In Die Zivilisierung der Barbaren. Eine Diskursgeschichte von Cicero bis Cassius Dio (Civilizing Barbarians. A Discourse History from Cicero to Cassius Dio),[1] Jonas Scherr has produced a monograph, which offers a history of the discourses of civilizing non-Greeks and non-Romans (whether that be by the coercion or the seductions of others, through self-civilizing, in partial or failed attempts at civilizing) traceable from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity. Especially where literary traditions thin out (the later Empire), Scherr draws on sculpture, relief, vessels, cameos, and (most adroitly) also numismatic evidence, images of which are provided in quality reproductions near the end of the book, before a very extensive bibliography and indexes. By far the greater preponderance of his study, however, is devoted to passages excerpted from all manner of written works, including epigraphy. It is in the analysis of these where Scherr excels.
The body of the work is divided into two main sections. Part 1, “Civilizers and Barbarians”, much the longer section, charts this discourse under three thematic subdivisions: “Lines of Tradition”, “Individual Civilizing Figures”, “Collective Bringers of Civilization”, followed by a neat summary. Part 2, “Civilizing without Civilizers” divides into four main themes: “Environmental Effects”, “Contact Metamorphoses”, “The Self-Civilizing and the Civilized Barbarian”, and “Imitatione Falsa – When Civilizing Fails”. These are followed by an efficient recapitulation. The whole work is closed off with a thoughtful coda.
Scherr announces his goals in a section of the introduction titled “Vorhaben” (objectives). These are set out, as everything in this book is, with great clarity. The author’s aims are well-defined, the delimited temporal parameters justified. If close readings are the means, the ends of this research is to analyze, the ancient discourses of the ‘civilizing of barbarians’ as this is imagined by persons in antiquity, in their widest possible sense, and to locate them in their broad historical relationships. Vorstellung ‘imagination’ (here the civilizing ‘imaginary’) is a key element of this project, as only befits a study of the emic view of participants within their cultural contexts. Scherr explores ancient identities in examining what ancient values persons identified with and wanted to be seen identifying with, that is, their elective affinities. His close readings of the words of historical actors gives a strong empirical coloring to his research. This invests all his literary analyses with something like the force of suitably sophisticated, anthropological field studies.
First he must clarify his understanding of these central terms – ‘civilizing’ and ‘Barbarentum’ (the condition of being barbarian). The term ‘civilizing’ is scarcely new when it comes to the description of processes of cultural transformation. It may have been coined precisely for such description. We find it doing this very work in Amyot’s 1572 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, where βασιλεῖς βαρβάρους ἡμεροῦντες is rendered “cultiver et civiliser des Roys barbares” (4). The ἡμερο- semantic field we find here (‘tame’, ‘reclaim’, ‘clear’, ‘make docile’, ‘humanize’), as with all manner of words for dominating, domesticating, gentling, and educating, is one of those stems for which we will be on guard, since they and their Latin equivalents (like domare, pacare, molliri; pacique imponere morem form a leitmotif across Civilizing Barbarians) will be found doing the work of the modern ‘civilize’, ‘civiliser’, ‘zivilisieren’.
Scherr locates his discursive history within and a little beyond the postcolonial turn in ancient studies, but draws subtle distinctions between his own intentions and those of recent others, briefly sketching the terrain of debates around postcolonialism and ancient studies (31-33). He engages intensely with a great range of scholars of antiquity from Mommsen (too ready to accept Roman prejudices as simple facts) to Greg Woolf (possibly his most important interlocutor), Vinzenz Buchheit (whose work seems unknown even to leading anglophone readers, 29), Rachel Kousser, Andrew Fear, Emma Dench, Daniel Richter, Clifford Ando and many others, including recent work such as that of J.J. Price/ M. Finkelberg/ Y. Shahar (2021, excellent on the contribution of the postcolonial turn to ancient scholarship in general, 31-3, ft. 116). For an important theoretical concept, Scherr flags the historian Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of ‘asymmetrical opposites’ (8-10). Greece and Rome constitute asymmetrical antitheses to Barbaria. The world is divided into this tripartite structure by Cicero (Fin. 2.49), but this triad, as “an analytical concept…so foundational” for Scherr’s work (14), announces itself in Greek writing by Polybius and in Latin in Lucilius, likely developed gradually as a trope from at least the 2nd century BCE until finding that Ciceronian formulation. On Koselleck’s idea, Scherr can refine the description of his own position; for the terminological opposition – civilized and barbarian – with which Scherr has to do, works only at a theoretical meta-level, having “only qualified direct counterparts in the source languages” (“nur bedingt direkte Pendants in den Quellensprachen”, 9). The semantic, oppositional structure with which Scherr is working is inferential or abstracted not ‘realweltlich’. ‘To civilize’ is an invented, umbrella term semantically radiating to many points on a concentric pattern. Significantly, it has several positive senses whereas, apparently, the Greek and Roman view was that the state of being a barbarian was a state of absences and deficits, a negative condition: non-Greek, non-Roman. This antithesis – civilized and barbarian – is a modern, theoretical contrivance.
