhance Rome's ecclesiastical and political prestige as well as its secular power.

Discovering Non-Self-Translation via E.M.Cioran

“The central object [of translation history] should be the human translator, since only humans have the kind of responsibility appropriate to social causation. […] [T]o understand why translation happened we have to look at the people involved” (Pym ix). However, translation is not the only factor altering translation history, as non-translation can expose elements otherwise overlooked. Translation—reproduction—sometimes takes the form of writing—production—, yet this might not be immediately obvious, or explicitly declared. Such is the case of E.M. Cioran, a Romanian writer who suddenly decided to abandon his past after self-exiling to France in his mid-twenties. Curiously, he abandoned it completely, refusing to ever write or even translate in Romanian. Cioran explained in an interview much later in his life that his Romanian self was no longer useful to him after a certain point because writing in Romanian meant writing for no audience. This study searches to reveal the true nature of this switch as illusionary, since his Romanian identity managed to stay hidden behind the use of French.

Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 by Jonathan Conant (review)

Reviewed by: Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 by Jonathan Conant Chris Doyle Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700. Jonathan Conant Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. 442. ISBN 9780521196970. Jonathan Conant’s exploration of the varying fortunes of North Africa and its peoples after the region fell out of Roman control during the 420s and 430s is a welcome and absorbing study. The time frame extends over two and a half centuries, from the fifth- century Vandal invasion and seizure of North Africa to the Byzantine “liberation” of the region from the Vandals, before concluding with a brief treatment of the effects upon Roman and Christian civilization of the Muslim conquest, which began in the seventh century. Conant states that his study is focused “heavily on the interconnectedness” of post-Roman Africa with the greater Mediterranean world, and he argues that Romano-Africans endeavoured to hold onto their Roman identity through “political, personal, religious, intellectual, and economic ties” to that world (3). Conant’s methodology includes the compilation of a prosopography of almost two thousand persons who were involved in North African life during the period 439–700. He acknowledges that this database necessarily deals mainly with various elites, and, as a consequence, tells us little of the average North African’s experience under Vandal, Byzantine, or Muslim rule. As regards our historical sources, for instance Victor of Vita’s vitriolic account of Vandal mistreatment of Nicene clergy, and the exodus of many from this group, as well as North African secular elites, to safer climes (68–75), Conant urges caution against accepting their biases. Instead, he keeps as “open a mind as possible” in his analysis of his sources (14). After all, the Vandal overlords did reach an accommodation with those Romano-African elites who remained, though this was not always maintained. Again, the historical narrative presents us with opposing views on Vandal-Roman relations, especially from African writers. Victor [End Page 185] of Vita’s barbarian nightmare contrasts starkly with the poet Luxorius’world of a reconciled civilization in which classical education flourished (134–36). The Vandal monarchs legitimized their authority in North Africa through both violent and non-violent means. Elsewhere, they made efforts to draw connections to Constantinople and to the western imperial court and, when the latter ceased to exist, to various barbarian successor states, especially to Visigothic Spain and Ostrogothic Italy. Legitimation occurred in other ways, for example, through the emulation of imperial ideology evident in Vandal coinage. The Vandal kings reestablished the Carthage mint, which had not operated since 311, and they used and adapted Roman numismatic conventions such as the legend dominus noster and representations of the goddess Victory. Equally, the Vandal regnal dating system counted from the date of Carthage’s capture, thus evoking the Roman convention of dating from the foundation of the city (ab urbe condita). That is, the Vandals, like their barbarian contemporaries, sought as much as possible to continue a Roman way of life in the imperial territories where they settled. Chapter four describes the reestablishment of Roman rule through the emperor Justinian’s reconquest. Politically, the Byzantine campaign was presented as the liberation of Roman people from their barbarian oppressors. Conant makes much of the fact that the military and civilian administrators of Byzantine North Africa were men who came from all over the eastern empire rather than from Romano-African circles, a situation that led to what what he calls the “Byzantinizing of African society” (211). As in the case of the full extent of refugees and production exports from the Vandal kingdom, the ethnic makeup of the minor military and civilian officials remains unclear since the evidence for Byzantine rule in North Africa is “primarily epi-graphic” and applies to a higher social order (247). Nevertheless, as Conant speculates, Constantinople must have used local people in its North African territory as there is “little evidence for the large scale arrival of fresh troops from the east” (250–51). Chapter five discusses the Moorish kingdoms that emerged in the fifth-century Maghrib interior. At different times, the Moors were both...

