Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World by Emma Dench (review)

Life is messy; this was true for the inhabitants of Rome's empire as much as it is for us, and histories of the Roman empire should reflect that messiness. This is the main point of Emma Dench's contribution to the Key Themes in Ancient History series of the Cambridge University Press. That Dench should seek to complicate Roman history does not surprise, given her previous innovative work on identity in Hellenistic and Roman Italy. Yet the topic of this study is, she states in several places, "political cultures" (18, 161). In the Bibliographical Essay at the end of the book, she summarizes the project as "an exploration of the emergence of and changes within local political cultures of the Roman imperial world, alongside the emergence of, and changes within, the imperial culture of the Roman state" (160). Put in another way, the book is a study of coping and opportunism in real time, both by the "Roman imperial state" as it reacted to the local cultures and institutions it encountered, and especially by individuals, private groups, and whole communities as they responded to Rome's dominance. This is an ambitious thematic program that Dench assigns her essay (as she prefers to call the book given its exploratory nature, 17), and she does cover such ground, which is why it is surprising that her main point is methodological, not historical: that historians should be more attentive to nuance.

In making this call for messier histories, Dench is reacting against the scholarly tendency since the nineteenth century of presenting the empire as a system. The prime example she identifies is Francis Haverfield's The Romanization of Roman Britain, which appeared in four editions between 1905 and 1923. That book presents cultural change as a straightforward process of the conquered recognizing the "natural" superiority of their conquerors' culture and rationally choosing it over their own. A century later, Dench argues, this "totalizing" approach to cultural change (from one culture to a completely different one) can still be detected in scholarship. She singles out as examples Greg Woolf's 1998 Becoming Roman and Clifford Ando's 2000 Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. The former presents the empire as a system of values. Woolf's Gauls have internalized the Roman concept of humanitas in order to enjoy the fruits of empire. The latter, meanwhile, presents the empire as a system of rituals that bind provincials to the centre. These theories are designed to explain the success of the empire. By so doing, Dench argues, they present the empire as a fixed process whose outcome was predetermined. This reduces the empire to a formula and accordingly marginalizes the aspects of life that fall outside the purview of that formula.

Such system theories Dench considers to be a symptom of a larger trend in ancient history that privileges the exhaustive empirical approach over the anecdotal. We are so busy looking for the patterns that we can miss the aberrations and nuances that may reflect the fuller story, for which direct evidence often does not survive. This point, of course, is not completely new. Over a decade ago now, Werner Eck made a similar but narrower point about inscriptions: they address such a small slice of ancient life that points arising from their statistical analysis must be controlled through comparison with other types of evidence.¹ Dench's approach to history also shares much with studies applying globalization theory to the ancient Mediterranean (a connection she downplays, 14, 155–156), for they do not track just the spread of extraregional trends, but also how communities adapted those trends to fit their cultures and needs. Indeed, one can quibble that her summations of Ando and Woolf (and other theories of romanization) are overly schematic. Woolf's model for cultural change, in particular, accounts for much more variation (according to geography, class, ethnicity, and other...