[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
In a 2017 chapter on provincial revolts in the early Roman Empire, Myles Lavan maintained the narrative histories upon which we rely are “ambitious and sophisticated texts that need to be understood on their own terms before we can redeploy them for our purposes.”[1] Though true of any historical reconstruction, it is especially true of reconstructing episodes of popular unrest that we must consider the elite socio-political milieu and individual authors’ aims and biases because we lack (in most cases) the words and voices of the everyday actors involved in unrest. This volume, which originated in a June 2019 conference at Tübingen, provides an important milestone in understanding how Romans made sense of and wrote about unrest. Lisa Eberle and Myles Lavan broadly construe unrest to include provincial revolts, mutinies, civil wars, usurpations, banditry, piracy, and civic and social protests/riots. Their work has three chief aims: to investigate how Romans categorized, explained, and framed narratives surrounding unrest.
Explanation here means causation, the value of which is often very limited because they were generic tropes colored with details. Despite this, “explanations constitute a form of theorising about society” (17). Here we discover social order via implied socialities, prejudices, qualifications, etc. For instance, bad characters, such as governors, are presented as the driving forces in pushing otherwise unmotivated people to action. Some authors, however, moved beyond such tropes and moralizations: see Eberle on Appian, Lavan on Cassius Dio, Bruno Pottier on De Rebus Bellicis, and Natalie Dohrmann on Rabbis. Meanwhile, the ways ‘discourse and explanatory models are framed is essential because these paradigms acquire persuasive force through connections to pre-existing models of thought and knowledge’ (18). The contributions aim to interrogate the politics of accounts, their structures, and how they are used in accounts. The editors note that a spectrum of attitudes towards unrest existed: pathological/normal; inevitable or preventable; manageable or existential threat; whether an episode called for leniency or harsh reprisals. By way of example, Lavan notes that Tacitus and other early imperial authors felt unthreatened by outbreak of provincial revolts (see especially Velleius Paterculus’ non-accounts of Florus and Sacrovir’s and Tacfarinas’ revolts: Vell. Pat. 2.129.3-4). Such authors viewed revolts as acts of war responding to legitimate grievances, and this view must correspond in some way to “a fatalistic account of their origins” (20). The inevitability of revolts, traced back to vices of some bad agents, threatened neither the state nor its legitimacy. This understanding prescribed state response: fight back to restore order (peace) rather than make institutional reform.
The eleven chapters and introduction focus especially on the terminology of unrest, because choices infer typology (and therefore cause-making), the scale of unrest, what sorts of responses were warranted and outcomes expected, and the legitimacy and cause(s) for a given episode. For example, Latin lacked a term for mutiny, so Latin authors deployed seditio, thus conflating mutinies with episodes of civic disobedience (Hans Kopp’s paper). Likewise, Latin lexical choice distinguishes whether an author conceived an episode as internal (citizen) or external (provincial/frontier) by deploying terms like seditio, (civile) bellum, or rebellio.
Carsten Hjort Lange’s chapter traces the language and concepts of civil/internal unrest/war from 3rd century BCE (Falerii in the First Samnite War) to the destruction of Fragellae in 125 BCE, an episode more akin to internal war than previous episodes, finally to the civil war between Marius and Sulla, at which time the term bellum civile was possibly popularized by Sulla in his memoirs. Lange points out that Roman understandings of stasis and internal unrest were influenced by Greek conceptual models going back to Thucydides. While 3rd and 2nd century BCE episodes were described as an emphylios polemos by Polybius or as a bellum instestinum by Livy (both may be translated as internal war), the 1st century witnessed the development of the related, yet distinct term, bellum civile which suggested an escalated scale in conflict and introduced an emphasis on citizenship to discourses on civil conflict.
Benjamin Gray examines the evolution of discourse in civic conflicts in the early Roman Greek East, from Thucydidean Corcyran stasis in which both sides were considered as engaged in political activity towards a coexisting alternate model wherein the dominant party delegitimized opposition. In the latter model, any political unrest, especially those aspiring towards democratic ideals, became viewed as a challenge to peace and civility (concord and homonoia) and must be shut down to maintain order.