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez

reviews between democracy and despotism well enough to want to defend their liberties” (8 January 1940). “Most of them [the intelligentsia] are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods , secret police, systematic falsification of history, etc., so long as they feel it is on ‘our’ side” (18 May 1944). The political sense exemplified in George Orwell’s letters is frightfully prescient in today’s political world. To some, the Orwellian world of government surveillance, politically correct thinking, and ignorance by citizens of the basics of representative democracy seem all too obvious . The danger—as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-Four—is not from our suppressors, but from a people’s willingness to be suppressed. In his relatively brief life (he died of tuberculosis at age forty-seven), Orwell’s genius was in his political observations of the new world of post–World War II society. He wrote knowingly of fascism, communism, and imperialism. He was intellectually clear and wrote in straightforward language of the dangers of realpolitik. Orwell did not live long enough to write his autobiography. A Life in Letters, along with Peter Davison’s editing of twenty volumes of Orwell’s writings and his diaries, aptly illustrates his life and hopes. Davison’s annotations and short biographies of his correspondents complement these fascinating—some momentous and others mundane—letters. The letters trace Orwell’s life from the 1930s (there is the odd letter to his mother in 1911 and portions of a letter to Cyril Connolly in 1920) to late 1949, in a letter written to Sir Richard Rees (Orwell’s literary executor, along with his wife) before he died: “Thanks so much for seeing about the boat and for rearranging my books. . . . I am getting on quite well and feel distinctly better since being here [in hospital].” Marrying his second wife, Sonia Brownell, in October 1949—his first wife died at age thirty-nine following surgery—he had looked forward to being well enough to recuperate in Switzerland but died the morning of January 12, 1950, with “his beloved fishing rods standing in the corner of his hospital room.” In distilling the 1,700 letters written by Orwell, Davison set himself two goals: the letters should illustrate his life and hopes, and “each should be of interest in its own right.” This volume admirably fulfills this twofold mission; it is a tribute to Davison’s decades-long scholarship on Orwell’s life. Daniel P. King Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin Richard Rodriguez. Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography. New York. Viking. 2013. isbn 9780670025305 Good essayists make us reflect on the world that we presume to know. Their ideas, often controversial, remind us that life is full of mystery, wonder, and change. Like the great essayists Octavio Paz and Edward Said, Richard Rodriguez writes from a perspective that is simultaneously grounded in place but with a worldly sense of history. Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography , Rodriguez’s fourth book, examines the connection between the Abrahamic desert religions and post–9/11 religious thought and the related “desertification” of society. The opening chapter, “Ojalá,” teaches us that the Moors and Allah—the Muslim interpretation of the same God that Christians and Jews worship—are not far removed from the Spanish memory and 74 worldliteraturetoday.org Vera Schwarcz Ancestral Intelligence: Renditions and Poems Antrim House In this surprising collection of poems, Vera Schwarcz interprets the life of Chinese historian Chen Yinke (1890–1969) and laments the changes imposed upon traditional Chinese characters throughout history. Both parts of this compilation illustrate how language simultaneously experiences and protests political and personal hardship. In doing so, the author weaves her Romanian identity into a universal one. Donal Ryan The Spinning Heart Steerforth Press Winner of the Irish Book Awards Book of the Year and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, The Spinning Heart captures the frustration and heartbreak of Ireland’s financial collapse as experienced by the tenants of a rural Irish town. Twenty-one honest and scalding human voices conspire to tell the tale of the myriad struggles engendered by financial desperation. Nota Bene bloodline and, subsequently, Mexico, Mexican America, and the Americas. Rodriguez also reminds us that Muslims , Christians, and Jews share the same physical and cultural...

Roman identity in Byzantium: a critical approach

Collective identity in the so-called Byzantine Empire is a much-debated issue that has drawn a lot of attention over the years. The current paper attempts a critical assessment of the hitherto main lines of thinking about Byzantine identity, focussing on the period between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. By proposing an alternative view on source material based on a comprehensive theoretical framework, I argue that a conceptualization of the collective identity of this medieval imperial social order with its constantly fluctuating geopolitical and cultural boundaries needs to be disconnected from essentialist and reifying views on perennial ethnicity as well as from the modern phenomenon of the nation-state

“Narod poeta, umjetnika, heroja, svetaca, mislilaca, znanstvenika, putnika i transmigranata”: kulturna politika fašističke Italije i njezin utjecaj na rumunjsku nacionalnu latinsku svijest i identitet

“Narod poeta, umjetnika, heroja, svetaca, mislilaca, znanstvenika, putnika i transmigranata”: kulturna politika fašističke Italije i njezin utjecaj na rumunjsku nacionalnu latinsku svijest i identitet

Orthodox Icons in Romanian State Schools: Symbols of Romania’s Orthodox Identity?

