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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2010
Whether or not Syme made a convincing case for revolution at Rome, his Roman Revolution did not effect a revolution in Roman history. To be sure, his choice of where to start and where to end his discussion was unorthodox (if orthodoxy was the old edition of the Cambridge Ancient History or Rice Holmes or the periodization of Oxford Greats), but his relentless focus on individual political actors and their relations with one another differs from the emphasis of earlier scholars only in its priorities and intensity. Whether or not Wallace-Hadrill makes a convincing case for revolution at Rome, Rome's Cultural Revolution is revolutionary. To be sure, the individual parts of the book have been variously anticipated in particular studies, but the insistence that what happens in the history of buildings, instrumentum domesticum, dress, and monuments constitutes not simply the background to a political story, but is itself the story of Late Republican Rome — in W.-H.'s own words ‘that the political transformation of the Roman world is integrally connected to its cultural transformation’ (xix) — challenges the assumptions on which Roman historians have built the history of the Republic ever since Asinius Pollio.
1 Holmes, T. RiceThe Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire, 3 vols (1923)Google Scholar began, effectively, with Pompey but finished in 44 b.c.e.; the old Cambridge Ancient History, like the new, divided at 133 and 44 b.c.e.
2 ‘Integrally connected’ represents a strengthening of W.-H.'s position since 1997 when he talked, in explicitly Foucauldian terms, of the political and social revolutions involving a ‘parallel revolution in ways of knowing’ in his ‘Mutatio morum: the idea of a cultural revolution’, in Habinek, T. and Schiesaro, A.The Roman Cultural Revolution (1997)Google Scholar, 3–22, at 6. On p. 215 (see below) W.-H. puts the case more strongly still.
3 cf. Salmon, E. T.Samnium and the Samnites (1967)Google Scholar, and even Harris, W. V.Rome in Etruria and Umbria (1971)Google Scholar.
4 From, for example, the fourteen volumes of F. Coarelli (ed.) Guide archeologiche Laterza (various dates) through collections of essays such as Roth, R. and Keller, J.Roman by Integration: Dimensions of Group Identity in Material Culture and Text (2007)Google Scholar and van Dommelen, P. and Terrenato, N.Articulating Local Cultures: Power and Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (2007)Google Scholar. Excellent in summarizing progress until 1996 is Curti, E. et al. ‘The archaeology of central and southern Roman Italy’, JRS 86 (1996), 170–89Google Scholar.
5 Ritual mention: Dyson, S.Community and Society in Roman Italy (1992)Google Scholar, 26, 32, 45, 60, 67; David, J.-M.The Roman Conquest of Italy (1996; trans. of La Romanisation de l’Italie (1994))Google Scholar, 22, 25, 118, 151, 154. Side-lining is the approach of the new Cambridge Ancient History where vol. 8, Rome and the Mediterranean to 133 BC separates off J.-P. Morel on ‘The transformation of Italy, 300–133 BC. The evidence of archaeology’ from E. Gabba on ‘Rome and Italy in the second century BC’, and of Flower, H. I. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 It is notable that attempts to write history with material culture remain dominated by those trained four or five decades ago (and outside the UK in the hands of those who are primarily archaeologists, e.g. Carandini, Coarelli, Torelli, rather than primarily historians); the literary turn amongst those trained in the last two decades or so is best represented by Dench, E.From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines (1995)Google Scholar and Dench, E.Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 So e.g., K. Bringmann Geschichte der römischen Republik (2002; trans. as A History of the Roman Republic (2007)), where the section on ‘culture and religion under Greek influence’ is entirely about literary culture and does not even nod to Pietrabbondante. Rosenstein, N. and Morstein-Marx, R.A Companion to the Roman Republic (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar restrict material culture to just three chapters: Torelli's on the archaeology of Rome, Welch's on art and architecture, and Patterson's on Roman and Italy. In the tradition of Galsterer, H.Herrschaft und Verwaltung im republikanischen Italien (1976)Google Scholar rather than of Hellenismus, David's Romanisation de l’Italie (above, n. 5) supplements tradition with epigraphy rather than material culture more generally, as does Bispham, E.The Municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus (2007)Google Scholar. Patterson, J. R.Landscapes and Cities: Rural Settlement and Civic Transformation in Early Imperial Italy (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar gives one indication of what can be done with material culture.
8 ‘Mutatio morum’ cited above n. 2, at 5 n. 7. W.-H. first used the title ‘Rome's cultural revolution’ for his review of Zanker's The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus in JRS 79 (1989), 157–64 — a fact which, as we shall show, makes the chronological limits of Rome's Cultural Revolution more, rather than less, surprising.
9 Scepticism about the rather mechanical view of clientship sometimes found in older literature does not justify abandoning the perception that ‘The Empire was based on the personal loyalty of leading men throughout the provinces to leading families at Rome, and this attachment proved to be independent of political vicissitudes and … on the whole unaffected even by the fortunes of those families’, Badian, E.Foreign Clientelae (1958)Google Scholar, 262.
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11 This has important implications for the wealth of current work on dress, too much of which pays insufficient attention to the rhetorical weight of fabric. A notable exception is Edmondson, J. and Keith, A.Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (2008).Google Scholar W.-H. is much better on clothes than on nudity, where he attempts to establish Greek attitudes to nudity during the Principate from Herodotus. A good treatment of the temporal patterns of fashions for nudity is still required despite much recent work, and controversy, on the topic (see e.g., Daehner, J. ‘Grenzen der Nacktheit. Studien zum nackten männlichen Körper in der griechischen Plastik des 5. Und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 120 (2006), 155–300Google Scholar; Hallett, C. H.The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC–300 AD (2005)Google Scholar).
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17 That language is, however, anticipated earlier in the book: cf. ‘the last and most spectacular wave of hellenism’ (111).
18 See Welch's chapter in Dillon and Welch, op. cit. (n. 15).
19 Very relevant to this chapter is Roth, R.Styling Romanisation: Pottery and Society in Central Italy (2007)Google Scholar, whose conclusions about the importance of sub-élite agency in the transformation of Italian pottery offer substantial grounds for resisting the ‘capillary action’, top-down, view.
20 W.-H. repeatedly (xix, 441) asserts that Syme's title was ironical, by which he seems to mean that Syme used a Marxist term to argue for a very non-Marxist revolution which left class positions quite unchanged. W.-H.'s ‘cultural revolution’ might be held to be equally ironical in relation to Mao were it not that others, and he himself (above nn. 2 and 8), have used the phrase in a non-Maoist sense for years.
21 Potter, T. W.Roman Italy (1987)Google Scholar; Crawford, M. H. ‘Italy and Rome from Sulla to Augustus’, in Bowman, A., Champlin, E. and Lintott, A. (eds), Cambridge Ancient History X: the Augustan Empire, 43 B.C.–A.D. 69 (1996), 414–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 979–89.
22 Excellent here is Edwards, C. ‘Incorporating the alien: the art of conquest’, in Edwards, C. and Woolf, G. (eds), Rome: the Cosmopolis (2003)Google Scholar.
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26 W.-H. himself draws attention to the absence of literature and religion, as indeed of Roman art, in the preface (xix) but does not explain or justify it, saying only ‘If I do not pursue certain themes, it is not for lack of appreciation of their interest and importance’.
27 Hence the irony that W.-H. first talked of cultural revolution when reviewing The Power of Images (above, n. 8).
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30 The classic text is FIRA 1.55, a decree of Octavian of 41 b.c.e.
