Roman Colonization under the Republic : historiographical contextualisation of a paradigm

Abstract

Introduction Recent years have witnessed increased interest in Roman colonization1 and previous conceptions of Roman colonization have been fundamentally challenged (fig. 1). At present, under the influence by postcolonial theory, there seems to be a strong consensus that previous views of Roman colonization are outdated and that the development of new ones is needed to move forward.2 An influential approach to this challenge has been the adoption of alternative perspectives to mainstream Romanocentric ones and the development of methodologies to bring these perspectives into focus. Especially since the 1990s, the attention paid to the subaltern part of society, to the downtrodden, and more generally to the variegated experiences and voices in ancient colonial situations has been especially productive in this respect and has opened our eyes to fundamentally different approaches to the subject.3 In certain circles, this has produced a new orthodoxy constructed around key themes such as resistance, appropriation, hybridization, variegation, discrepant experiences, fluidity of identities and more. This type of approach is sometimes associated with, or rather claimed by, archaeologists more than ancient historians,4 but in reality this undoubtedly healthy corrective development is based on a dynamic and fruitful debate of both critical-historical insights and new archaeological theoretical approaches. After an initial, perhaps overenthusiastic deconstruction of top-down perspectives, which resulted in an underestimation of Roman agency, a more productive approach now takes Roman power into account, but also considers the different and intricate ways in which it was exercised.5 Without doubt, recent studies of Roman colonization have made important progress by applying such new approaches to the primary sources and archaeological evidence. Yet, they have tended to do so in opposition to what they view as outmoded interpretations of Roman colonization or in relative isolation of the long and complex history of research. Framing new interpretations in opposition to previous work or not engaging this work at all has risks. One such risk is the simplification of earlier work caused by preferring one prominent study to many other, less visible ones, or by fusing elements from different contributors into a chimerical ‘standard view’. The imminent risk here is that, by losing sight of the complexity of the past debate, new interpretations are framed according to a very particular, unintentionally circumscribed line of thought. As will be demonstrated below, such a process may ultimately narrow a debate that actually is much wider in scope and potentially obscure alternative approaches to the subject. Another approach, also of postcolonial pedigree, is to delve deeper into the complex historiography of Roman colonization and to trace the emergence of some concepts and the decline of others against their historical and intellectual background. Yet, despite the momentous historical importance of Roman colonization, the history of modern thinking about Roman colonization has been surprisingly little scrutinized

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