The article refers to the debate over the presence of the Orthodox icons in the Romanian state schools which, after the fall of communism in Romania, replaced the dominant portraits of the dictator. Answering the question whether they might be considered as a symbol of Orthodox identity some important moments from the history of Christianity in Romania are analysed. The article presents also the main points of the proponents and opponents in the discussion over the icons in the context of broader Romanian identity.

An Important Episode in the Evolution of Romanian Identity in the 18ᵗʰ Century: from Uniatism to the Transylvanian School

The article focuses on the process, events and attempts from the end of the 17ᵗʰ and the beginning of the 18ᵗʰ century to unite the Romanian Orthodox Church or rather a part of it belonging to the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania with the Roman Catholic Church. The author analyzes the challenges and consequences of such a union for the Romanian identity. To overcome the controversies and strengthen a common Romanian identity, the cultural program of the Transylvanian School movement was initiated.

Greek History

The study of ethnicity and the interaction between cultures has been a popular topic with ancient historians recently, and this trend continues. While the interconnection between Greek identity and culture and Roman power during the Second Sophistic has attracted significant attention in the last few decades, the earlier periods have remained relatively unexamined. This is now nicely redressed by an important collection of essays edited by Thomas Schmitz and Nicolas Wiater, which focuses on the first century bce. One main theme of the volume concerns the interaction between Greek and Roman identities, and the ways in which authors reinterpret and destabilize them: the interaction between Rome and Greek classicism (Dihle), the rethinking of Greek and Roman cultures and identities in Dionysius (Wiater), the impact of Rome on its resident Greek authors (Hibder), the interpretatio graeca of Augustus by Nicolaus of Damascus (Pausch), the Roman context of Mytilenean intellectuals and their self-fashioning (Bowie), and Greek poets and their Roman patrons (Whitmarsh). A second main theme concerns the interaction with the Greek past and its classics, and the extent to which the classicist approaches of the Second Sophistic are already present in the first century. This is variously explored, from Dionysius’ exploration of stylistic models (Fox), Diodorus’ image of Athens (Schmitz), the tendency to systematization in various intellectual fields on the basis of the classics (Most), the grammarians’ attitude to Greek dialect (Hintzen), and the Homeric quotations in Chariton (Baumbach), to the (re)building projects in Athens (Borg).

Landscapes of war

Drawing on established connections between Roman identity and an agricultural landscape, this paper examines how the imagery of disrupted pastoral and agrarian landscapes and characters represent the effects of civil war on the Roman people in Vergil’s Aeneid and Lucan’s Bellum Civile. While disturbance and turmoil are already a part of the natural landscape in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, in epic, a genre that concerns itself with how empire and imperial power mediate Roman identity, the displacement of shepherds and agriculture partially redefines Roman identity in militaristic terms. Vergil’s pastoral characters, written into military roles as civic landscapes displace agrarian ones in the Aeneid, survive but fail to find a place in Lucan’s ruined and desolate Pharsalian landscape in the Bellum Civile. There, the broken natural landscape, unfit for agriculture, pastoralism, or trade, mirrors the redefinition of what is “Roman” and the occlusion of Rome’s link to an idealized bucolic past.

Christ Circumcised. A Study in Early Christian History and Difference by Andrew S. Jacobs (review)

Christ Circumcised. A Study in Early Christian History and Difference. By Andrew S. Jacobs. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 314. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4397-0.)Discussion of ancient Christianity has become increasingly concerned with the idea of identity. In a reaction against older discussions of the subject, scholars, influenced by recent theoretical models that have their origins in postmodernity, have emphasized the diversity of the early Christian movement and the constructed character of the identities promoted by individual Christians, including those who came to be associated with the orthodox. In the discussion of the construction of such identities, much significance has been attached to the role of the and to the related idea of boundary formation and exclusion. The book under review emerges out of these concerns, but critiques what it terms the prevailing socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion (p. 4) in favor of an approach, based upon psychoanalysis, in which the self is a partially realized fantasy from which the other is never completely separated:In this understanding of personhood, the 'other' is for the 'self an object of identification and distinction (p. 12). Such a view of identity will be used to articulate Christian understandings of Judaism, in particular as these were refracted through the idea of Jesus's circumcision.In this learned and wide-ranging book,Andrew S.Jacobs covers a bevy of subjects.The book is set against the overarching background of Rome and its Empire, in which Jacobs sees questions of difference and their incorporation as central to Roman identity and shows how Roman understanding of circumcision in some ways embodied these ideas. Jacobs writes authoritatively on a range of Christian texts that have traditionally been described as adversus Judaeos, showing how their engagement with the circumcision of Christ simultaneously rejects and reinscribes its originary Jewishness (p. 12), noting also how the dialogical form that some of these texts take also implies a more blurred and complex understanding of Christian identity. Chapters follow on heresiological writing, again emphasizing a similar point about the capacity for those who are supposedly excluding to reabsorb contents of the ideas of those they are opposing (here introducing Julia Kristeva's idea of the abject in which rejection and absorption of the other are brought together and the question of identity rendered ambiguous) and on St. …

