Michael Maas’s thought-provoking study The Conqueror’s Gift surveys the different structures by which the human population of the world was conceptualized and ordered in late antiquity. It explores the ways in which classical (especially Greek) modes of ethnographic understanding were adopted and then rendered obsolescent both by political transformations as dramatic as the fragmentation of the western empire and by cultural changes as fundamental as the arrival of Christianity and later Islam. Maas consciously nestles his study in the chronological gap between Greg Woolf’s Tales of the Barbarians[1] and Antony Kaldellis’s The End of Ancient Ethnography[2], although his approach is necessarily somewhat different from each. What this book presents is a series of overlapping studies of the period from roughly 300-700 CE which gather together current thinking on a range of topics. Together, they provide plenty of food for thought, although some interesting areas might have been explored in a little more detail, not least to explore the contradictions and interactions between these modes of understanding.
The opening lines of the Introduction outline the principles to follow: (p. 1): “The elites who control empires require ethnography…” The study is primarily concerned with the multiple ethnographies that were articulated from the imperial court (and later the episcopal scriptorium) and projected outwards, rather than the messier realities of the wild frontiers or with the production of new knowledge on these fringes. The focus is also chiefly on Greek and Roman writers from the Mediterranean world, although some Sasanian material is also analysed, and so too are a handful of post-Roman authors like Isidore of Seville. The effect is that of a cacophony of voices rather than a choral harmony, and this is deliberate: Maas resists concepts of a single ‘Roman ethnography’ that obscure this variety: (p. 15) “Roman ethnography did not offer a single view of society. It was written by people who held a stake in the empire and identified with it in often conflicting ways. We will encounter pragmatic diplomats, ideologically driven courtiers, zealous churchmen, triumphant generals, careful lawyers and learned historians setting down their opinions in different modes.” The Conqueror’s Gift ultimately argues that these practices of ethnography were central tools in imperial description, judgement and control; they provided a means of fitting the world into an ordered image (or an imagined order), but required a more or less constant process of revision and replacement as this world changed. This is essentially a model of imperial knowledge production control that is closer to Claude Nicolet’s bold image of Augustan geography than to Greg Woolf’s account of the changing middle ground.
Chapter 1. ‘Conquest and Curiosity: Creating a Roman Imperial Ithnography’ is a crisp tour of the principal writers of ethnographic works in the period before late antiquity. We are provided succinct portraits of mostly extant authors: Herodotus; Polybius; Posidonius (from the fragments); Caesar’s Gallic War; the Res Gestae; Vitruvius, Strabo; Pliny’s Natural History; Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania and Ptolemy. These are all efficiently sketched out and lay the groundwork for some of the basic features of what Maas calls the imperial ‘ethnographic dossier’: chiefly that discrete population groups can be identified and labelled, that they tend to be more barbaric the further they are from the imperial (or Mediterranean) centre, but that all had the potential to be incorporated within the ‘civilized’ world.
There are some surprising omissions from this list, even (or perhaps especially) if we are to consider the classical texts which had the greatest impact on later thought. Arguably, the single most influential ethnographic text of the pre-Christian period was neither Herodotus’ Histories nor Tacitus’ Germania, but the catalogue of ships in the second book of the Iliad, which inscribed the history of the Trojan war into the pasts of innumerable groups (and vice versa). In a similar mode, of all of the texts of the early principate, the Aeneid was certainly more important than either the Res Gestae or Strabo’s Geography in drawing together the different peoples of the Italian peninsula under the Roman umbrella, and in articulating the central importance of that city within the wider (populated) world. Maas alludes to the Aeneid several times over the course of the introductory chapter, of course, but that poem along with the Georgics was fundamental in articulating the very specific nature of Roman identity, not least in its relation to multiple other groups. And of course Virgil’s poems were also read, repurposed and repackaged by late antique writers for many ends, including the ethnographic.
Chapter 2: ‘Hostiles and Friendlies’ is the longest chapter in the book, and is concerned with diplomatic relations between the later Roman empire and neighbouring groups. The largest section of the chapter is concerned with relations with Persia, a region with a unique role to play in Roman conceptions of the world, and one of the few areas where both sides of the ethnographic dialogue can be examined. A particular highlight is the thoughtful exploration of the deployment of biological metaphor in diplomacy – the rulers of Constantinople and Ctesiphon addressing one another as brothers, or framing their relationship as that of father and son. Later sections address groups from Arabia, the Huns and Avars and the western kingdoms. Discussion here is rather more schematic, with some sub-sections of only a single paragraph, but the account of tributary policy is particularly deftly done. As Maas notes, while the distribution of donatives had once been regarded as a manifestation of political superiority (in a Maussian sense), commentators in late Antiquity increasingly railed at the perceived surrender to barbarian extortion.
