Roman Imperialism and Local Identities

Abstract

In this book, Louise Revell examines questions of Roman imperialism and Roman ethnic identity and explores Roman imperialism as a lived experience based around the paradox of similarity and difference. Her case studies of public architecture in several urban settings provide an understanding of the ways in which urbanism, the emperor and religion were part of the daily encounters of the peoples in these communities. Revell applies the ideas of agency and practice in her examination of the structures that held the empire together and how they were implicated within repeated daily activities. Rather than offering a homogenized 'ideal type' description of Roman cultural identity, she uses these structures as a way to understand how these encounters differed between communities and within communities, thus producing a more nuanced interpretation of what it was to be Roman. Bringing an innovative approach to the problem of Romanization, Revell breaks from traditional models and cuts across a number of entrenched debates, such as arguments about the imposition of Roman culture or resistance to Roman rule. A scholar of Roman architecture and Latin epigraphy, Louise Revell is lecturer in the department of archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Roman Urbanism: A View from the Countryside

“…Usually the Cinderella of accounts about towns in Roman Britain, the great majority of the population that continued to live on the land rarely feature as anything other than passive observers, supporters or recipients of urban life. As Revell (, 56) recognizes, however, we should not underestimate the role of the large numbers of people living in the countryside, who might only come into town occasionally to sell goods at market or to pay taxes but who were nevertheless crucial to the project of urbanism.…”

“…Laurence et al . ; Revell ). In this respect, Britain, much of northern France and north‐western Iberia are distinctive in that the provincial landscape here was characterized by a comparatively dispersed pattern of major urban centres interspersed with a far more extensive but patchy network of other smaller nucleated settlements that, to use a phrase of Greg Woolf's,‘displayed a markedly rural character’ (, 143).…”

“…In discussing the idea of the town, Creighton notes that the construction of these places and their subsequent character reflected the many different aspirations and interpretations of their ‘stakeholders’ of what it was to be Roman (, 71). More recently, Revell (, 43) has characterized urbanism as an ideology about the correct way of living that required locating daily activities within town, in the process establishing this place as part of the unquestioned mental map of the people dwelling there (cf. Keay , 203–4).…”

“…With such documents, however, there is always the problem of how far these laws were followed in reality. Consequently, rather than using them as proof of how people lived within provincial towns, deconstructing these documents provides an insight into how the ruling administration in Rome thought the peoples within the empire should organize their communities (Revell , 50). Within a provincial setting urbanism should be seen as a dialectic: whilst the charters provided a framework through which certain social and political activities might be conducted, it required the active reproduction of this ideology through the daily lives of the inhabitants of provincial towns for this to become the case.…”

“…As rural dwellers visited town their ability to ‘read’ the symbolic and practical significance of the buildings, streets and other features of the urban fabric, and willingness to incorporate the place and its routines into their own conceptual landscapes, would play a key role in affirming Roman urbanism. As Revell (, 40) puts it in relation to the evidence from Roman Wroxeter: ‘each time someone visited one of the stalls in the front portico and bought a mortarium or a sigillata bowl, or paid their taxes in the basilica, they reproduced the idea that a town was the most appropriate place for such daily routines, thus actively reproducing the importance of the urban setting’. If they did not, then the urban setting of social and economic life was undermined.…”