[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
The edited volume of José Luís Brandão, Cláudia Teixeira and Ália Rodrigues contains a total of 18 papers dealing with questions of identities and otherness in the Roman Empire and can be seen as part of the project: BioRom – Rome our Home: (Auto)biographical Tradition and the Shaping of Identity(ies).[1] As such, the editors focus primarily on the well-developed and highly discussed concept of “otherness” and its construction in Roman literature.[2] Nevertheless, their goal is to “explore the ‘perspectives’, angles and interests expressed by the texts” (p. 6) for the purpose of challenging traditional views regarding otherness and cultural identity in the Roman empire. The book is split into two major sections: “Confronting Identities: Othering Communities and Groups”, and “Confronting Identities: Othering Individuals”. A short index of names, places and subjects completes the volume.
The volume begins with a brief introduction by the editors, who hypothesize that “there is no single ‘other’, but many ‘others’” (p. 6). The first three sections of the introduction present some fundamental frameworks on the subject, from postcolonial studies to constructivist approaches. Due to the volume’s flexible temporal and geographical range, the editors present the current state of otherness research rather superficially and refrain from explicating a particular meaning of, for example, key terms like “alterity”, “otherness”, and “Romanitas”.[3] Although this allows individual contributors to apply and present a wide range of theories and methods, the opportunity to give the collection a unified profile and a common thread through a sharpened theoretical framework is lost.
Following the introduction, the first part (“Othering Communities and Groups”) commences with an interesting paper by Louise Revell on civic identities in the Baetica. The next paper, by Mario Lentano, looks at racism, dark skin, and cultural imagination from a Roman perspective. In discussing the implications of Roman thought for our modern times, Lentano argues that we must not judge the representation of others by skin color with our modern understanding of systemic racism. Beginning with the pseudo-Hippocratic treatise “Airs, Waters and Places”, Lentano shows that social status was more important than skin color, as he demonstrates with examples from Homer, Martial, and the Historia Augusta. Nevertheless, he concludes that the color “black” was associated with death and the underworld and, with the spread of Christianity in late antiquity, became increasingly associated with evil and sin.
The contributors of the next four papers each focus on a single author or work: Claudia Beltrão on religious images and practices in Cicero’s De natura deorum and De divinatione; Selena Ross on Varro’s De re rustica and questions of integration; Francisco Martínez Sánchez on the alterity of pirates in Plutarch’s Moralia; and, finally, Ralph Moore on barbarians in Caesar’s Commentarii De Bello Gallico. I want to highlight the contribution of Martínez Sánchez since it deals with another kind of integration of otherness. Martínez Sánchez observes that in his references to piracy in the Moralia Plutarch follows a traditional practice of depicting them as “murderers, impious, abductors, thieves, violent, scheming, barbarians, uncultured” (p. 109) but minimalizes the relationship between Greeks and piracy as much as he can to “present a common Graeco-Roman objective”, namely the punishment of the piratical other. Martínez Sánchez states that we need a deeper and wider analysis to better understand the otherness of pirates and their function in Plutarch’s works. In addition, one might ask whether Plutarch, who could be counted among the local aristocracy in Greek poleis on which Rome based their power, is showing off his integration into the Roman empire through this assimilatory tactic.
The following two papers treat women and their “integration” into the Roman world as countervailing factors to the mos maiorum. Denis Álvarez Pérez-Sostoa investigates women as a “new kind of hostages” during the Principate of Augustus and the following imperial period through the writings of Suetonius and Tacitus while Pedro David Conesa Navarro and Sara Casamayor Mancisidor discuss how wet-nurses, as portrayed by Juvenal and Tacitus, challenged Roman society and potentially led to a cultural decline due to their foreign influences.
Next Eleni Bozia deals with the geography of otherness in the Roman empire. The author questions whether belonging should be defined in terms of geography and provenance by analyzing passages from Ovid, Juvenal, Aristides, Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, and Favorinus, and concludes that geographical belonging is instead a lieu littéraire and has to be regarded as a sociocultural construction, based on one’s paideia. The final two papers of the first part deal with Gothic and Saxon otherness. Paolo Desideri researches Dio of Prusa’s Γετικά – in which Dio expresses his sympathies for the Dacians – and compares it to Tacitus’s account of the Germani. Filomena Giannotti focuses her attention on the letter to Namantius by Sidonius Apollinaris (Epist. 8.6), in which Sidonius reports on the Saxons, and argues that Sidonius uses the otherness of Visigoths and Saxons to portray himself as the last defender of Latin language and literature.
The first paper of the second part takes the reader back to ancient Sparta and its lawgiver Lycurgus. Martina Gatto investigates the admiration Justin had for Lycurgus “as a model statesman and a moral exemplum for the Roman public” (p. 246), as found in the Epitome of Pompeius Trogus. The following contributions range from the otherness of enemies (Nuno Simões Rodrigues on Sophoniba; Rúben Henrique de Castro on Viriathus, Boudica, and Arminius; Cláudia Teixeira on Zenobia) to otherness of emperors or their reaction towards otherness (José Luís Brandão on Suetonius and his depiction of emperors as others; Serena Connolly on self-fashioning of Roman emperors).
