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  • Romanization in the Time of Augustus
  • Craige B. Champion
Romanization in the Time of Augustus. By Ramsay MacMullen (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000) 222 pp. $25.00

The term Romanization has come under increasing fire in recent decades. Scholars of ancient history are skeptical about notions of a one-directional flow of cultural productions from conquering center (Rome) to subjected periphery (the provinces). The subject of MacMullen's book, therefore, is problematic, and it is alarming to read at the book's inception that "Roman civilization eventually appeared everywhere, as one single thing." Such a statement arouses suspicions of reductionism. Fortunately, these fears are soon allayed. MacMullen later states that there was "no single homogeneous 'Roman civilization,'" and that the real evidence for Romanization is "archeological, and of the provinces." As MacMullen shows throughout the book, his position is no self-contradiction; at different levels of historical analysis, both statements are accurate.

The book breaks down into four regional case studies about the Greek East, Africa, Spain, and Gaul; a concluding chapter considers provincial replication of Roman cultural productions. Greece was a special case. There the Romans entered a world that was already highly urbanized. In cultural terms, Horace's famous maxim that Rome was in the end conquered by Greece carries historical substance. Although Augustus settled some 40,000 to 60,00 veterans in the east within twenty years, [End Page 452] that the Greek east successfully resisted "Romanization" in many ways is most significantly revealed in Latin's failure to make significant linguistic inroads in the Greek speaking parts of the Empire.

Africa, where Caesar and Augustus settled 50,000 discharged veterans, tells a different story. There Roman surveying and farming techniques changed the landscape, and cities such as Lepcis Magna took on characteristically Roman features, with macellum (market), basilica, and curia (senate house). Spain had city centers that replicated Roman proportions, axiality, and (sometimes) sheer size, imitating Italian prototypes. Gaul also underwent Roman re-ordering on an urban basis. Gallic civitas-capitals were governed by elected officials bearing titles found in Italy, either duumviri (two chief officials) with aediles or quattuorviri (boards of four chief officials).

Each regional chapter gives a useful map that plots Caesarian and Augustan foundations, colonies, and municipia. In the concluding chapter on replication of Roman cultural forms in the provinces, MacMullen offers salutary warnings against center-periphery models according to which all signs of Romanization emanated from an imperial capital carrying out its own politicocultural agenda. He cogently argues that Augustus had neither the means nor the will to impose Roman ways upon unwilling provincials. There was no "centralized culture-push." The term ideology is ill-suited to describe the appearance of Roman civilian, artistic, architectural, and cultural forms in the provinces.

The Mediterraean world became Romanized, in part, because of the cultural influences of significantly large numbers of discharged veterans and commercial agents, but a more important cause was its own desire to be Roman. Imitation, not ideology, is the key word. Romanization was urbanization, but within the urbanized areas, native persistence showed the limits of Romanization (and Roman indifference to native practices): Gallic Roman deities with torques, Iberian beer drinkers in the Tagus Valley, display niches for skulls "in good Gallic fashion," and a Carthaginian sufetes with the culturally schizophrenic name of Annobal Tapapius Rufus.

MacMullen succeeds in illustrating the concrete aspects of Roman culture spread, but he does not sacrifice historical specificity and historical nuance. Furthermore, he demolishes any vacuous ideological notions of Rome as an "evil empire" that forced its way of life on the colonized and the conquered.

This is a little gem of a book; its scholarship is what we have come to expect from its author, comprehensive and provocative. It is certain to become the starting point for students of the complex historical phenomenon of Romanization. [End Page 453]

Craige B. Champion
Syracuse University
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