The Monetization of Temperate Europe

AbstractBy considering monetization across the Iron Age and Roman periods and across the whole of Temperate Europe some major developments become apparent. The spread of coinage in the Iron Age bears some relationship to the eventual extent of the Roman Empire. Coins stand in the archaeological record for systems of doing things, for ways people relate to each other and to things, and for ways of conceptualizing the world. They provide a useful way to approach the meeting of the worlds of the Iron Age and of Rome. Material forms of being Roman became increasingly important as a dimension of Roman identity. The commercialization implicit in Rome's ‘Cultural Revolution’ was underpinned by the extension of Roman-style monetization. In this light the monetization of Temperate Europe emerges as a process of considerable importance.

ROMAN IDENTITY AND ASSIMILATION - S. Bell, I.L. Hansen (edd.) Role Models in the Roman World. Identity and Assimilation. (Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 7.) Pp. xii + 316, ills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, for the American Academy in Rome, 2008. Cased, US$85. ISBN: 978-0-472-11589-1.

ROMAN IDENTITY AND ASSIMILATION - S. Bell, I.L. Hansen (edd.) Role Models in the Roman World. Identity and Assimilation. (Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 7.) Pp. xii + 316, ills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, for the American Academy in Rome, 2008. Cased, US$85. ISBN: 978-0-472-11589-1.

Roman Infantry Helmets and Commemoration among Soldiers

It has long been recognized that perceptions of individual posthumous memory and the commemorative devices harnessed to maintain it differ greatly through time. In pre-Christian Rome, the belief that an individual enjoyed an afterlife through the perpetuation of their memory before and after death was central to Roman social identity and encompassed not only the act of reproducing or recalling anindividual or an event, but reflected an individual’s character and virtues. Recent studies demonstrate that the material correlates of commemorative behavior pervaded the Roman visual landscape. Although the majority of evidence bespeaking commemoration represents the elite, the importance of memory was widely recognized. It would, therefore, be difficult to assume that only the upper classes engaged in such rituals. Roman soldiers, as individuals in a profession that took them far from their native land, also practicedsuch behavior. Without the means to engage in traditional commemorative practices, Roman legionaries devised unique methods to fulfill their commemorative needs. This investigation argues that the personalization of infantry helmets did more than denote personal property. It also became a tool created by soldiers to safeguard their memory. As objects that pervaded the visual landscape of the military realm, legionary helmets became an ideal medium for commemorative behavior.

Anti-Modern without being Non-Modern? Attitudes to Modernity in the Writings of Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Stăniloae in the Interwar Period

This article examines attitudes towards modernity in the writings of the theologians Nichifor Crainic and Dumitru Stăniloae, leading figures in the Romanian intellectual current of Orthodoxism. The question of modernity in Romanian public discourses is closely connected to the question of national identity. I am therefore focusing on the contributions by these two theologians to the discourse on national Romanian identity in the interwar period, when crucial contributions to this discourse originated. After an overview of the historical preconditions, I introduce the two theologians and their contributions to the discourses on modernity and national identity between the two World Wars. I conclude that the concepts of modernity of Crainic and Stăniloae had several dimensions and that their attitudes were ambiguous. In certain aspects, the theologians' concepts may be called ‘anti-modernist’, but their attitudes as well as their thinking cannot be characterised as ‘anti-modern’. I add a postscript on some renewed discussions of the ideas of Crainic and Stăniloae in Romanian Orthodox publications since the turn of the millennium.

