“What have the Romans ever done for us?” Roman historians have used snippets of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) to help teach their survey classes for decades. Memorable depictions of rival collegia or the Roman soldier correcting the Latin grammar of the graffiti of a Jewish protester are often recalled, but the most oft-referenced scene revolves around a question posed by a Judaean resistor named Reg (John Cleese). At a meeting of the People’s Front of Judaea (PFJ), Reg is the one who asks what the Romans had ever done for them. Members of the PFJ push back against Reg’s rhetorical indictment of their colonizers: sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, freshwater systems, and public health are all offered up by the audience as positive products of Romanization. Monty Python’s writers ultimately recast the Romans as a “civilizing” force in the region, an argument at once familiar and patently British. The film is a product of the classical education and colonialist mindsets of the Oxford and Cambridge graduates who wrote and then performed it. Leaving aside the fact that the first century musical is a fiction, the skit still embodies the core tenets of Romanization and the question of who, exactly, has the “right to narrate” the experience of the colonized?[1]
The wild-haired German epigrapher and historian Theodor Mommsen coined the term Romanisierung (‘Romanization’) in the fifth volume of his influential Römische Geschichte (1885) series.[2] Two decades later, the Oxford ancient historian Francis Haverfield further developed and popularized the framework for an English-speaking audience beginning in 1905.[3] Mommsen and Haverfield helped to provide the colonialist bifocals through which many have viewed Rome and its provinces over the last 140 years. Their casting of Roman culture as a “civilizing” force that ultimately benefits the people it subjugates was, at its root, an implicit defense of European colonialism. But what role has the development of postcolonialist theory played—if any—in shifting the paradigm today? In Danielle Hyeonah Lambert’s Decolonizing Roman imperialism: the study of Rome, romanization, and the postcolonial lens, she tracks the emergence of the opposing frameworks of Romanization and postcolonialism. The author addresses two pivotal questions: “how postcolonialism travelled to the scholarship of Roman history and reoriented the discourse on Romanization” (3) and then, “[a]fter decolonization, what is the merit of postcolonialism today?” (2). By retracing the historiographical routes of these two theoretical and methodological approaches and their impact on the field of ancient history, Lambert nimbly demonstrates how alterations to the standard narrative allow us to shift the understanding of both the past and the present in vital ways.
The book provides an introduction, four chapters, and a concluding historical intervention. Lambert traces the emergence and diffusion of the idea of Romanization, she then examines the entrance and application of postcolonialist theory within Roman historical studies. Chapter One takes us back to the context of the early twentieth century, at the height of European imperialism and American optimism. Romanization is portrayed as a product of its place and time in early twentieth-century Britain, influenced by German positivist thinking. Lambert charts the rise and influence of a “gentlemanly tradition” among Oxbridge noblemen, many of whom championed Classics and Roman history as a historical means of advocating for their own interests in Victorian and Edwardian England. As she notes, these men took for granted that the British and Roman empires were analogous, ultimately allowing Classics and the gentleman class to symbiotically define and sustain each other (18). By 1914 and the beginning of World War I, there was already a group of academics within Classics, including Roman history, that increasingly adopted the positivist approaches of German historians and the European mainland. This approach departed from the British gentleman class’s use of history as exempla. Haverfield hastened this move with a continued focused on elites rather than non-elites in his development of Roman frontier studies. He also proposed that the uncivilized but still clever Britons had simply adopted and then surpassed their Roman conquerors. Prosopographical historians like Ronald Syme and his landmark Roman Revolution (1939) carried this focus on elites further. In the early twentieth century, both prosopography and frontier studies either explicitly or implicitly presented the prime movers in Roman antiquity as aristocrats.
