Roman Past Research Articles

Teoderico e gli allori dei Magni

This paper deals with some of Cassiodorus’ letters focused on the relations between Theoderic’s kingdom and the Roman nobility of southern Gaul after the victory against the Franks; in particular, it examines the letters on the appointment of Arcadius Placidus Magnus Felix to the consulship (Var. 2, 1-3), and the letter on the restitution to the spectabilis Magnus of the properties he had lost during the war (Var. 3, 18). The contents and rhetorical strategies of these texts strengthen the links between the Ostrogothic present and the Roman past, so that Cassiodorus, for the first and only time in the Variae, establishes a full identification between the Gothic kingdom and the imperium Romanum. These messages must be interpreted both in the light of the external relations of the Ostrogothic kingdom and in the light of the new ties between Italy and the Gallic prefecture.

„Służyć Bogu, Ojczyźnie i Rodzinie”. Kobiety w faszystowskich Włoszech (1925–1940)

The article focuses on characterizing the ideological assumptions and policies of the fascist movement toward women, and, after 1922, those of the state governed by the National Fascist Party (PNF) and, above all, by Benito Mussolini. Women’s equality, among other things, was established in the initial period of fascism when its left wing was strong. Gradually over time as the movement came to power and especially after taking it in 1922, Il Duce and the party embraced conservative, nationalist social and economic policies that referred to the great Roman past in a desire to reconstruct the empire and increase the number of Italian citizens that would be newly formed Italian fascists. To achieve this goal, especially after 1925 when the totalitarian state and society was being built, the regime pursued a policy of the total control and subordination of women to the state and the system. Divorce, abortion, and the sale of contraceptives were banned, the “excessive education” of girls and the possibility of woman undertaking professional work were limited, while the roles of women in society as mothers, wives, and guardians of the “home” were promoted.

<em>Roman Culture in the Ottonian World</em>

Roman culture outlived its empire in the West. Any study aiming to assess its relevance in the medieval period must consider that related conceptions and cultural features may change over time. A significantly different definition may have applied to medieval periods compared to what we know from the time of the Roman Principate. This paper studies Roman culture in the Ottonian world by considering the significance and role attributed to the culture of the Roman past and the Byzantine present. The first section focuses on cultural elements related to politics and the exertion of power, the second deals with Roman culture in the material heritage, and the third discusses related non-material aspects. The study argues that although the Ottonians called themselves emperors of a Roman empire, elements that may have been conceived as Roman or were related to the Byzantine world were far from abundant and largely limited to the court. The Roman empire was part of their western heritage, while Roman and Byzantine models represented the sole known sets of adequate examples or sources of inspiration to represent western emperorship. These models had already been adopted and adapted by the Carolingians, who remained an important reference among their imperial successors. Still, while influences from Byzantine court culture were present at the Ottonian court, monastic and popular Byzantine culture was largely absent from the Ottonian world. .

The green granary of the Empire? Insights into olive agroforestry in Sicily (Italy) from the Roman past and the present