In one of several papers focusing on a single author/work, Katell Berthelot identifies three distinct, yet overlapping discourses of Jewish resistance to Rome at work in Josephus’ Jewish War: war/revolt with Rome (polemos, neoterismos, apostasis); a Judean stasis, one in which Josephus delegitimized rebel factions as lestai (bandits) and stasiastai (insurgents) plausibly as an apologetic strategy; a rebellion against the God of Israel. Josephus was an outsider cum insider writing for a Roman audience and, for the sake of legibility, described the uprising by deploying discourses that Romans would have expected (on which see Lavan’s paper). At the same time, Berthelot simultaneously illustrates well the complex politics at play in his account, as Josephus navigated his position as a Jew under Roman domination in the imperial court and as someone from the Jewish aristocratic milieu who wanted to defend the Jewish religio against contemporaneous slander and ridicule which celebrated Yahweh’s failure. This set of circumstances leads to the multilayered set of discourses at work in Josephus’ Jewish War.
Eberle’s chapter re-envisions materiality in Appian, who presented a unique model of unrest against Rome (bandits, pirates, rebellion, civil strife) due to aporia. Specifically, he inferred that a lack of land (aporia gēs) was the motivation for opposition to Roman rule. Since aporia gēs forced subjects to oppose Roman rule the cause was blameless, thus offering opportunities to reflect about how subjects ought to be treated; Appian’s contemporary Hadrian did much in the latter respect. His successor, Antoninus Pius, under whom Appian was writing, was undoing much of Hadrian’s work. As such, Eberle raises the fascinating question, was Appian subtly recommending a return to Hadrianic policies concerning Italy and the provinces?
In a diptych of papers on provincial revolts Lavan argues in the first paper that conceptions of provincial unrest in 1st century BCE to 2nd century CE derived from Republican perceptions of a clear distinction between the Roman people (citizens) writ large and foreign subjects (socii). This model created a persistent externalizing discourse equating provincial unrest to war, as evidenced here through Cicero, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio. Only in the late 2nd century did a discourse of unrest as criminality begin to appear more systematically, which he ascribes to contemporary developments in the rising influence of jurists in administration and extensions seen in criminal and administrative law. Meanwhile, Pottier finds that evolving political changes post Antonine Constitution, especially the mid-third century crisis, resulted in newer or evolved interpretations of provincial unrest from those revealed by Lavan. Here, 4th century authors Ammianus Marcellinus, Aurelius Victor, and Eunapius of Sardus deployed more varied yet no less schematic models of provincial unrest, namely 1) conflict with less urbanized, ethnically othered populations, internal border groups aspiring to regain independence; 2) an imperial politics model wherein low status individuals take advantage of chaotic disruptions to establish themselves as separatist rivals to the Roman state (this is a delegitimizing discourse which labelled such leaders tyranni, latrones, who recruited criminal followers, and people seeking res novae); 3) provincial revolt as a legitimate uprising against a tyrant where provincials defend Republican principles.
James Corke-Webster’s paper investigates 1st to 3rd century evolutions in how Christians self-understood persecution (diogmos) through New Testament texts, Justin, Tertullian, Eusebius, and Lactantius. There were two discourses present in the New Testament, one deployed judicial contexts (i.e. floggings in synagogues and appearances before Roman agents) in presenting local Jewish elites as agents of persecution. Here Roman officials were instruments, not agents, of persecution. The second discourse present in Christian texts originated in the Book of Revelation where persecution was presented as a form of cosmic warfare. Later, apologists like Justin and especially Tertullian adopted the legal framework deployed in the New Testament, but now the agency of persecution shifted to Rome, where the emperors were front and center in their accounts. The shift towards an emperor’s agency in persecution stems from the fact that justice ultimately stems from him, as such legal punishment and suffering trace all the way up to him. Finally, Eusebius and Lactantius, who grew up during the height of military usurpers in the later 3rd century, brought the evolutions to their natural conclusion by appropriating cosmic warfare in place of a judicial model for their accounts of persecutions. For Corke-Webster, the creation of a Christian historiography in the 4th century was “indicative of a wider shift, namely that Christianity was emerging onto, and… [saw] itself acting at, the level of state affairs” (246).
Ulriika Vihervalli demonstrates the role of women in unrest narratives, focusing on Livy, Tacitus, Eusebius, and Orosius. In these works, women appear selectively and purposely and were deployed according to contemporary gender politics. In Classical authors like Livy and Tacitus, Vihervalli observes three functions of women in unrest narratives, namely as instigators, mitigators, and victims. Eusebius and Orosius manipulate the previous dominant models for their own ends and only continued to deploy female suffering, especially nameless women, to accent pathos. While Eusebius conceived of unrest through feminine suffering, he left no room for women in narratives which may point to a view where female agency had no role in the historical causation of unrest; like provincials in Tacitus, events happen to them. The early books of Orosius followed the model of feminine suffering of earlier authors, but in Book 7 his new bloodless era divorced feminine suffering from unrest altogether.
