(Do) We Have to Talk About the Romans(?)
The ancient world was, thankfully, not all like the Roman Empire but there's a good reason we often think it was
Hello,
and welcome back to Coffee with Clio! This is a newsletter where I think through matters historical that have been on my mind. Sometimes it’s things I’ve read or places I’ve visited. It can be the start of a new idea or piecing together thoughts that float around for years before starting to take shape. This week is one of those.
No surprises
I recently got a result that didn’t surprise me at all. I was doing a check on publications for a publication project, so I ran a check on WorldCat.1
Before I get into what I searched for, it is worth saying a few things about WorldCat’s data because if you’re going to talk results, then the what went in is pretty critical to what comes out.
WorldCat is an aggregator: it brings together information from thousands of electronic library catalogues worldwide. At that scale, detailed moderation isn’t really possible. As a result, there’s quite a lot of junk data: every time a library somewhere enters the information for a book or article incorrectly or just differently from somewhere else, WorldCat produces two duplicate results for what is, in fact, the same piece of work.
This is important if you’re about to do some quick, back-of-the-envelope quantification!
If a work is already popular, it will tend to have more duplicates in the catalogue because more people will have contributed their library’s slightly variant data about it. As a result, it will amplify differences between popularity and obscurity.
Still…
I did two simple searches.
‘Roman Empire’ (in books, meaning that relevant books have ‘Roman Empire’ in their title or any other metadata such as abstracts or tags)
‘Kushan Empire’ (likewise, in books)
The results were not (really) startling:
Roman Empire = 282,713 hits
Kushan Empire = 148 hits2
Okay, a lot of those entries for ‘Roman Empire’ are probably duplicates for all the reasons outlined above.
But even so, these search results only cover books in English (or sometimes other languages if the entry has English-language tags). There are enormous bodies of scholarship about the Roman Empire in other languages. Basically every European scholarly language and quite a few languages mainly spoken outside Europe have some tradition of Roman studies.
My latest publication, in fact, was a joint article with a colleague from China (you can read more about the process here): we looked at the development of Chinese-language scholarship only about Roman maritime trade in the Indian Ocean in the first few centuries CE. Even that was more than enough for a long article with a pretty hefty bibliography!
Even if there are lots of duplicates in the Roman returns on WorldCat, then, there is also a tonne of stuff it isn’t catching.
There is scholarship on the Kushan Empire in various languages, too, but with a proportionally stronger lean towards English. This is because most of the former Kushan Empire was under British imperial rule when the Kushans first came to the attention of modern scholarship and, for the same reasons of global colonialism, English remains the main language of academic publication in the modern states of India and Pakistan, which are now the centres for Kushan studies.
In other words, duplication might be over-estimating the difference between English-language scholarship on the two empires, but based on my experience in both fields, searching only in English is probably missing proportionally more work on the Roman Empire than on the Kushans.
Tldr: the numbers themselves are probably quite inaccurate. We can quibble about the details. Nevertheless, in this case, the big picture is just underscoring something anybody in the relevant fields already knows: nearly a quarter of a million versus nearly 150. The gap is a bit shocking but only a bit.
Scholarship on these two empires is also not going to get more equal, short of an apocalyptic planetary reset. More scholarship on the Roman Empire means more scholarship to come on the Roman Empire because more books, films, TV shows, museum exhibits and university courses means more people wanting to find out more about the Roman Empire and that is absolutely fantastic!
We do need to talk about the Romans
I think people being interested in the past is always a good thing.
I think people being interested in pretty much any past is a good thing.3
I think people being completely fascinated by the Romans is a good thing.
But even beyond this, we do need to talk about the Romans because their influence is now a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Even on continents that Roman geographers never imagined, or speculated about as a theoretical possibility, modern European colonialism planted buildings, laws and languages saturated with admiration for and imitation of the Roman Empire.
For generations, school children all over the world were taught that Rome was one of the two great ancient civilisations that gave birth to the modern world (the other one being ancient Greece). Other ancient cultures might feature in the history classes but usually only as bit parts or shadowy ‘enemies’.4
Not to study a culture that is woven so tightly into the fabric of our world would definitely be missing something important.
As a result of some of their own habits and the lasting historical obsession with them, we also have a much better chance of understanding the intricate, everyday, behind-the-scenes parts of the Roman Empire than we do anywhere else.
We can paint a picture of Roman life in far more detail than any other ancient culture, from street foods available on a summers day to changes in haute couture. We can build models with a much higher level of certainty about huge questions like how the military was funded or how well transport infrastructure worked.
All of this is an incredible dataset for comparison as long as we remember one thing:
the Roman Empire was weird.
Just because we can see it better…
The Roman Empire was weird in the general sense that every culture is distinctive.
The Roman Empire was also weird in the sense that lots of things about it sit pretty far outside of any average we can make out from other ancient cultures.