In her section on the “Dawn of American Scholarship,” Lambert examines analyses of Roman imperialism in the United States by discussing influential American ancient historian Chester G. Starr and economist Tenney Frank. Each scholar suffused their Roman histories with ideas of American optimism and, particularly for Frank, a belief in white exceptionalism. Although Chapter Three goes on to address the mid-century Marxist writings on Rome during the American Cold War (81-9), Lambert could have recognized that American socialists and Marxists wrote about Ancient Rome prior to this moment. Decades before the British Marxist historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix wrote about The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Cornell University Press 1981), popular socialist historians like Cyrenus Osborne Ward applied Marxist approaches to Roman history and championed the role of non-elites. Ward’s frequently reprinted works, The ancient lowly: a history of the ancient working people from the earliest known period to the adoption of Christianity by Constantine (Kerr 1888) and Ancient working people (Press of the Craftsman 1889), spoke directly to the artisans and craftspeople working and forming labor unions in America at the time. While Starr and Frank typified pre-WWI American academic approaches to Roman expansion, many writers outside of academia also championed the working people of Rome and the burgeoning corpora of inscriptions, papyri, and archaeology that pointed to their lived experiences.
Chapter Two maps the emergence of postcolonial theory in academia. Lambert starts with the poststructuralist movement in the 1960s, particularly the role of Michel Foucault in shattering traditional ideas of knowledge, truth, and writing history. From there, she traces the role of anti-colonial theorists and activists like Frantz Fanon and the formation of postcolonial theory in the late seventies and eighties. Lambert puts emphasis on the parts of these heuristics then reused by ancient historians and classical archaeologists. Lambert remarks on the influence of Edward Said’s 1978 publication of Orientalism: western conceptions of the Orient (Pantheon Books) and the impact of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s prominent theorizations surrounding postcolonialism and subalternity, together with the work of Homi K. Bhabha on the “right to narrate.” In Lambert’s telling, exploring “imperialism and its consequences” (51) was and is the fertile overlap between postcolonial studies and Roman history, even if the main questions posed in postcolonial theory stemmed from modern European colonization and decolonization. Still, many scholars in the field of Classics at first shied away from these emerging theories surrounding colonizing behaviors and their effect, critiquing whether such principles could or should be grafted onto Romanization. One critic noted that Romans were more “integrating” imperialists, as opposed to the “divisive” European imperialism from 1500 onward. Bhabha’s “hybridity” model, which rejects Eurocentrism in order to explore the liminal space between the Self and the Other, is perhaps one fruitful way to write new, postcolonial histories. The concept is at times criticized for not considering power dynamics enough, but remains an important way to grasp the space between colonized and colonizer.
Having established the main players and their theories in the first two chapters, Lambert moves on to look at how academics began to reassess Romanization in light of Marxist, multiculturalist, and postcolonialist ideas. Lambert offers an illuminating assessment of the “Early Adopters” of the postwar generation who “enriched Romanization discourse with social, economic, and cultural histories and started to question imperial epistemology” (89). She also addresses early opponents of the traditional model of Roman imperialism like Ramsay MacMullen and Moses Finley, while giving kudos to American ancient historian Stephen L. Dyson. His radical 1971 article, “Native Revolts in the Roman Empire,” published in the journal Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, is an overlooked gem given its due thanks to Lambert’s skillful historiography. By the late twentieth century, scholars like British archaeologist Martin Millett and the rise of Late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA) archaeology had destabilized but not yet demolished the old model.
At the end of the Nineties, Greg Woolf’s Foucauldian take on Gaul and the issues of power and knowledge in the province, Becoming Roman: the origins of provincial civilization in Gaul (Cambridge University Press 1998), took Romanization and its acolytes to task. That volume would also set the tone for the decades to come. Lambert here reminds her readers that book reviews were and still are an important source of critique in postcolonial debates. She uses Clifford Ando’s 1999 review of Becoming Roman as an important supplementary analysis of Woolf.[4] Chapter Three ends with a third appendix regarding French schools of thought, this one focusing on “History and Classics in Postwar France.” Of particular interest are the contributions regarding Roman North Africa provided by scholars in the 1970s like Abdallah Laroui and Marcel Bénabou. These appendices are learned and useful, but it is a bit jarring to separate them out so inorganically from the intertwining historiography regarding British and American schools of thought that precede them in each chapter.
