In the previous [post]I discussed what I called the binary aspect of Graeco-Roman ethnography, in other words, the distinction between Roman-ness and barbarism. As we saw, this was really a pretty abstract element of thinking about the world and its organisation. In this area of thought the barbarian and the Roman were both ideals, and the barbarian ‘other’ largely existed as a counter to the ideal Roman. As we saw in an earlier lecture Roman men whose behaviour did not live up to the ideals of civic masculinity could be described as barbarous, but also as feminine, or childlike, or as animal, as all of these categories orbited the masculine ideal at the centre and shared various non-Roman traits: ferocity, emotionality, irrationality. As I said in that earlier lecture, the barbarian could be rendered feminine or child-like.
It is worth remembering, however, that because the Roman-Barbarian ethnographic binary operated in a rhetorical field, it could be played with. One of the great rhetorical tropes in writing critically about the Empire was to say that even the barbarians do things better than we do. Because of the historical dimension to the Romans’ own views of their civilisation, the barbarian could be presented as a sort of noble savage, retaining pristine things which perhaps the Romans had lost on their road to the present. It could be used ironically: barbarians can have speeches put into their mouths in which they say things or voice opinions which barbarians shouldn’t have said or held.
There was, however, another element of Roman ethnographic thinking, which I call the taxonomic. In Graeco-Roman thought the world was a world of peoples: ethne in Greek; gentes in Latin. This patchwork of peoples did not start at the imperial frontier, even if, when the Romans called an emperor a domitor gentium – pacifier of the nations – what they meant was pacifier of the foreign nations. After all, the vast bulk of the Roman Empire was made up of areas that had been inhabited by peoples who had at one point been non-Roman: at one level, the Gauls, the Britons, the Spaniards, the Celtiberians and so on in the West, the Libyans and Egyptians in North Africa, the Greeks, Syrians, Judaeans, Lycians and so on in the East. Such peoples might now be incorporated in the Empire and be counted as Romans but at the same time they could be believed to retain at least some of the other characteristics that had defined them before the Roman conquest.
Here again the frontier was important. For the Romans, the frontier, the limes didn’t mark the end of the Roman world, just the end of the part that the Romans had organised and cultivated. The rest of the world was also part of the Roman world; it was just that they hadn’t got around to sorting it out yet. It was the equivalent of the line between your ploughed and fertilised fields and the bits of your land that were wild forest, pasture, moorland and so on. So the frontier was not something that the Romans felt constrained by. It was like a membrane which they could pass through but which outsiders couldn’t move in the opposite direction. So, historically, the movement of that always provisional frontier had meant that peoples who had once been barbarians were now civilised and that could happen again.
This kind of ethnography was much more descriptive and focused on things such as the physical appearance of people, the colour of eyes and hair, the way they did their hair, their costume, the ways in which they waged war, their favourite weapons and so on. It also addressed political constitutions to some extent, interesting features of diet or cuisine or particular features of family life. Some of this could be mapped onto the binary Roman-barbarian dichotomy, but the great bulk of it couldn’t. It worked in a different register; the bulk of it did not necessarily have any sort of moral content. This sort of ethnography was much more about showing a knowledge of the world.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is the work the Germania which the great early Roman writer Tacitus wrote at the end of the first century AD – so about 200 years before the start of our period. The Germania has two halves. The first half is really all about the Germani (the term ‘German’ is really anachronistic) in abstract terms, as a figure of the barbarian. In much of this, Tacitus uses the barbarian as a sort of noble savage, but really none of it is about real Germani; it is a critique of the Roman Empire using the notion that the barbarians do things better than the Romans. Tacitus was a conservative who didn’t really approve of the Empire and wanted to return to the Republic. So Tacitus says the Germani choose their kings according to their nobility, and their generals according to their virtus or power -the implication is that the Romans don’t. The rulers of the Germani listen to the advice of their council of elders – for which read ‘the senate’ – unlike the Roman Emperors. And so on.
But in the second half of the work Tacitus goes on to catalogue the different peoples who live in Germania, in a way that has barely any points of contact with the first half of his text but seems instead to be making a claim to know loads about these people, but also perhaps to demonstrate that, contrary to what the emperor Domitian had said about having conquered Germania, these people remained very much unsubdued.
Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest of the fourth-century Roman historians, and a self-proclaimed continuator of Tacitus, has several ethnographic excursuses in his work. Sometimes these concern the peoples beyond the frontiers. Probably his best-known excursus is at the start of the final book of his Res Gestae (a difficult title to translate; basically it means ‘Deeds Done’, ‘Past Happenings’, something like that) where he talks about the people who live beyond the Danube frontier, culminating in his account of the Huns. His account of the Huns is very famous but historians have generally not paid enough attention to the fact that Ammianus places the Huns at the ends of human society and thus they share all of the stock features of extreme barbarians: they have no government, no houses, barely any clothes, and so on. But Ammianus also discusses areas within the Roman Empire in ethnographic terms. A classic instance is where he talks about the Gauls and compares them with the Italians. Much of what Ammianus has to say about the Gauls is ultimately derived from early Roman accounts of the Gauls, say from the days of Caesar. They are fierce and brave and happy to serve in the army. Their women are also brave. All this, in Ammianus’ view, presented the Gauls in a favourable light compared with the Italians, who he saw as idle and cowardly – although largely because Ammianus, himself a Syrian, had journeyed to Rome but hadn’t been able to find the favour he had hoped and indeed had been turfed out of the city during a food shortage even though, as he complained, dancing girls had been allowed to remain.
In the early third century, the Roman historian Cassius Dio described the Emperor Caracalla, whom we’ve met before, and related all of his bad points to the various parts of the Empire that his family hailed from. Ausonius, the Bordeaux professor who was important at the court of Emperor Gratian, - he was a professor of rhetoric, but is best known as a poet – Ausonius mocked a Briton apparently called Silvius Bonus. Bonus is a name but it also means ‘good’ a fact that Ausonius harps on about...:
“This is Silvius Bonus.’” “Who is Silvius?” “He is a Briton.” “Either this Silvius is no Briton, or he is Silvius malus [Silvius Bad].’”Silvius is called Good and called a Briton: who would believe a good citizen had sunk so low?No good man is a Briton. If he should begin to be plain Silvius, let the plain man cease to be good.This is Silvius Good, but the same Silvius is a Briton: a plainer thing—believe me—is a bad Briton.Thou Silvius art Good, a Briton: yet ’tis said thou art no good man, nor can a Briton link himself with Good.
Hilarious.
None of this is about Romans and Barbarians, though: it is Gauls being prejudiced against Britons. What’s crucial here is that when a Roman talks about someone as a Briton, say, or an Italian, or a Gaul, that is not necessarily radically different from when a Roman talks about someone as a Vandal or a Goth or a Frank. The latter peoples might currently be regarded as barbarian and the former as groups within the civilised Roman empire, but then that had once been true of Britons Gauls and even some Italians too.
It is really important to remember these two types of Roman ethnography: the binary and the taxonomic. Historians generally don’t and map the attitudes involved in rhetoric about ‘the barbarian’ onto Roman discussions about people described simply as belonging to a particular people. Sometimes that might indeed be implicit; sometimes inter-regional rivalry or chauvinism might be because some regions thought they were inherently more civilised and thus better Romans than others. But in my view it is usually operating in a quite different register. It may indeed be prejudiced, like Ausonius’ side-splittingly funny comments about Silvius the Briton, or it might not; but it’s a different sort of chauvinism or relationship. The confusion of the two types of ethnography really causes a lot of misunderstanding of Roman sources.