That is where those 148 studies of the Kushan Empire come in. And the slightly fewer about the Sātavāhana Empire, that ruled further south in South Asia in the first and second centuries CE, and the slightly larger number of studies about the Parthian/Arsacid Empire that ruled in West and Central Asia (centred in modern Iran and Iraq) at the same time, and the tiny number of studies of the Western Kshatrapas, who were sandwiched between the Kushans and the Sātavāhanas…
The total numbers may be small in comparison with the enormous amount of scholarship on the Roman Empire and that gap may never go away, but our knowledge of everywhere is and, consequently, we can start to make generalisations that don’t start with the Roman Empire as default.
We can start to say with some confidence, for example, that how the Roman Empire managed its monetary system was not like how other places did. We can’t necessarily say exactly how: that is the problem with having one picture in slightly blurry Technicolor and the others in grainy black-and-white, but we know enough to say that, if their systems worked like Roman systems, the coins we have from other places would not look the way they do or be found in the places and the numbers that they are.
The Romans favoured incredibly life-like statues not because nobody else in the world at the time could figure out how to carve a perfect calf muscle but because the Romans had particular ideas about identity, the afterlife and communal recognition. Other societies had different ideas about humans and the world and their art reflected that.
…that doesn’t make it right
Maybe more than anything, I now feel confident saying that, as a scholar of the ancient world from a comparative perspective, the Roman Empire was uniquely brutal.
Yes, all empires are violent.
But the Roman Empire embraced, celebrated and proliferated extreme violence to a degree that was shocking to its contemporaries and that should be shocking to us. It often isn’t because we’ve internalised over generations that the Roman Empire was ‘normal’.
When politicians and popular talking heads sweepingly state that people in the past were only either vicious or victimised, that life was cheap and that awful violence was par for the course, they are mostly (and often unknowingly) generalising from the Roman Empire to the rest of the past in some quite specific ways:
Generalisation Step One: all ancient civilisations were like the Roman Empire (but maybe slightly less good: that’s why we don’t know so much about them). Therefore, they must also all have been extremely violent.
Generalisation Step Two: medieval civilisations were qualitatively worse than ancient civilisations because the modern idea of history is rooted in the notion of great antiquity, a terrible ‘Dark Ages’ and then a climb to Enlightenment. Therefore, if all ancient civilisations were extremely violent and all medieval societies were worse, they must have been extremely violent, too.
Generalisation Step Three: Therefore, all societies in the past were extremely violent.
Big narratives, so big that we don’t necessarily even notice them, die hard, but this one needs to. The Roman Empire was unique, specific, particular, distinct and one of the ways it was different was in its use of and attitude towards violence.
No other ancient civilisation used slaughter of humans and animals as mass entertainment. Gladiatorial shows in the Roman Empire sometimes had a vaguely ‘ritualised’ dimension: they might be used to celebrate a festival or an emperor’s birthday, but they were not religious events like, say, the ballgames of many of the Central American empires. Those were violent. See above: all empires are violent. But they were steeped in cosmic ideology. Their violence served specific purposes within ideas about how the world worked and how to keep it turning. Amphitheatres around the Roman Empire look more like football stadia and descriptions of gladiatorial shows by Romans make it very clear that they were, overwhelmingly, viewed that way too. They were a great day out!
No other ancient civilisation that we know of exercised such widespread and violent punishment for insurrection or crime. From the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE to the punishment of even quite moderate crimes with (sometimes elaborately orchestrated) death and the mandatory torture of slaves when called as witnesses, the Roman Empire set standards for violent empire incredibly high. They were not typical penalties, but any society that punishes specific crimes by switching out the number and type of animals put in a sack with the offender before they were all thrown in a river is, in my personal (albeit historically informed) opinion, odd.
Most of what we know about Roman violence we know from Roman sources: that is actually weirder than we often realise. Often what we know about violence by historic societies comes from the testimony of their enemies and victims. That isn’t proof that everyone in the past thought violence was okay, but it does suggest that the Romans were pretty comfortable with it.
We can see it in representations of violence, which overlap uncomfortably with that Roman obsession with realism. Compare these two public statements of power.
In the famous Sasanian rock relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, another ancient empire celebrated the defeat of two Roman emperors. One is shown kneeling. The other is gripped around the wrists by the mounted Sasanian emperor. Their fate was pretty grim (I can’t keep saying this enough: all empires are violent) but in the public representation of them, by the Sasanians, they are presented as alive, clothed, voluntarily submitting. The emphasis is on the greater glory and power of the Sasanians.
Trajan’s column, erected in 113 CE in Rome, had an identical purpose to the rock reliefs at Nash-e Rostam: it is a big, public, permanent record of the greatness of a ruler. Its surface is entirely covered in a spiral ‘comic strip’ account of the deeds of Trajan. However, here, Trajan’s soldiers show their victory not by bringing kneeling captives but by holding out the severed heads of the defeated.