Rumuńscy Arumuni i ich język

Until 1913, all Aromanians lived in the same state i.e. the Ottoman Empire, on equal terms with the other non-Muslim subjects of the sultan. After the Balkan wars, they did not succeed in forming their own state and they became separated by the new borders of the four countries: Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania. That quickly led to ethnic and linguistic tensions, especially in Greece, which continued its policy of forced assimilation of the Vlachs. The mass emigration to Romania, considered by many Vlachs as their only real homeland – first to the Southern and then to the Northern Dobruja – saved them from persecutions but did not protect their ethnic, linguistic and cultural distinctness from assimilation. After having settled in Romania, Aromanians adopted the Romanian identity and language according to the theory that they represented a part of the Romanian nation and their language – a dialect of Romanian. This traditional, pro-Romanian point of view was the only and official one for a half century, until the late 1970s. It still subsists but competes now with a new, opposite point of view, considered and named a “separatist” one. This new point of view envisages the Aromanians to be a separate nation with a distinct language and requires their recognition as a minority group on behalf of the Romanian authorities. Regarding the linguistic aspect, the Aromanian language used in Romania is strongly influenced by Romanian, both lexically and gramatically. For the Aromanian language, Romanian represents a source of modern life or abstract vocabulary and a model of morphosyntactic structures. As for the linguistic analysis in our present study, it is based on Aromanian-language articles and literary works, translated or original, written by Aromanian intellectuals from Romania (some of whom subsequently having emigrated in the meantime and lived in other countries).

Rome's Cultural Revolution (review)

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...

Ravenna in Late Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: Ravenna in Late Antiquity Robin M. Jensen Ravenna in Late Antiquity Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 0521836727 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s four Book Review Editors: Michael Kulikowski (mek31@psu.edu); Richard Lim (rlim333@comcast.net); Hagith Sivan (helenasivan@yahoo.com); and Dennis Trout (troutd@missouri.edu). Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis begins her study of fifth and sixth-century Ravenna by explaining how the city could be called the “capital” city of the western Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. The chronicler Agnellus gave it this title in the ninth century and it was applied again in the twentieth by the art historian Friedrich Deichmann, author of the monumental four-volume study, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes (1969–1989). Setting this matter before the reader from the outset is crucial to any study of Ravenna’s political, architectural, and religious history because, even though the span of years when Ravenna rightfully possessed that title (400–751) were relatively few in comparison to Rome or Constantinople, those three and a half centuries were marked by dramatic dynastic shifts, theological and ecclesiological struggles, and stupendous architectural and artistic achievements. These shifts and struggles were born of Ravenna’s particular straddling of Gothic and Roman identities, Arian and Nicene theologies, and eastern and western cultures. Yet, today one would hardly recognize the almost sleepy modern university town and tourist destination as having briefly been a center of world power, a place where many divergent traditions met and blended. Deliyannis’s project is to make that obscure identity apparent to her readers and bring the late antique cities back to life. In most respects she accomplishes this goal. More importantly, however, she provides a thoroughly researched and richly documented study that guides her reader through a daunting mountain of archaeological and analytical studies that comprises the Ravenna scholarly corpus, much of it inaccessible to English-only readers. Because she has so much material to manage, the book ultimately becomes more a study of the city’s political history by way of a presentation of its monumental buildings and their interior decoration, weaving the political, social, and ecclesial history in as she goes. This is slightly disappointing, given that Deliyannis, an editor and translator of Agnellus’ history and undoubtedly steeped in the sermons of Peter Chrysologus, might also have presented an equally valuable analysis of the complex intellectual, cultural, and even liturgical side of the story. Nevertheless, her decision to organize materials in this form is difficult to fault, mainly because it makes the book particularly useful to art and architectural historians. Should the present work appear in paperback, it will serve as a helpful guidebook for highly motivated tourists. In the midst of sometimes plodding descriptions of buildings and their decoration, Deliyannis’s prose remains lucid and occasionally sparkles. Small details [End Page 174] are given appealing significance, such as the discussion of the mustachioed apostle in the Arian baptistery procession (p.187). She is crucially attentive to the question of later modifications of the mosaics—a matter that makes discussions of their interpretation extremely vexing. She provides her own hypothetical interpretations of compositional programs, as in her thoughtful analysis of the iconographic scheme in the San Vitale presbytery (pp. 243–50). In this instance, she offers her own insight into the potential meaning of the whole, a move that makes this book rise above merely reporting (and sometimes critiquing) what other historians have proposed. A book on Ravenna deserves to be lavish so the presence of a mere handful of color plates is regrettable. Yet, I suppose, that color photos of nearly all of the monuments discussed in the book are readily available on the Internet is a consolation. Thankfully, black and white photos as well as drawings are appropriately placed within the text itself. In conclusion, I highly recommend this book and am grateful to the author for its publication. Robin M. Jensen (Vanderbilt University) Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press