Groves with ancient olive trees (Olea europaea L.) could be considered remnants of old agroforestry systems. Anything but static, these agro-ecosystems have undergone drastic transformational processes in Mediterranean countries, where abandonment or intensification have been observed far more than continuity, expansion or renaissance, leading to environmental degradation of rural areas. Starting from this assumption and inspired by historical ecology and historical geography, we consider centuries-old olive trees as living archives of human-nature interactions and are thus proxies of past agroforestry. Our aim is to better understand what has driven dynamics of change and persistence, happening today as well as in the past. We first travel backward in time, looking at the ecology of land management systems during the Roman period (ca 200 BC-400 AD) and late Antiquity (ca AD 400-700). The special focus is the island of Sicily, the granary of the Empire, well known as a region where cereal production increased around the latifundia economy. We reconstruct the diversity of land tenure and the ecology of such complex systems, by combining records from Roman agriculturalists and palaeoenvironmental evidence of the past. We then zoom out, to look at today’s management practices in olive groves, thus drawing a parallel between Antiquity and today. Our work provides valuable insights into the correlation between certain organisation models, ecological strategies and adaptation capacity over the long term, clearly showing that human and nature dimensions are interconnected. Such entanglement may be a key element for ensuring these agroecosystems resilience. All elements that may contribute to the re-invention of sustainable forms of their management, for the present and the future.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz For this editorial team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages. Hans Hahn's "Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?" opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's "Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of 'Sexuality' in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers," Maryann Piel's "La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship," and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers' continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other "great men"; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities. The next essay in the line-up, "Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien," by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past. By coauthoring the essay, Meixner and Rocks present a model of scholarly research and writing that remains relatively rare in the humanities and that we wish we could have featured more often over the past five years. In "Reading Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist," [End Page xi] Katherine Pollock brings Kleist's gestures into the framework of contemporary performance theory to implicate the body of the reader in the cognitive production of meaning. We move to a section that resonates with responses to the persistence of bias; it is devoted to new work on "(White) Enlightenment Legacies." In four parts, the section showcases a direction in scholarship we believe is urgent: an inquiry into the role that German Enlightenment thought and the culture of the Goethezeit play in the persistence of anti-Black racism. These brief interventions recapitulate a series of conversations that have emerged from ongoing research and conference presentations. Introduced by Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson—"Reexamining (White) Enlightenment Legacies Through a German Lens"—the section builds on novel attention to literature, race, and the Global South in two exemplary ASECS sessions that Tautz attended ("New Horizons"), as well as Simpson's reflection on "Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies." Sarah Eldridge's "Interior Whiteness: Race and the 'Rise of the Novel'" previews the incoming coeditor's book in progress. The section closes with a Tagungsbericht by our colleagues Sigrid Köhler and Claudia Nitzschke, "Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights: The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany." While the interlude hashes out ongoing debates and the faultlines that chart the present and, hopefully, the future of German eighteenth-century studies, our final forum section glimpses into this future. It arose from a series of MLA panels devoted to the topic of "Unexpected Bodies in the Eighteenth Century." The contributors take a range of innovative and generative...

The medieval Muslim interpretation of a Roman municipium: The vision of Mārida (Mérida) in the work of al-Idrīsī and al-Ḥimyarī

The article analyzes the image of the Roman past of Hispanic cities, as reflected in works created after the Moslem conquest of the 8th century. Writers who wrote in Arabic had no reliable information about Roman architectural inheritance and tried to compensate for this fact by using other sources, such as prejudices, myths, legends and fantasies. Works of the descriptive genre (al-masãlik wa-l-mamãlik) demonstrate this tendency most clearly. The books written by the Arab Hispanic author al-Idrīsī (12th century) and the Persian writer al-Ḥimyarī (15th century) belong to this genre. Al-Ḥimyarī had never been to Spain (al-Andalus) but was very interested in this country and left a very detailed description of it. Both writers reflected the image of Merida in their works. This city had great importance in Roman and Visigothic times. Strange interpretations of the functions of some Roman buildings in Merida (theater, amphitheater, aqueduct, forum, triumphal arches and others) found in the work of al-Ḥimyarī were frequently taken from al-Idrīsī. The fantastic interpretation of the origin of the name of Merida (“residence of an honorable or noble man”: mashkīn ashsharīf) suggested by al-Ḥimyarī had the same source. At the same time, much better grounded information included in the work of alRāzī (written in the 10th century) was disregarded. The main cause of these incorrect interpretations was a lack of knowledge of Roman municipal life in the case of Arabic writers.

The Gate of Horns: History and Fiction in Ovid’s Cipus Episode (Met. 15.565–621)*

Ovid’s tale of Cipus, the returning general who discovers that horns have miraculously appeared on his forehead, combines narrative elements that point back to the poem’s early books with others that suggest historiography. Cipus’ own hybridity, therefore, figures a generic combination that simultaneously invites incredulity and belief. These different interpretative strategies feature in the different responses to the prodigy within the episode. The general’s determination to keep his horned presence, and the kingship it predicts, out of Rome makes space for Republican history to proceed as normal, while his likeness to other metamorphic figures within the poem complicates that strategy. As a representation of the Roman past, Ovid’s Metamorphoses necessarily summons up foreign, even tyrannical, comparands at the moment of their exclusion and questions the very reality on which history’s authority depends by grounding it in unbelievable stories. The second half of this article uses this Ovidian perspective as a vantage point for re-examining the blending of myth and history at the conclusion of Aeneid 6, intermittently recalled by the language and imagery of the Ovidian episode. Reading Vergil back through Ovid exposes the earlier poet’s refashioning of history to serve dynastic ends: Cipus’ prescription for the Roman future, ‘no kings’, sets up a Republican response to the entire Vergilian spectacle and suggests how its internal contradictions persist in the normative conclusions Anchises draws from it.

