Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World

Aaron W. Irvin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781119630715
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119630708
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A timely and academically-significant contribution to scholarship on community, identity, and globalization in the Roman and Hellenistic worlds 

Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World examines the construction of personal and communal identities in the ancient world, exploring how globalism, multi-culturalism, and other macro events influenced micro identities throughout the Hellenistic and Roman empires. This innovative volume discusses where contact and the sharing of ideas was occurring in the time period, and applies modern theories based on networks and communication to historical and archaeological data. A new generation of international scholars challenge traditional views of Classical history and offer original perspectives on the impact globalizing trends had on localized areas—insights that resonate with similar issues today.  

 This singular resource presents a broad, multi-national view rarely found in western collected volumes, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Russian scholarship on the Roman Empire, as well as on Roman and Hellenistic archaeological sites in Eastern Europe. Topics include Egyptian identity in the Hellenistic world, cultural identity in Roman Greece, Romanization in Slovenia, Balkan Latin, the provincial organization of cults in Roman Britain, and Soviet studies of Roman Empire and imperialism. Serving as a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on the wider topic of identity and community, this volume: 

• Provides an expansive materialist approach to the topic of globalization in the Roman world  
• Examines ethnicity in the Roman empire from the viewpoint of minority populations 
• Offers several views of metascholarship, a growing sub-discipline that compares ancient material to modern scholarship 
• Covers a range of themes, time periods, and geographic areas not included in most western publications 

Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students examining identity and ethnicity in the ancient world, as well as for those working in multiple fields of study, from Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman historians, to the study of ethnicity, identity, and globalizing trends in time. 

1
The beauty of the Oikumene has two edges: Nurturing Roman Imperialism in the “Glocalizing” traditions of the East

Ljuben Tevdovski

The interest in the classical past and the study of its identities, communities and ideas in modernity can be characterized as extensive, constant and often almost manic.¹ This scientific and societal process has transformed into an alternative quest for the self‐conception of the modern Westerner, and even the contemporary human.² In this context, the identities and communities coming from, or perceived to be from, the edges of the classical world represented a key element of self‐definition through the “otherness”, in antiquity and modernity.³ They represented the final frontier or, alternatively, the beyond of the cultural or civilizational entities we analyzed or imagined in modernity. In addition, the postcolonial turn in the study of the classical past in the twentieth century has added an additional focus on the identities and communities on the edges, which were identified by the contemporary groups that felt “less represented” in the classical narrative, as their “oppressed” ancient ancestors.⁴ This long‐lasting process has created the modern world of nations, races, cultures and civilizations, but also fractured our understanding of the classical past, producing misleading conceptions on ancient identities, including the artificial dichotomies such as Greek versus Near‐Eastern, Roman versus Oriental or Native, Eastern versus Western, or Christian versus Pagan.⁵

However, the contemporary trends, achievements and paradigm shifts in different social sciences and humanities, occurring in the last few decades, together with the wider societal trends, instigated by the intensified multiple waves of the contemporary globalization process, has dramatically shaken our convictions for the self‐contained, homogeneous,and static nature of the identities, communities and cultures in the present and in the past.⁶ The anticipation of the importance of these multiple and interrelated transformative processes produced extensive research interest in the phenomenon of globalization and its impact on identities and communities around the world. The profound effects of the global processes on different local realities in the contemporary world, was incrementally recognized as an applicable and useful approach for the research of the past as well.⁷

Thus, the scientific interest for globalization and its usefulness as a methodological approach in analyses of societies, communities and identities has steadily moved from the present into the past, tracing the roots of this process back in the early modernity, the Middle ages, classical antiquity, and even the prehistory.⁸ In this process, the traditional conceptions of well‐defined cultural or political entities scattered through our historical narratives, are losing their compact character and boundaries, and are increasingly perceived as open puzzles of diversity and connectivity of people, materials and ideas, interrelated in the continuous and accelerating globalization process.⁹ Authors, like Frank, Gills or Morris, have reemphasized the role of the Near East as the locus of creation of the nucleus of the process of globalization, that Wilkinson calls “central civilization”.¹⁰ The convergence of the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age, and the millennial imperial traditions of this region is increasingly perceived as a formative element of the ancient globalization, that was spreading in waves, affecting Rome on the West and China on the East, and continuously growing over centuries into a “world system” of connectedness, or the globalization phase that we live in today.¹¹

