Rome's Cultural Revolution

Name: Rome's Cultural Revolution
Author: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
ISBN: 0521896843

by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

Andrew’s a good friend, and this is a terrific book. He called it Rome’s Cultural Revolution in deliberate allusion to the great masterpiece of Roman history written by Ronald Syme in 1939, called The Roman Revolution . That was an account of Augustus’s rise to power, a very political story, and Syme had absolutely no time at all for the idea that Augustus might have been a popular champion. On the contrary, for Syme he was a dangerous demagogue with paramilitaries at his back. But Syme was writing at the time of Hitler and Mussolini, and he knew what demagogues with paramilitaries behind them looked like. That’s another story, which I talk about a bit in chapter 10 of The House of Augustus. But because The Roman Revolution was such a hugely influential book—certainly for my generation but also later on—Andrew alluded to it in his title. His line, which he works out brilliantly I think, is that politics is not enough. There was a revolution in the way Rome became a different kind of place. In 100 BC Rome was still a city-state among other city-states in Italy. It was a disproportionately powerful one and had all kinds of political power over its ‘allies’ elsewhere in Italy, but it was still only one city-state among others. A hundred years later Rome was a world empire. That change is not only political, it’s a cultural change as well, and that’s what Andrew wants to explore. The book is a wide-ranging account of the cultural background of Augustan Rome, as it had developed over two centuries in creative interaction both with Greek culture and with that the of other Italian peoples and their languages. In particular, the reason I like the book is because in 2 BC, one of the great moments of the Augustan principate, when the Senate and People of Rome were conspicuously acting in consensus after two generations of being at each other’s throats, they hailed him as pater patriae : ‘father of the country’, ‘father of the native land’. It’s an honorific title, of course, but what is the patria ? Is it Rome? No, it’s not. It’s Italy, because by now the whole of Italy had Roman citizenship. That had happened two generations earlier, during what’s called the Social War. Socius mean ‘ally’ in Latin, so the bellum sociale is the War of the Allies against Rome. Roman power in Italy had depended largely on alliances with other notionally independent city-states, but they got more and more dissatisfied with the way Rome arrogantly assumed it could simply take their manpower and use it for overseas conquests without giving anything significant back. They rose in rebellion against Rome in 90 BC, and it was a very nasty war. The only way the Romans got out of it was by immediately conceding Roman citizenship to the whole of Italy. Against the background of all that, what Andrew does is look at the evidence of material culture. As an ex-Director of the British School at Rome, he’s a master of the archaeological record. What you get in his book is a brilliant analysis of the independent life and culture of various Italian cities. It’s part of what ancient historians have called ‘hellenization’: the influence of Greek culture around the rest of the ancient world. Of course, that’s something everyone has known about for years; a famous example is the hellenization of what we call the Middle East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great. That’s back in the 4th century BC. But there was also the hellenization of the western Mediterranean, which starts a lot earlier than most people think, and applies in many different ways. Some places were much more hellenized than others, and the way each of these individual city-states in Italy developed during the fourth, third, second, even into the first century BC, was unique to itself. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then, in the first century BC, suddenly all these places were technically Roman. They all now had Roman citizenship, because it had become so desirable and they’d fought a great war in order to get it. Two generations later, one of the things that Augustus had to do—quite apart from healing the wounds of polarized politics in Rome itself—was to make sense of an Italy which was now a coherent entity for the first time. He was ‘the father of the native land’, and that native land was Italy itself. The great literary statement of Augustan Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid , is all about the arrival of Aeneas and his Trojans after the fall of Troy, not specifically to Rome—Rome itself hardly comes into it—but to Italy. Virgil himself came from northern Italy, what we would now call the Veneto. So you have this concept of a city-state first dominating its neighbours and then morphing over a couple of generations into ‘Italy’ in the way we now understand the term, a kind of nation-state with a single citizenship. “The way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways” During the desperate times of the late republic there was no time for any cultural assimilation to take place. What Andrew argues is not that the cultural revolution is different from the political revolution. It’s not that it’s the same thing as the political revolution, either. The two things were happening simultaneously and independently, but you can’t understand one without the other. It’s a way of understanding the Augustan age that broadens the question out, and also helps to overcome a constant danger in academic studies, namely specialization. In the nature of things, the way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways. The great thing about Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is that he has a mastery of several of these fields, and knows what these different subsets of scholarship are about. He can make them talk to each other and create a coherent narrative that makes sense at a cultural level. He also writes very well. On the other hand, it’s a subtle argument with a lot of complex material, so from that point of view it’s not an easy read. But it’s a very important book. No other book gives such a broad sense of what 1st-century BC Rome and Italy were like, and how Augustus was able to get beyond politics and offer a sense of common culture that everyone could be loyal to.