Identity Crises and Confusions: Metamorphosis Constantiniana

Public monuments are the materialization of historical events or persons chosen to be remembered by a society, official factors of collective and cultural memory, elements of the chosen identity and the ways in which the community aims to be perceived by the outsiders. In the series of identity searches of the current representative monument culture in Serbia, rare are the examples that include the archaeological imagery. The paper examines the ideas and motifs of one such sculpture – Metamorphosis Constantiniana, not from the artistic perspective, but from the viewpoint of archaeology and cultural heritage, as well as the meanings ascribed to it by the participants of its ceremonial unveiling, and finally the reception of this public marker by the current citizens of Niš. Although the sculpture is erected on the occasion of the jubilee of 1700 years from the Edict of Milan, and although tolerance, acceptance, and cooperation are deeply rooted in the Christian ethics, these principles are rejected and not represented by this monument. The possibility is also rejected that the monument is aimed to promote the linear connection between the Roman state and today’s Serbia – our “Roman-ness” equated to the European roots and “civilisation”, the narrative that pervades the public discourse, at the same time being a flagrant abuse of the Roman past, both in the political and disciplinary domains. The main value promoted by the monument is identified in the “Primal Parent” – in the “beginning” from which stems a specific spiritual vertical, continuity and the celebration of the people with history. Valorisation and sacralization of the past are also discussed, and the influx of pseudo-scientific interpretations, images of ignorance contributing to the current identity crisis

The reception of Roman Mithras in Transylvania in the 18th-19th century

Transylvania became part of the Habsburg Empire in the late 17th century. Between 1686 and 1848, the region’s urban landscape was radically altered by several large-scale infrastructural and architectural projects that also uncovered a substantial amount of archaeological material from its Roman past. Construction of the Vauban fort and other major urban projects in Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár, Karlsburg) after 1711 contributed to the creation of the city’s first archaeological collection, established by Ignatius Batthyány in the late 18th century. This paper focuses on the first Mithraic finds from Alba Iulia, the Batthyaneum Library’s valuable collection and the role of Mithraic finds from Apulum in the history of Mithraic studies.

New Projects, Old Ideas: Roman Past of European Canals' Projects

New Projects, Old Ideas: Roman Past of European Canals' Projects

Nābulusī Explores the Ruins of Baalbek: Antiquarianism in the Ottoman Empire during the Seventeenth Century

Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī visited and described the Roman ruins of Baalbek twice, in 1689 and 1700. He interpreted the site, however, not as a temple but as a palace built by jinns for Solomon. Nābulusī was very likely aware of the site's Roman past but purposefully played with its historicity to highlight Syria's innate sanctity. His interpretation of Baalbek reveals an antiquarian project in the Ottoman Empire that was constructed along variant but parallel lines to the better known one in Renaissance Europe.

From Cato to Plato and Back Again: Friendship and Patronage in John Tzetzes' Letters and Chiliades


 
 
 In many passages of his works, John Tzetzes likens himself to different figures from the Greek and Roman past in order to emphasise relevant features of his authorial persona. This strategy has been the subject of recent studies, which underscore the self-advertising agenda underlying Tzetzes’ constant reference to – and identification with – Greek and Roman models. Drawing on and going beyond this strand of literature, this paper pursues two main goals. First, it aims to situate Tzetzes’ references to these figures from the past within the broader sociocultural dynamics informing his self-fashioning strategy. To this end, it will focus on passages of his works dealing with friendship and patronage, two social practices that were crucial to any Byzantine writer. Second, the paper seeks to show that Tzetzes uses these figures to reflect upon his condition as a commissioned writer, skilfully employing them to create an authorial narrative that both spells out and plays with the constraints and contradictions stemming from his professional status.
 