Chapter 3 ‘Include Me Out: Ethnography, Settlement and Law of the Edges of Empire’ is concerned with the legal structures by which the political and demographic changes of the period were negotiated, especially in the west. As such, this complements the final section of chapter 2. Underpinning all of this, of course, is Caracalla’s Edict of 212, which sits some time before the main period covered here, but is outlined very clearly. The greater part of the chapter is devoted to the categories by which outsiders were settled (or exploited) within the empire (laeti, foederati, auxilia and so on). Such labels helped to impose meaning on a rapidly changing political situation, and are necessarily understood within an ethnographic as well as legal framework. The discussion here is excellent, and Maas provides a sure overview of the (often limited) evidence. If anything, the argument here might have been pushed further, to consider the degree to which the Roman mania for ethnographic labelling—manifested in documents like the Verona List—itself helped to bring new social and political structures into being, especially on the edge of the empire. As studies of more modern colonial discourses have demonstrated, such practices did not simply involve fitting pre-existing groups within an imperial cognitive framework, but were also in some ways generative of the group identities themselves.
Chapter 4: ‘Divine Providence and the Power of the Stars’ and Chapter 5 ‘The Controlling Hand of the Environment’ are both concerned with essentially deterministic notions of national characteristics and the degree to which these were challenged and later overturned by Christian thought. Chapter 4 explores changing attitudes to astrology in the period, a discipline that was connected to ethnography by the definition of the klimata through reference to the stars, and hence arguments that particular groups living within these regions might share a collective destiny. Chapter 5 turns to the more familiar notions of climatic determinism from Hesiod and Hippocrates onwards. This is the view that those who lived closest to the torrid zone were most likely to be clever, cunning, dark skinned and physically weak; those in the frigid zone to be pale, strong and essentially stupid, and those in what we might term the Mediterranean ‘Goldilocks zone’ somewhere in between these extremes, and hence could go on to rule the world. These assumptions were replicated in the writing of the imperial period, most obviously in the work of Vitruvius and Pliny, but their essential characteristics were nevertheless undermined by a growing conviction in the regularising and homogenising power of empire and of Roman law. In each case, the deterministic assumptions underpinning these concepts were further challenged by the development of Christian thought and new convictions regarding the nature of human will and divine agency.
The last three chapters of the book all relate to specifically Christian modes of ethnographic understanding. Chapter 6: ‘Christianity and the Descendants of Noah’ discusses the so-called ‘Table of Nations’ traditions derived from Genesis 9-10 in which the world’s populations might be traced by descent to one of Noah’s sons, Ham, Shem and Japeth. Chapter 7 ‘Babel and the Languages of Faith’ addresses how Christian views of languages as markers of group identity within a divinely ordained system were affected by exegesis on both the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 and the miracle of Pentecost in Acts 2. Finally Chapter 8 ‘A New Ethnography of Christian Heresy’ considers the inclusion of heresiological writing as a final supplement to the imperial dossier, in which categories of belief replace ethnicity as markers of difference. As Maas shows, the discursive power of each of these models derived in part from their malleability. Noah’s sons, Babel’s scattered languages and the evangelical impetus of Acts did not offer particularly straightforward models for ordering the welter of populations in a changing world, and so enabled interpreters to cast them in their own image.
As he explains at the outset, Maas’ ethnography is primarily located in the imperial centre, with correspondingly less attention paid to the messy interface at the moments when abstract models encountered the alien, especially on the edges of the world. This results in some surprising emphases: considerable space is devoted to the accounts of the Avar embassy to Justin II’s Constantinople in the work of Corippus, Menander Protector and John of Ephesus, for example, yet relatively little to Priscus’ famous account of the court of Attila. There is no mention of Sidonius Apollinaris’ reflections on the court of Theoderic, or the accounts of Aksum in Malalas and Cosmas Indicopleustes, all of which are important to modern knowledge of these different groups, but also represent the point at which ethnography, diplomacy and politics most obviously met in this period. Passages like these testify to an additional archive of practical ethnographic knowledge, which was being exploited, supplemented and revised to facilitate political action in a changing world, and perhaps deserve their own folder in the ethnographic dossier.
Similarly, there are elements in Maas’s discussion of Christian ethnography which perhaps over-systematize the contradictions of the classical inheritance, and the coherence of what emerged. Not least among these is the implication that Christian conviction in the salvation of mankind rendered obsolescent existing ethnographic categories. Thus, in the conclusion to Chapter 5, he remarks: “Divine intent was clear: individuals had the ability to choose their spiritual identity and to live and believe correctly. Thus, in a sense, identity became a moral choice and not something determined by the environment” (p. 184). In a sense this may have been true, but this leaves unexplored anxieties about scriptural lessons which state more or less the opposite (and in a pseudo-ethnographic mode). Thus Jeremiah 13:23 “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?”, or indeed the significant patristic tradition about black-skinned ‘Ethiopians’. These certainly attest to the breadth of the new Christian oikoumene but do so in ways which necessarily engage with existing ethnographic assumptions, even if only to overturn them.
These small caveats aside, The Conqueror’s Gift does an excellent job of highlighting the very different sections of ‘the ethnographic dossier’, and in showing how contrasting models of conceptualizing the world became operative throughout late antiquity. Chapters show how power was asserted, political or demographic changes rationalized, differences between peoples explained, and all of this reconciled with scripture.
Notes
[1] Reviewed by M. Shane Bjornlie, BMCR 2011.07.45
[2] Reviewed by Francesco Borri, BMCR 2014.05.06