Recommended by

Peter Wiseman

"Andrew’s a good friend, and this is a terrific book. He called it Rome’s Cultural Revolution in deliberate allusion to the great masterpiece of Roman history written by Ronald Syme in 1939, called The Roman Revolution . That was an account of Augustus’s rise to power, a very political story, and Syme had absolutely no time at all for the idea that Augustus might have been a popular champion. On the contrary, for Syme he was a dangerous demagogue with paramilitaries at his back. But Syme was writing at the time of Hitler and Mussolini, and he knew what demagogues with paramilitaries behind them looked like. That’s another story, which I talk about a bit in chapter 10 of The House of Augustus. But because The Roman Revolution was such a hugely influential book—certainly for my generation but also later on—Andrew alluded to it in his title. His line, which he works out brilliantly I think, is that politics is not enough. There was a revolution in the way Rome became a different kind of place. In 100 BC Rome was still a city-state among other city-states in Italy. It was a disproportionately powerful one and had all kinds of political power over its ‘allies’ elsewhere in Italy, but it was still only one city-state among others. A hundred years later Rome was a world empire. That change is not only political, it’s a cultural change as well, and that’s what Andrew wants to explore. The book is a wide-ranging account of the cultural background of Augustan Rome, as it had developed over two centuries in creative interaction both with Greek culture and with that the of other Italian peoples and their languages. In particular, the reason I like the book is because in 2 BC, one of the great moments of the Augustan principate, when the Senate and People of Rome were conspicuously acting in consensus after two generations of being at each other’s throats, they hailed him as pater patriae : ‘father of the country’, ‘father of the native land’. It’s an honorific title, of course, but what is the patria ? Is it Rome? No, it’s not. It’s Italy, because by now the whole of Italy had Roman citizenship. That had happened two generations earlier, during what’s called the Social War. Socius mean ‘ally’ in Latin, so the bellum sociale is the War of the Allies against Rome. Roman power in Italy had depended largely on alliances with other notionally independent city-states, but they got more and more dissatisfied with the way Rome arrogantly assumed it could simply take their manpower and use it for overseas conquests without giving anything significant back. They rose in rebellion against Rome in 90 BC, and it was a very nasty war. The only way the Romans got out of it was by immediately conceding Roman citizenship to the whole of Italy. Against the background of all that, what Andrew does is look at the evidence of material culture. As an ex-Director of the British School at Rome, he’s a master of the archaeological record. What you get in his book is a brilliant analysis of the independent life and culture of various Italian cities. It’s part of what ancient historians have called ‘hellenization’: the influence of Greek culture around the rest of the ancient world. Of course, that’s something everyone has known about for years; a famous example is the hellenization of what we call the Middle East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great. That’s back in the 4th century BC. But there was also the hellenization of the western Mediterranean, which starts a lot earlier than most people think, and applies in many different ways. Some places were much more hellenized than others, and the way each of these individual city-states in Italy developed during the fourth, third, second, even into the first century BC, was unique to itself. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then, in the first century BC, suddenly all these places were technically Roman. They all now had Roman citizenship, because it had become so desirable and they’d fought a great war in order to get it. Two generations later, one of the things that Augustus had to do—quite apart from healing the wounds of polarized politics in Rome itself—was to make sense of an Italy which was now a coherent entity for the first time. He was ‘the father of the native land’, and that native land was Italy itself. The great literary statement of Augustan Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid , is all about the arrival of Aeneas and his Trojans after the fall of Troy, not specifically to Rome—Rome itself hardly comes into it—but to Italy. Virgil himself came from northern Italy, what we would now call the Veneto. So you have this concept of a city-state first dominating its neighbours and then morphing over a couple of generations into ‘Italy’ in the way we now understand the term, a kind of nation-state with a single citizenship. “The way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways” During the desperate times of the late republic there was no time for any cultural assimilation to take place. What Andrew argues is not that the cultural revolution is different from the political revolution. It’s not that it’s the same thing as the political revolution, either. The two things were happening simultaneously and independently, but you can’t understand one without the other. It’s a way of understanding the Augustan age that broadens the question out, and also helps to overcome a constant danger in academic studies, namely specialization. In the nature of things, the way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways. The great thing about Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is that he has a mastery of several of these fields, and knows what these different subsets of scholarship are about. He can make them talk to each other and create a coherent narrative that makes sense at a cultural level. He also writes very well. On the other hand, it’s a subtle argument with a lot of complex material, so from that point of view it’s not an easy read. But it’s a very important book. No other book gives such a broad sense of what 1st-century BC Rome and Italy were like, and how Augustus was able to get beyond politics and offer a sense of common culture that everyone could be loyal to."

Augustus · fivebooks.com