 

Displaying plaster casts, staging Romanization

Abstract In 1911, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy, a grand exhibition of Roman antiquities was hosted at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome. Rodolfo Lanciani, main agent behind the organization of this Mostra Archeologica, opted for exhibiting mainly reproductions of ancient monuments from the far-flung regions that once formed the Roman Empire. The aim was to reconstruct a coherent image of ancient Roman culture, directed towards the celebration of both the glorious Roman Empire and the expanding Italian one. By examining the selection of material exhibited and its display, this paper will analyse how early twentieth-century visions of the Roman past and the Italian present were reflected in the Mostra Archeologica. This analysis sheds light on the impact of these ideas and the nationalistic biases they introduced into the formulation of modern notions of Roman provincial art and archaeology.

Psychoanalysis and the antinomies of an archaeologist: Andrea Carandini, the ruins of Rome, and the writing of history

Freud’s fascination with the ruins of ancient Rome was an element in the formation and development of psychology. This article concerns the intersection of psychoanalysis with archaeology and history in the study of that city. Its substantive content is an analysis of the life and career of Andrea Carandini, the best-known Roman archaeologist of the past 40 years. He has said and written much about his changing views of himself and about what he is trying to do in his approach to the recuperation of the Roman past. His scholarly publications and autobiographical testimonies are at the core of this article. After an early commitment to Marxism that ended in disenchantment and a crisis in his personal life, Carandini spent a decade undergoing psychoanalysis with the Chilean-born expatriate Ignacio Matte-Blanco. The latter gained a following as a theorist who built upon Freud’s ideas about the unconscious by producing a set of mathematically inspired concepts concerning the workings of temporality in human history in which emotional intuition took priority over the rational(izing) logic of empiricism. Much influenced by his psychoanalyst, Carandini developed a highly personal approach to the writing of archaeology and history. These writings are explored here in terms of Roman historiography, and in the wider arena of formulations of how the past is to be addressed and written about.

George Chapman’ın Ceasar and Pompey Trajedisi ve Arabulucu Cato

The classical Roman past has been a rich source for the playwrights who desire to make literary connections between the ancient political characters and real life figures. George Chapman, a neglected playwright of the seventeenth century, uses the Roman Empire allegory in Caesar and Pompey: A Roman Tragedy (1631) to respond to the political dissagreements which lead England into the Civil War. Through Caesar and Pompey, Chapman conveys possible scenarios that correspond to specific political events in the history of early modern England. Using new historicism as a theoretical framework, this paper analyzes Chapman’s play as a political allegory of the dispute between Charles I and Parliamentarians, leading the three kingdoms into war in 1642. Drawing a parallel between the Roman republic depicted in the play and the specific moments of early modern world, this paper discusses how Cato acts as Chapman’s mouthpiece and the ardent supporter of political negotiation rather than conflict. Thus, the paper contributes to the scholarship about Chapman who uses the history of Roman republic as a warning for the future of English politics during the Elizabethan period.

Crossroads and Barriers on the Roman Border: Institutional Authority, Roman Heritage and the “Đerdap” Projects

Although “the archaeological research in the Đerdap area represents the most important crossroad in Serbian archaeology” (Bikić i Šarić 2017, 67), the role of the two large research projects Đerdap I and II in the development of the discipline and the local archaeological community remains to be thoroughly reconsidered. In search for the answer whether the vast corpus of archaeological material and information gained in the course of these projects influenced the shift in interpretation of the Roman past and in presentation of the Roman frontier on the Danube, the paper presents certain scientific and research aspects and the consequences of the projects for the interpretive framework of the Roman period.
 It may be expected that, just as the fieldwork itself was a large opportunity for professional training and growing, the huge amount of information on the Roman border collected during the projects became a constant source for further consideration and disciplinary growth. The innovations introduced – multi-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, preventive conservation and integral protection of heritage – foreshadowed the space for testing of ideas. However, the archaeological record of the Roman period, approached from the culture-historical point of view, dominant at the time, is still principally interpreted according to the concepts formed in 19th century and significantly reconsidered over the last couple of decades. The majority of the recovered material is not published yet, the limited access to the “finds in boxes” obliges current researchers to work on the base of available publications, and the confidence in “discoveries” induces the transfer of ideas of original researchers without further reconsideration. The abandonment of the concept of Romanization is slow, mainly due to the institutional “keepers”, as illustrated by chosen examples, e.g. the monograph Vivere Militare est. From Populus to Emperors – living on the Frontier (Golubović, Mrđić 2018) and the exhibition Roman Limes and Cities in Serbia, organized on the occasion of the 24th International Limes-Congress, as well as the new permanent display of the National Museum, opened in 2018. It may be concluded that the constant affirmation of institutional authority, where the archaeological heritage of the Roman frontier acts as an academic symbolic capital, is more important than multivocal interpretation and presentation.