This chapter is looking toward the identities, communities and the very creation of the Roman world from this perspective of ancient globalization. My main aim is to shed a new light on the identities and communities of eastern edges of the “Roman world”, and their role and input in its creation. I will also raise wider ontological and methodological questions, connected to the very existence of such a world or such edges aside from the ancient or contemporary imagination. Finally, my analyses are in line with and aim to contribute to the contemporary trends of “decentering” Rome, and, as such, they place the communities and identities of the Roman world in the wider context of the globalization processes of antiquity.¹² The key element of my approach is the hypothesis that the perspective on the Roman world, that I refer to in this chapter as the “senatorial narrative”, although traditionally overrepresented and central in our modern understanding of Rome, embodies a minority voice of anti‐globalism and elements of glocalization that faded away in the intensively globalizing ancient reality.

Hellenistic Globalization

The “globalization turn” in the study of the classical antiquity has recreated the picture of the ancient world where Rome represents both globalized and globalizing entity.¹³ In that perspective, “Roman civilization” was built upon globalizing tendencies that originated in the Near East.¹⁴

However, the globalizing system that Rome was introduced to was far wider and created in the changing global realities triggered by Alexander's conquests.¹⁵ The Hellenistic world, created in the post‐Alexander period, moved the globalization core to the west in the new centers of the eastern Mediterranean like Alexandria, Antioch, Pella, Thessalonica, or Pergamon, and produced a model of interrelation and connectivity that affected the “Old World”, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and from the mountains of Hindu Kush to Eritrea.

The “Hellenistic age”, widely defined by historians as the period between the death of Alexander and the death of Cleopatra (VII), has a long history of underrating in modern academic research. Due to the traditional “classical” focus of the study of antiquity, the period was perceived as impure and decadent; an amalgamation between the culture of western “classical centers” like Athens and, later, Rome, and that of the “Orient”.¹⁶ However, the recent paradigm shift in the study of antiquity, from the “old model” that “emphasized static cells” of homogeneous culture toward a new one, focused on the processes of “fluidity and connectedness”, instigated an “astonishing development” in the studies dedicated or related to this period.¹⁷

The accomplishments of this age loomed large among the many contemporary scholars of antiquity, and especially those approaching it from the perspective of ancient globalization. The revolutionary developments in science and technology, arts and architecture, urbanism, travel and trade, medicine, philosophy or religion of this era are recently frequently emphasized by researchers that attribute them widely to the great interconnectedness of different cultural centers, traditions and elites in this intensively interrelated and globalizing world.¹⁸

One of the most important characteristics of Hellenistic globalization is its close dependency on the unique syste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The beauty of the Oikumene has two edges: Nurturing Roman Imperialism in the “Glocalizing” traditions of the East
• 2 “Triggered identity”: The use of Macedonian ethnic by Blaundos in confrontation with the Roman Empire
• 3 The population of Siscia in the light of epigraphy
• 4 Roman presence in Athens in the light of epigraphic sources
• 5 Global and local in the sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods in Marathon:
• 6 Consciousness of connectivity: Roman temples in southern Syria
• 7 Macedonian, Greek, or Egyptian? Navigating the royal additive identities of Ptolemy I Soter and Ptolemy II Philadelphus
• 8 Being Mithraist: Embracing ‘other’ in the Roman cultural milieu
• 9 “There are always two sides to every story”: Roman rule, cultural continuities and ethnic identity in southern Hispania
• 10 Unlocking ritual performances in the Romano‐British countryside: How small finds and structured deposits enrich our understanding of provincial priesthoods
• 11 Purification through puppies: Dog symbolism and sacrifice in the Mediterranean world
• 12 Communities at the edges of the Roman world: The perception of identity in the Roman Iron Age Barbaricum
• 13 Deconstructing “Balkan Latin”
• 14 The importance of being earnest: Why precise language matters
• 15 The dictatorship of identity: Soviet scholarship and Roman imperialism
• Index
• End User License Agreement