Judging by the epigraph to this book alone (”Le barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie”, from Anthropologie structural deux. Paris 1973, 384), it sets sail under a Lévi-Straussian star. It does, however, navigate beyond that star’s hemisphere into more dialectical waters. Compared to a work like Ando’s Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, however, which nourished related questions about Roman social history on strong engagements with the critical theory of, for example, Bourdieu and Habermas, Scherr’s interlocutors are largely scholars of antiquity.[2] If Ando’s is a kind of high concept philology, and Scherr’s is less theorized, still it feels like an omission that in a work so concerned with Vorstellung, Scherr does not include any reference to Ando’s 2015 Roman Social Imaginaries. Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire. This notwithstanding, the great strength of Scherr’s accomplishment is the quality of empirical field work that comes from the many, very insightful, judicious, imaginative and well-informed close readings of such a range of ancient materials.
Drink Salmacis!
Of the many dozens of specimens Scherr situates and reads closely, I select one to try and convey something of his method. In a section of Part II called “Contact Metamorphoses”, Scherr considers the phenomenon of Salmacis (409-21). Vitruvius is the influential early source for this nymph and eponymous water source at Halicarnassus, notoriously “supposed to exercise softening and effeminizing effects, to corrupt morals and lead to sexual deviance” (409). Vitruvius, like Strabo but in greater detail, offers a rationalized explanation of this reputation of the spring’s waters:
But one takes the false view, who believes that those who drink from it become infected with a sexual affliction. It will do no harm, however, to demonstrate why this opinion has become spread around the world by false hearsay. For that which is said, that from [contact] with that water men become soft (molles) and depraved (inpudicos) is not possible, it is instead the perlucid power and excellent taste of this spring’s water (eius fontis potestas perlucida saporque egregius).
The water is so delicious and pure, that anyone, civilized or pre-civilized cannot resist it. It does not make one sweet and gentle or neuter virility, it simply is sweet and gentle. As such, it becomes a commodity product, having something like the soft power of Coca-Cola. It starts being bottled by one of the colonists, Vitruvius recounts. What we glimpse unfolding is the soft power of a commodity economy. The wild peoples of the mountains of Asia Minor, who had been plundering and raiding, are drawn into a complex, economy and everything that will entail about forms of social relation: seduction, softening, civilizing. Vitruvius’ passage continues:
Thus they came down one by one and coming together they were transformed out of their harsh and feral manner and, by their own will, brought into the style of life and amenability of the Greeks. This water, therefore, has obtained this reputation not from the depraving infection of disease, but on account of barbarian minds softened (mollitis) by the sweetness of civilization (humanitas).
The precivilized Carians and Leleges ‘by their own will’ (sua voluntate), are brought into the Greek way of life. Cultural contact proves a kind of positive contagion, of itself civilizatory (simultaneously economic, social and cultural) in its effect. The mountain savages come singillatim ‘one by one’, but are soon being gathered into urban intersubjectivity: ad coetus convenientes. It is as if bashful Cyclopes were slowly filing into the city eventually to become socialized, urbanized. The Salmacis treatment is not a physical sex change, it’s a transition of the mind from ‘hard’ and ‘feral’ to ‘soft’ and ‘gentle’. The passages throughout are often linked by these recurring lexical threads like duro feroque more…humanitatis dulcedine mollitis animis barborum… (410, ft. 80, Vitruvius 2.8.12). Terms, like molliri, durum, ferum, dulcedo, humanitas, and Greek πρᾶος, ἥμερος, ἤπιος, θηριώδης or ἄγριον form the bundle that gets tied up with synthetic ‘civilize’.