Roman Past, Jewish Future: Prophecy, Poetry, and the End of Empire

Although classical political values and their Latin sources continuously informed Elizabethan and Jacobean public culture, assessment of the Roman experience itself became sharply contested. By the 1590s reformist Protestants in both England and Scotland discounted the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire arc of Roman history. Instead, they looked to the Hebrew commonwealth, Jewish learning, and, increasingly, contemporary Jews. These developments issued in a preoccupation with Judeocentric prophecy and piety. In stark contrast, anti-reform Protestantism constructed a competing Christocentric piety linked with a resolutely imperial vision. At the center of this emergent push-pull within late sixteenth-century Anglophone spirituality lay conflicted readings of the Roman past.

Assessing How Representation of the Roman Past Impacts Public Perceptions of the Province of Britain

There is a lack of detailed research into the attitudes of the public in Britain to the Roman past. Information and views about the Roman period are communicated to people in the UK through education at school and also by the media (TV, films, the Internet). Museums and other heritage centres also provide interpretations for visitors, although these venues tend to cater for people who have progressed to a fairly advanced level in the educational system. This paper explores the public debate resulting from the BBC cartoon of a ‘Roman family’ in Britain (Beard, 2017). It argues that some of the extreme reactions to the idea that people came from North Africa to settle and to live in Roman Britain may have drawn upon some old-fashioned ideas about the past that have persisted in school education in England. It appears to be difficult for certain members of the public to understand that ideas about the past that they learnt at school were interpretations rather than ‘facts’ and that knowledge is constantly changing. That society in the Roman empire was highly mobile provides particularly informative parallels for modern Britons. To exploit this potential, however, will require archaeologists to take a more direct interest in communicating their research to a broader range of audiences.

Stories from the Frontier: Bridging Past and Present at Hadrian’s Wall

Abstract A corn modius, excavated in 1915 at Carvoran Roman fort, survives as an enduring testament to the memory sanctions applied to the emperor Domitian after his death. Domitian’s name has been hammered out, even though the rest of the engraved text – which reveals the capacity of this measuring vessel – has been preserved. Taking this case study as its springboard, this article reflects on how artefacts act as battlegrounds for the parallel processes of commemoration and censorship. It exemplifies, moreover, how a modern video-game for school-aged children which Stocks co-designed about Vindolanda, an Imperial-era Roman fort at Hadrian’s Wall, can serve a similar function. By translating the physical realities of that site into virtual images, and challenging players to solve a fictional murder mystery within this simulated environment, the game creates a new means through which students might be led into the past: it allows them to co-create history by selecting narrative paths and engaging intermedially with ancient Vindolanda. Far from being all ‘fun and games’, this process is especially effective as a pedagogical tool: players experience history not as readers, spectators, or listeners, but as visitors, endowed with first-person access to the stories and places of Britain’s Roman past.

PΩΜΑΙΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ ≠ ROMAN OCCUPATION: (MIS)PERCEPTIONS OF THE ROMAN PERIOD IN GREECE

The Roman period in Greece has had a relatively short history of inquiry compared to other epochs of the country's long history and, as a result, very little has been written about modern perceptions of this period. For various reasons, neither modern Greeks nor foreigners have been particularly concerned with the country's Roman past, a period which has often been relegated to a negative realm. As a result, misperceptions about the Roman period in Greece are rampant, with many fallacies being perpetuated by labels and displays in museums and archaeological sites throughout the country, as well as by pedagogical institutions and the media.