I cannot overstate how wonderful this volume is. Typos are rare and do not hinder the arguments. From this volume, it is clear that individual author surveys warrant continued investigation, perhaps in a large companion volume. The treatments of unrest in Josephus, Appian, and Orosius emphasize some of the complexities, unique qualities, and ways that each author plays with conventional understandings surrounding the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian discourses of unrest. This sort of work, however, requires the Herculean efforts of broader trend surveys to help us understand these facets (such as Woolf 2011,[2] Lavan 2017, and the topically themed papers here).
There seems to be some sort of divide occurring between the Later Antonine and the Severan periods that shapes several strands pulled upon in the contributions herein. Whereas earlier Republican and early imperial authors modelled unrest strictly on internal (cives) / external (socii, alieni) lines, trends from Hadrian onwards such as increased Roman citizenship in the provinces, a fostering of an ideology wherein (at least) elite provincials viewed themselves as Roman, and the rise of jurists to prominence in Roman society all seem to have significantly shaped the discourses of unrest in the later Roman Empire. In terms of provincial revolts, Lavan and Pottier find a gradual shift in rebellio from a republican literal sense of renewing war by foreign peoples towards “a much more generic term for an armed uprising,” where even rivals to imperial power may be labelled as engaging in a rebellio (17). One can see the fascinating transitions in models and terminology of provincial unrest at work through the Tacfarinas’ Revolt (17-24 CE). What early imperial authors Velleius Paterculus terms as bellum Africum (2.119.4) and Tacitus the more generic term motus (Ann. 3.32.1), the fourth century writer Aurelius Victor uses a more internalizing, criminality term latrocinia to describe the episode (De Caes.2.3).
If I must convey any criticisms, it is a shame that there is no conclusion that ties the papers together nor states what are major discursive themes of unrest left to be explored. For a work that crisscrosses centuries, authors, and discourses, an Index Locorum would have been welcome. That being stated, while the discursive strategies, topics, and Roman authors widely vary, the volume must be lauded for the cross-referencing and engagement with each other’s papers throughout. This is something which we should see more in similar thematic collected volumes. While one may be tempted to mine this volume for individual chapters related to one’s areas of research interest, reading the whole work is an enriching experience, presenting opportunities to understand unrest from different methodologies, discourses of author or genre, and theoretical lenses. For example, Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s paper introduced me to Survivance, a contemporary Native/Indigenous theory of resilience, and ways to read against the grain to find subjugated peoples’ strategies to maintain their cultures. This volume should be considered required reading for those interested in unrest in the Roman world and imperial historiography.
Authors and Titles
Lisa Pilar Eberle and Myles Lavan, “Unrest in the Roman Empire: Discourse and Politics,” 9-31
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “Tell Me How I Conquered You: Theorizing Accommodation and Unrest in the Book of Daniel”
Carsten Hjort Lange, “The Roman Language of Civil War: From Internal War and Stasis to Bellum Civile”
Benjamin Gray, “Struggles to Define and Counter-Define Unrest in the Cities of the Early Roman East”
Katell Berthelot, “Josephus’s Multilayered Discourse on the Judean Revolt against Rome”
Hans Kopp, “Narrating Mutiny: Towards a Discursive History of Military Unrest”
Lisa Pilar Eberle, “Aporetic Unrest: Reimagining Materialism and Empire in Appian”
Myles Lavan, “From War to Criminality: The Roman Discourse of Provincial Revolt”
Bruno Pottier, “Usurpers, Bandits and Barbarians: Narratives of Provincial Unrest in the Fourth Century”
James Corke-Webster, “Towards a Discursive History of Christian Persecution”
Ulriika Vihervalli, “Violent Histories: Women and Unrest from Roman to Late Roman Historiography”
Natalie B. Dohrmann, “Roman War, Rabbinc Law, and Provincial Sovereigntism”
Notes
[1] Lavan, Myles. 2017. “Writing Revolt in the Early Roman Empire.” In The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt, edited by Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers, 19–38. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Quote: 21.
[2] Woolf, Greg. 2011. “Provincial Revolts in the Early Roman Empire.” In The Jewish Revolt against Rome, edited by Mladen Popović, 27–44. Leiden: Brill.