With his interpretation, Vitruvius is further away from the sensational dramatization of an Ovid and nearer the outlook of the people of Halicarnassus themselves. Scherr reproduces the Hellenistic inscription, a 60-line epigram, found in 1995 at the Salmacis itself. Rather than fodder for Ovidian gossip about transitioning, Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis are here represented positively, as culture-heroes, local spirits of a sacred but not magically emasculating spring. The people of Halicarnassus settled the heights, declares the inscription, they own the temple to the nymph of the spring Salmacis. Salmacis had received one of their young boys, Hermaphroditus, took him in and raised this ‘outstanding youth’; he established the institution of marriage and was the first customarily to build the wedding bed. Salmacis herself, meanwhile, softens (πρηύνει) the savage mind of humans by spraying her sacred droplets from the roof of her cave (positive contact, but Vitruvius, Scherr argues, is still implying that this ‘civilizing’ emanating from one Hermaphroditus can entail the dangers of excessive softening, ‘degeneracy’).
Salmacis is a culture hero here. She is not connected with a literal fusion of genders, but with that most determining of social institutions, the treaty alliance, which we call marriage, that fuses together into one social unit man and woman and, concomitantly, with the gentling of feral minds. But this civilizatory magic took place before the arrival of Greek colonists. That the original, indigenous inhabitants of Halicarnassus, the Carians, were long civilized and blessed by the gods, is another subtext of this inscription. The epigram places them on an equal, if not superior, footing with the Greeks, since the Greeks are civilized settlers, and they are civilized autochthons. This inscription presents a harmonious picture of ‘the processes of cultural confrontation, integration and change, which Halicarnassus as a “multi-ethnic” city had experienced in the course of its history’ (414). The nexus of colonization, cultural and ethnic integration and mutual transformations through contact and integration are finely exposed through an example such as this one, and through this setting together of different kinds of texts devised to different purposes.
Anyone with an interest in Mediterranean antiquity would benefit from and enjoy reading this very well developed, learned and rather brilliant study.
Errata
8 ft. 21: Cic. Fin. 2.49 is cited but does not appear in the “Register”, list of authors and works.
27 Body: in the indented quotation from Kousser, better not to hyphenate ”made” (into “ma-de” at line break), English only hyphenates at syllable breaks.
32 ft. 114: “entgegentreteten”.
119: In the lengthy passage quoted from Plutarch (Plut. Sert. 14.2) we start to see, inconsistently, Greek final sigma being used for medial in quoted texts (see also Aristides passage, 282, 283).
135: final sentence, repetition of “liegt” in “…liegt für Dio liegt die Wurzel…”.
171: first paragraph “die eine Zivilisierung”, is the repeated “eine”.
233: third line from top “zwöftem”.
298: (final word) “Zvilisie-“.
298 ft. 106: “die Geheminsse”.
330 (final paragraph): “Wendngen”.
354: In the quotation from Pernot “that is [sic!] becomes”: delete the exclamation mark, Pernot has simply made a typo (“is” for “it”).
376: “impliter”.
418: In the indented quotation from Syme “werde”.
452 ft. 141: “Denn das es nicht das ist…” instead of “Denn dass es nicht das ist…”.
455: 7 lines down “knüft”.
460: In the passage quoted from Whitmarsh, fourth line end: “repsonse”.
464 ft. 187: “aus aus Soloi”.
503: second line down “Ausblidung”.
511: In the Greek text of the Suda entry for Juba, accents and diacritics are misaligned throughout.
523: the passage from Ov. Met. 5.642-661, has the enclitic -que detached from its noun/ adverb deliberately throughout.
539: second line down “Hoffung”.
Bibliography
Ando, C. Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, (2000, University of California Press).
Ando, C. Roman Social Imaginaries. Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire, (2015, University of Toronto Press)
J.J. Price, M. Finkelberg, Y. Shahar (eds) Rome: An Empire of Many Nations. New Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Identity, (2021, Cambridge).
Notes
[1] I take responsibility for all translations from the German here.
[2]Scherr has lively interactions with the work of others throughout, with Ando for example, see 332, ft. 243; and, discussing Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (with the idea of the Romans as a tertius genus), 344-45, ft.294.