In [these blog posts] I want to talk about cosmologies – how people thought about the world, not so much in terms of geography – or not only in those terms – but more conceptually in terms of cores and peripheries; legitimate centres and illegitimate outliers; and eventually about time and their place within it. What we’ll see, I think, is that things had changed significantly by the close of our ‘short late antiquity’
In this first lecture I want to return, not for the first time, to the concepts I discussed in [a previous lecture], on the notions of civic masculinity. There we saw that the virtuous Roman male occupied the centre of the conceptual universe. This was a very gendered structure, as mentioned, but it also mapped onto political geography. In ethnography – writing about peoples (ethne in Greek) the Romans had two ways of thinking about the world. I call the first of these ways the binary. In other words, it was based upon the opposition between civilisation and barbarism.
The notion of the barbarian had a long history, going went right back into classical Greek times. The word has a Greek origin, barbaros, which is actually onomatopoeic: the barbaroi – the barbarians -were people who burbled, people who just went bar bar bar. In other words, people who didn’t speak Greek. The development of the idea of the Barbarian in classical Athens was of course directly related to the idea of what made a good Hellene (Greek). The figure of the barbarian in Greek drama – usually either a Skythian from the steppe lands to the north or a Persian from the east – was there to represent all the things a good Greek was supposed not to be. There was a geographical element to Greek thought about barbarians. The Persians lived in a land, they said, where things were just too easy and as a result got fat and lazy and allowed themselves to become subject to tyrannous governments. What the Greeks thought made them superior was their mixture of opposites: the harsh mountains and the fertile plains, for instance. This meant they could take the best of both worlds: accept hardship but also exploit the fruits of the fertile lands, and so on.
In the Hellenistic period – that of the successors of Alexander the Great – when Greek governments ruled what had been the Persian world, Egypt and even parts of south Asia, these ideas possibly changed somewhat, although since key influential works from this period have been lost it is not easy to trace the details. Italy during the rise of Rome contained a lot of Greek or Greek-influenced states and the political vocabulary of barbarism was important in claims for legitimacy or illegitimacy. Rome, obviously was not Greek-speaking and was still conscious of the fact that that made her barbarian in Greek terms, so there was some subtle re-jigging of the terms of the debate, especially once the Republic had conquered most of the Hellenistic states around the eastern Mediterranean.
In Roman ethnography, language was replaced by conduct, morals and living by the law as the key determinants of civilisation. As we saw in [a previous set of lectures], the key definition of the civilised man (and as we saw then, it was essentially a question of men) was moderation, the ability to keep one’s bodily appetites under control (without going to the opposite extreme of complete renunciation), the capacity to keep your emotions in check; to be able to see both sides of things and make a reasoned choice. The issue of self-control was what enabled the law to reign; subscription to the law was an extension of self-control.
In Roman thinking, there were geographical and biological reasons why the Romans had managed to become more civilised than anyone else. The Romans stressed their being in the middle, between extremes, rather than having a mix of both. This extended to their place in the world. Roman writers believed that the ability to behave in a civilised fashion was the result of a happy balance of the body’s humours. If you lived too close to the sun, like the Africans, the moisture of the body was drawn up to the head, which was why Africans were very clever and cunning, but not very brave (as far as the Romans thought, anyway). If, on the other hand, you lived too far away from the sun, to the north, like the pale-skinned barbarians, the moisture of the body was drawn down towards the legs. This made these people very big and strong, and very fertile, but also a bit stupid. Of course, where the Romans lived happened to be just the right distance from the sun and so the Romans had the correct balance of humours, allowing them to be clever and brave. This is how Pliny the Elder (who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) put it in his Natural History:
In the middle of the earth, owing to a healthy blending of both elements [fire and moisture], there are tracts that are fertile for all sorts of produce, and men are of medium bodily stature, with a marked blending even in the matter of complexion; customs are gentle, senses clear, intellects fertile and able to grasp the whole of nature; and they also have governments, which the outer races never have possessed, any more than they have ever been subject to the central races, being quite detached and solitary on account of the savagery of the nature which broods over those regions.
You can find these ideas in a string of Roman writers, stretching from Pliny through Vitruvius, the writer on architecture, and the medical writer Galen, and on to Vegetius, who wrote about military matters in the fifth century.
The way the Romans saw the whole world was largely coloured by this set of beliefs. If you read the Roman ethnographers and geographers, the further you went from the centre of the world, the more weird and wonderful things became. The people just over the border were barbarians, sure, but nothing compared to the people beyond them, and just wait til you hear about the people who live beyond them. And so on.
The further one progressed from the Mediterranean – the sea ‘in the middle of the earth, remember – the more wildly people didn’t live according to what Romans thought were the correct mores. In whatever direction you went, at the edge of the world of men, you find people who are cannibals, sleep with their mothers, sisters, fathers, pretty much anything with two legs or fewer, don’t bother with proper houses or with cooking stuff and don’t have any kind of government. The Romans thought the Irish were like this; the people in the outer islands off Scotland; people in the north of Germania, on the edges of Scythia to the North-East, and people to the south of the Sahara desert – or some of them anyway.
Beyond that there were people who were half human, half animal; people in Africa called Sciapodes who had one massive foot, under the shadow of which they slept all day, and then hopped about in the night.
As I mentioned in [an earlier lecture], though, the Romans also saw a historical dimension to all of this. Earlier Roman writers such as Propertius and Martial thought the Romans had also been barbarians once, but that they had surpassed this stage. What is interesting is that they saw that stage as happening when they discovered the law, and what that involved in particular was the limitation of sex to marriage. Marriage, the family unit, self-control and the law; this was crucial to Roman self-definition. This was the ideal that every Roman male had to set themselves against- which simultaneously meant comparing themselves to the barbarians. Just as with the Christian debate about women, this was not a two-way discussion; it rarely if ever involved any actual barbarians. This was a dialogue between Romans and Romans: we are (or ought to be) like this because they are like that. The ‘they’ are essentially a fiction – an ‘other’ – to set against the ideal ‘us’. In some ways this gave the frontiers of the Roman Empire a very particular form. When you were looking across the Rhine, as in this picture (below), you weren’t as you would be today, simply looking across from Alsace, in France, to the hills of Baden-Württemberg in Germany – you were looking from the world of civilisation – barbaricum – where the wild people were.
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| The Rhine Valley in Alsace, looking from the Vosges towards the Schwarzwald |