Unrest in the Roman Empire (eBook)

A Discursive History

Lisa Pilar Eberle, Myles Lavan (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
312 Seiten
Campus Verlag
978-3-593-45851-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Despite Roman claims to have brought peace, unrest was widespread in the Roman empire. Revolts, protests and piracy were common occurrences. How did contemporaries relate to and make sense of such phenomena? This volume gathers eleven contributions by specialists in the various literatures and modes of thinking that flourished in the empire between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE - including Graeco-Roman historiography and philosophy, Jewish prophecy, Christian apology and the writings of the Tannaitic rabbis - to investigate these questions. Each contribution analyses the discourses by which the diverse authors of these texts understood instances of unrest. Together the contributions expand our understanding of the varied politics that pervaded the Roman empire. They highlight the intellectual labour at every level of society that went to (re)making this imperial formation throughout its long history.

Lisa Pilar Eberle is Assistant Professor in the Institute for Ancient History at the University of Tübingen. Myles Lavan is Professor of Classics at the University of St. Andrews.

Textauszug

1.Unrest in the Roman Empire: Discourse and Politics

Lisa Pilar Eberle and Myles Lavan

On January 6th 2021 millions of people around the world looked on as a group of mostly white men entered the US Capitol by force. What happened that day in Washington, DC? March, protest, siege; coup d’état, putsch, insurrection; attack, armed invasion; conspiracy; legitimate political discourse; or white race riot? These are just some of the terms that have since been used to describe the events of January 6th (Lepore 2023). The choice of label is anything but trivial. The various terms encapsulate radically different understandings of what happened and its implications. Was it legitimate? What caused it? What response does it require? Might such events be prevented in the future? The different terms imply different answers to these questions, often eliding some while foregrounding others. As such, they each constitute a distinct attitude, a distinct politics, vis-à-vis these events, often intertwined with larger political frameworks and struggles.

The events of January 6th 2021 were hardly fathomable at the time of the conference from which this volume originated, in May 2019; and yet, these events and their aftermath vividly illustrate the central concern of our project: the far-reaching significance of how historical actors identify and explain instances of unrest (a term to which we will return). How such events come to be understood is in no way self-evident. The discursive construction of unrest is contested precisely because it is so consequential. Discourses of unrest prescribe not only attitudes but actions, sometimes long after the events they describe. The contributions to this volume analyse discursive constructions of unrest in the Roman empire with the aim of widening our understanding of the politics that pervaded this imperial formation.

Unrest

The claim that Roman rule had brought peace (pax) to the world was central to imperial ideology.1 To later historians too, stability and longevity have often seemed clear and distinctive characteristics of the empire that demanded explanation.2 Yet imperial society was arguably less calm and stable than these perspectives suggest. Various sets of evidence hint that at least some of the men and women that lived in the empire did not accept the circumstances in which they found themselves. Indeed, the empire itself provided important avenues for challenging the status quo. By petitioning Roman officials and the emperor himself, imperial subjects continually sought to alter their current place in the social order.3 Crucially, this practice was not limited to social elites living in towns. Village- and mountain-dwellers in Egypt and Anatolia demonstrably appealed not just to Roman officials but also to the emperor (often to shield themselves against the depredations of those very officials) and some slaves had recourse to the refuge that the emperor promised them against the power of their master.4 At different moments, however, people engaged in forms of collective action that aimed to change their allotted circumstances in life. Examples include assembled townspeople menacing Roman office-holders and local elites with turnips, stones or fire, plundering bands in the countryside seeking anything from higher wages at harvest season to the establishment of a new polity, slave rebellions, army mutinies and other uprisings – categories that in practice could readily blend into each other.5 This volume’s focus on ‘unrest’ is directed at this second group of strategies, involving collective action to contest the social constellations in which people were embedded.

Just how often did such forms of unrest occur? In an attempt to question Rome’s success at bringing peace to the world, Thomas Pékary catalogued all attested instances of such unrest between 31/30 BCE and 189/90 CE and found a total of 138 separate events.6 It remains hard to know what to do with this number. It is clear that these instances only represent the tip of an iceberg. The evidence we have is incidental and in no way complete. The ancient historians of the period considered many of these events unworthy of inclusion in their works; many were also invested in silencing and trivialising their occurrence.7 In his Histories Tacitus dramatised the succession crisis of 68–69 CE by narrating seemingly unrelated instances of slave uprisings, mutinies, provincial rebellions and civic discord in Achaea, Asia, Pontus, northern Africa and various parts of Gaul.8 Did he know of a similar range of events for other years in the first century? And how many other instances of unrest in 68–69 were unknown to Tacitus, or neglected by him? Our inability to answer these questions makes it impossible to meaningfully assess the incidence of unrest in the empire, let alone compare it with other periods and places. Yet contemporary authors do not appear to presume that their readers would be surprised to learn about such events. On balance, it seems likely that various forms of unrest – from banditry and urban protest to anti-Roman uprisings and rebellious slaves and soldiers – were pervasive features of the Roman world. Grasping their causes, unfolding and consequences is important to our understanding of social and political life in the empire.9

Yet the surviving evidence makes these questions hard to answer. The narrative sources for unrest are problematic on more than one level. Besides the issue of the unknown number of events which they overlooked or chose to suppress, there is the brusque brevity with which they treat those they do mention. With the singular exception of the rebellion in Judaea between 66 and 73 CE, few instances of unrest receive more than a sentence or two. More importantly, research on revolt and resistance in other periods and places should make Roman historians suspicious of how the elite authors of these texts recount these events. In 1381, Ricardian England witnessed a large-scale peasant rebellion, attested by numerous contemporary authors of high literature like Chaucer. Yet Stephen Justice has shown, by contrasting their accounts with six enigmatic texts that originated among the rebels, that Chaucer and his peers were simply incapable of comprehending the rebels’ motivations and strategies. Justice brilliantly reconstructs ‘a political culture in the countryside that the lords and chroniclers and poets barely knew of before the events of 1381 exploded it in their faces, and which, even then, they could not know’ (1994: 5).

Ranajit Guha developed and systematised similar ideas in his work on peasant revolts in British India (1983, 1999). His influential studies showed that the authors of many accounts of peasant rebellion in India, from colonial administrators to historians working in the twentieth century, pay no heed to the worlds of the peasant rebels. While some deny the rebels’ actions legitimacy by deploying the tropes of barbarism, immorality and criminality; others deny them rationality and even agency by resorting to notions of spontaneity and attempting to explain their actions as quasi-automatic responses to external stimuli.10 For Guha all these authors, including liberal and radical historians critical of British rule, partake in ‘the prose of counter-insurgency’; in refusing to centre the consciousness of the rebels, they all side with colonialism against its potential and projected alternatives (1983: 58–9).

Taken together, these ideas have important consequences for attempts to study unrest in the Roman empire. For one, we need to reckon with our own language and its politics. ‘Unrest’ is our gloss on the Latin noun motus (‘movement’, ‘disturbance’, ‘unrest’), which, together with a network of related words and imagery, appears as the most capacious of the various categories Roman authors used to gesture at the events that interest us, capable of...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.9.2024
• Verlagsort: Frankfurt am Main
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
• Schlagworte: discursive history • middle and late republic • Roman provincial administration
• ISBN-10: 3-593-45851-9 / 3593458519
• ISBN-13: 978-3-593-45851-9 / 9783593458519