The final two papers offer new and interesting perspectives on “otherness”. Brandão convincingly argues how Suetonius alienates emperors like Caligula, Nero, Caesar, Otho and Domitian in not only describing their character but also their appearances (the way they dress), thus, combining eidos and ethos. Brandão concludes that in this way Suetonius is able to recreate emperors, “transforming them sometimes into exemplary figures of Romanitas, sometimes into strange and sinister ones capable of provoking horror” (p. 312). On the other hand, Serena Connolly argues that Roman emperors displayed gifts of non-normative forms as an instrument of self-fashioning, showing interests, erudition, and appreciation of otherness. This contribution would have profited from a deeper theoretical foundation, marking the other as an “exotic” element and questioning why the emperors were expected to react with this kind of self-fashioning.
The book aims to challenge “traditional views” concerning the concepts of otherness and cultural identity visible in literature through various perspectives that can confirm or refute them. On the theoretical level, this goal was not achieved. The editors missed their chance to challenge existing narratives through new theoretical perspectives and approaches that could have been developed within such a research project. Instead, most papers deal with ethnic otherness and thus confirm the “traditional views”.
Another criticism is the structure of the volume. Even though the separation between communities of otherness and individual otherness makes sense, the overall line-up of the individual papers remains unclear. For example, given its broadness in comparison to the very specific argument of Revell, Lentano’s paper would have been the better choice for the opening essay. Also, a clearer common thread might have emerged from a more nuanced organization of the contributions. Especially in part 2, the order of the papers appears rather random: why not put Zenobia and Sophoniba together? Although all the contributions discuss otherness from different perspectives, the volume gives the impression of having been strung together somewhat arbitrarily. A more nuanced theoretical framework at the beginning of the book, which all the authors could then take up, would have avoided this. A final criticism concerns the editing: sometimes sources are cited in the original language in the text (e.g. Revell), sometimes the original text with the translation directly below (e.g. Beltrão) — or the other way round (e.g. Ross) — and sometimes the sources are cited only in translation. In the latter case, the original text is occasionally provided in the footnotes and sometimes not at all (for both modes, see Lentano). This is unfortunate and once again highlights the inconsistency of the volume.
On the other hand, the volume can be easily consulted because it is open access and clearly offers a wide range of well-written contributions on otherness. Thus, the individual papers will be a fruitful resource for anyone researching otherness in the Roman Empire. “Confronting Identities in the Roman Empire” demonstrates that there are still many unanswered questions about the concepts of “other” and “otherness” for the Roman period, and that we still need more research on this intricate topic to discover its full potential.
Authors and Titles[4]
José Luís Lopes Brandão, Cláudia Teixeira and Ália Rodrigues, “Introduction”
Louise Revell, “Performing Identities in Rome’s Western Provinces”
Mario Lentano, “Decolor heres: Dark Skin in the Roman Cultural Imagination”
Claudia Beltrão, “Cicero on Foreign Religious Images and Practices”
Selena Ross, “Non idem esse Romanos et Graecos: Varro’s De re rustica and the Integration of the Roman World”
Francisco Martínez Sánchez, “Pirate Alterity in Plutarch. The Roman Influence on the Construction of the autre Pirate in the Moralia”
Ralph Moore, “Where Reason Could Not Prevail: Barbarian Othering and Diplomatic Double-Standards Caesar’s Commentarii De Bello Gallico”
Denis Álvarez Pérez-Sostoa, “Contra mores maiorum: Barbarian Women Prisoners During the Principate and the High Empire”
Pedro David Conesa Navarro and Sara Casamayor Mancisidor, “The Use of Wet-Nurses in Ancient Rome as a Way of Rupturing the mores maiorum”
Eleni Bozia, “The Geography of Otherness in the Roman Empire: Exile and Belonging”
Paolo Desideri, “Dio of Prusa’s Γετικά in the Context of the Ethnographic Production of His Age”
Filomena Giannotti, “News from a mundus senescens: Romans, Visigoths and Saxons in a Letter by Sidonius Apollinaris (8.6)”
Martina Gatto, “Greek Lawgiver in the Epitome of Pompeius Trogus: Justin’s Account of Lycurgus”
Nuno Simões Rodrigues, “Othering the Woman in Augustan Rome: Sophoniba’s Exemplum”
Rúben Henrique de Castro, “Self-Perception in the Construction of the Other: Case Study of Roman Portrayal of Viriathus, Boudica, and Arminius”
José Luís Brandão, “Othering the Emperor in Suetonius”
Cláudia Teixeira: Zenobia, “The ‘Exceptional Other’ in the Historia Augusta”
Serena Connolly, “Novel Gifts: Imperial Self-Fashioning from Non-Normative Bodies”
Notes
[1] https://www.uc.pt/en/cech/research/secondary-projects/biorom/
[2] Such studies have received an ongoing boost starting with François Hartog, Le miroir d’Herodote. Essai sur la répresentation de l’autre (Paris 1991), in which he interprets the perceptions of others in the writing of Herodotus as ‘rhetorique d’alterité’, leading to Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton 2011) and then to the recent publication of Jonathan J. Price/Margalit Finkelberg/Yuval Shahar (eds.), Rome: An Empire of Many Nations. New Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Identity (Cambridge 2022) and the first publication of the above-named project: Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta et al. (eds.), Roman Identity. Between Ideal and Performance (Turnhout 2022).
[3] This is especially true in regards to “alterity”, which is used for example in the paper of Francisco Martínez Sánchez, but is not even found in the index.
[4] Unfortunately, there are discrepancies between the table of contents on the publisher’s website and in the final print/open access version. The present list of authors and titles is based on the print/open access version.