In Chapter Four, Lambert looks “Towards a Paradigm Shift in the Age of Globalization.” She investigates the alternative paradigms put forth by scholars of antiquity in the broader diffusion of the theory and practice of postcolonialism from 1999 to the present. Lambert considers these postcolonial thinkers within a more globalized but neoliberal world. Marxism and multiculturalism helped pave a path forward for the increased integration of postcolonial frameworks in Roman history, with archaeologists leading the way forward yet again. Mentions of museum exhibitions that reframe objects through a postcolonial lens, such the British Museum’s 2014 exhibition, Meroe Head of Augustus: Africa defies Rome, demonstrate that postcolonial thought can be provided to public audiences—and not simply limited to the narrow readership of academic journals and expensive monographs.
Postcolonial methodology relies on transparency and attribution. Lambert stresses that even as many adopting this framework press forward, postcolonial tactics require us to recognize intellectual debts. For instance, the influence of W.E.B. Du Bois’ work on “double consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk [1903]), which would later influence historical archaeologist Jane Webster’s postcolonial framework of Roman provincial “creolization.”[5] Resistance or marginalization of postcolonial thought continued into the 2000s. In 2006, Eric Adler questioned Richard Hingley’s anti-imperialist takes as perhaps “fashionably hostile,” but Lambert’s keen analysis demonstrates how Hingley’s coalescing of top-down and bottom-up forces together produce an epistemological shift that is not a mere fad.[6] Just as Spivak turned to the subaltern Other, “a new group of scholars looked towards the subaltern Other in the Roman Empire” (158).
What, then, have the Romans done for us? At roughly the same moment that Monty Python’s members listed the merits of Roman imperialism in the provinces, Said’s work revealed its damage. Although some ancient historians have finally begun to ask, “What has Romanization done to us?”, other scholars and news pundits like historian Niall Ferguson continue to resurrect Victorian era defenses of British and Roman imperialism. The work is not over, and Lambert uses her conclusion to look to the future with a “Historical Intervention” surveying the present debate. The book is a valuable reckoning of the epistemological shifts in ideas surrounding Roman imperialism and the provinces in the last century and a half. In that sense, the volume should be essential reading for all graduate methodology courses and comprehensive lists in classics, ancient history, and archaeology.
New publications continue to integrate anticolonial and postcolonial methods into Roman studies. Decolonizing Roman imperialism joins significant recent works by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classicism and Other Phobias [Princeton 2025]); Walter Scheidel (What Is Ancient History? [Princeton 2025]); Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West (Bloomsbury 2024), and the contributions in the new Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory (Routledge 2024). Ultimately, the book illustrates how amending the narrative of the past remains a vital tactic, one that can challenge the status quo, destabilize cultural authority, extend the “right” or “permission to narrate,” and—to paraphrase Lambert’s own quotation of Salman Rushdie—to alter our sense of what it means to live and belong within historical spaces (7).
Notes
[1] Postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha developed the idea of the “right to narrate” (modifying and building upon Edward W. Said’s notions of the “permission to narrate”), beginning with his editing of Nation and Narration (Routledge 1990) and continuing to the present day.
[2] Mommsen, T. 1885. Römische Geschichte vol.5: Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian. Weidmannsche.
[3] Haverfield, F. 1905. “The Romanization of Roman Britain,” Proceedings of the British Academy 2: 185–217.
[4] Ando, C. Review of Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman. The origins of provincial civilization in Gaul, Phoenix 53.3–4 (1999): 386–388.
[5] Webster, J. 2001. “Creolizing the Roman Provinces,” American Journal of Archaeology 105.2 (April): 209-225.
[6] Adler, E. 2006. Review of Richard Hingley, Globalizing Roman culture: unity, diversity and empire, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.02.26.