My point is not about whether or not each empire killed people (obviously, they did) or killed more people (how would we even know) or even how they killed people (violently - how else?). It is about the way in which the Roman Empire chose to foreground violence in conveying its own glory.
It is testament to the distorting influence of the Roman Empire - the sheer mass of evidence that means we see it so clearly and the admiration in which it has been held - that saying the Roman Empire was extraordinarily violent is even controversial.
Still, if you’re not convinced, take a moment to really think about this single data point. (If you are convinced, really don’t. Skip right past because it is horrible.)
In 71 BCE, when the Roman army defeated a major slave rebellion, 6000 prisoners of war were crucified along the Appian Way, the main road into Rome. We are used to thinking about the distant past in terms of numbers, so let’s run some numbers: if each man were crucified approximately 10 feet apart and along both sides of the road and a person walks, on average, at 4 miles per hour, a person entering Rome would have walked for around an hour and twenty minutes past the sight, smell and sound of dead and dying men. Crucifixion was explicitly designed to last for hours, often days. It was intended to be physically agonising and visually striking. Bodies were often left on display afterwards to drive home the point.
Rome had a population at this point of perhaps half a million people. Step beyond the numbers and imagine what this one act of imperial retribution must have been like, not even for the 6000, but for the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who must have used the Appian Way, maybe multiple times a day, for days on end, possibly even weeks.
This was not perpetrated on a distant field or in the immediate, heated aftermath of battle. (I’m not making excuses but these are, comparatively, ‘normal’ contexts for historical violence.) It was mass, public brutalisation at the very heart of the empire.
Modern popular depictions, such as the epic 1960 movie, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, focus on the personal injustices of individuals towards Spartacus and his fellow slaves or suggest that the empire was at a unique moment of ‘corruption’ and ‘decadence’.
There is little evidence that the Roman authorities saw it in those terms. Plutarch does claim that Spartacus was inspired to rebel because of harsh treatment by his slave master but no clemency was offered to the rebels because of any such extenuating circumstances. No change resulted in either the legal status of slaves or the use of crucifixion as a punishment.
The past was complicated because people are
The Roman Empire provided a foundation for huge parts of the modern world. Some things we would probably mostly agree are ‘good’: space for artists, poets, even political protest (not by slaves!), celebration of friendship.
Many things were (and are) morally neutral but we might agree mostly make life nicer or make Good Things more possible: prototypes for integrated plumbing systems, regular bathing habits, an interest in fine food, concrete.
Some things are pretty hideous when you look closely at them, but we generally don’t, because when the Roman Empire was nearly all we could see of the ancient world it was possible to convince ourselves that everybody must have been doing the same. And if, as a lot of the West does, you claim the Romans as ‘(y)our’ ancestors, it can be uncomfortable recognising that they really were more violent than lots of other people at the same time or since.
I don’t think we should stop studying the Roman Empire. I don’t think we should fixate only on its horrors, any more than we should remain hypnotised by its grandeur.
We need to keep digging deeper, to keep producing those articles and books to understand the Roman Empire better and better, in all its complexity: its poetry, its plumbing and its peculiar obsession with death.
And we need to do the same for every other part of the ancient world and make sure that those stories find their movies and their TV shows, too.
We will probably always know much more about the Roman Empire than anywhere else in the ancient world and that is probably okay if it helps us to see everything more clearly instead of it being everything we can see.
If you don’t know it, WordCat is a great resource. It is a massive database of library catalogues than can tell you not just what is out there but also which libraries they are in. If you give it your location, it can even list the copies closest to you.
Particular kinds of interest in certain parts of the past are a different matter. The past is a resource which, like any other, can be used for all sorts of purposes, including bad ones. Nevertheless, in my experience, people being honestly interested in how the past actually worked, rather than dishonestly cherry-picking isolated or distorted snapshots to support an argument in the present, is always a good thing.
The clear exception to this has always been East Asia, where the series of very large empires that have competed for control of the wide networks of the Yellow, Yangtze and Pearl Rivers. The regional ancient past has always been prominent in education, though in recent centuries the Roman Empire has nevertheless become a focus of major interest.
While I generally think your point is valid, I think you may be overstating your case a bit. For example, take this claim, “No other ancient civilisation that we know of exercised such widespread and violent punishment for insurrection or crime.”
I can think of one example immediately that makes the Romans look tolerant - the Neo-Assyrian empire. For example, here’s an inscription from Ashurnasirpal II:
"In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword ... I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms [and] hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living [and] one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.”
It’s likely true that the Romans were above the norm for brutality, but they’re not alone. There’s also the confounding factor that, smaller societies never produced an empire as large as Rome, and thus simply practiced violence on a less impressive scale.