Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Miriam Balmuth Lectures in Ancient History and Archaeology) [Hardcover]

David Mattingly has been writing post-colonial literature for quite a while now and this book seems to really sum up his view of the Romans. Basically his conclusion is that the Romans sucked. They sucked a lot. And people didn't like living under them. This was the main theme of his book on Roman Britain (An Imperial Possession) as well. Mattingly seems to be driven by a moral imperative that, while admirable in itself, doesn't seem to have much place in historical studies. It can be summed up in a simple argument: Empires are evil; Rome was an empire; Therefore Rome was evil. Mattingly is a postcolonialist which means that he feels the need to rescue the voice of the underclass (the so-called subalterns to use a term I despise) from behind the exploitative screen of the upper classes (who don't get themselves a fancy new name). This is a book about identity and the way in which people define themselves. More importantly it's a book defending the way he looks at the Romans as a people.

As you might be able to tell I don't have much liking for the new breed of post-imperialists and some of their cultural historical brethren. They seem to spend more time inventing buzzwords or redefining old ones (gender, identity, memory, etc.) than actually contributing to the field. 'Identity' alone shows up more than 100 times in this book. Still, this isn't the worst book on the topic. It does after all have a genuine purpose: to convince everyone else to hate the Romans. Most people (scholars not excluded) would be willing to admit that the Romans could be pretty nasty people. While Mattingly does provide the interesting point that the opinion of the Romans is rather darker in novels and films than in historical works I don't really think there's nearly as much whitewashing of them as he makes out. Sure, some people may admire them, but there's a major difference between admiring someone and trusting in them blindly. The darker side of Roman imperialism could indeed use some study, but he isn't likely to win many converts the way he goes about it.

Having got that out of the way I do think that this book has much to offer. It certainly has its heart in the right place. It's not a bad goal to recover the lost voices of history. I'd argue that it isn't possible except at rare sites such as Pompeii, but it can't hurt to try. It's just that rather than doing this by looking at how the common people lived he wants to look at how they suffered. Because that is the common theme of everyone in this book: Suffering and resistance. If you are an elite living in an unfair power relationship then it is impossible to have an honest relationship with your inferiors. If you are among the poor you have to resent your superiors. It's good of Mattingly to demonstrate that the Romans were not the monolithic block that we tend to think of them as, but he does so with such extremism and disdain that it's hard to sympathize with his point of view even when you want to be in complete agreement.

As far as the structure of the book goes it's pretty logical. This was based off a string of lectures so each chapter is unconnected to the last apart from a few recurrent themes. They all revolve around exploitation in some way, but they focus on theses such as the nature of imperialism (in general and in the Roman context), the way that Roman power would have been felt by the conquered, the ways in which the Romans extorted money from their population, and the way in which individuals defined their identities outside of the standard Roman system. The title actually does a remarkably good job of covering each of these strands. Every theme is passionately argued (often in a way that makes clear their parallels to modern imperialist states) and contains useful information, even if they often verge on the theoretical.

So that's the book really. It has a lot of good ideas and seems to sum up his views pretty well. I won't claim that there isn't good material in here, but I feel like his 100% negative bias is not a good counter to the maybe 60-70% positive bias going the opposite way. Making everything positive into a negative is not correcting a bias, it is removing all nuance. The thing is that I don't much like the Romans as a people. I find them cruel and unbearably self-righteous. But I can't bring myself to think of them as nothing but villains because they just weren't. Mattingly is very conscious of the connection between the Romans and modern imperialism and seems determined to force people to judge the Romans by modern (liberal) standards. I disagree. The Romans were a different beast altogether. Judging them by modern standards is a fairly useless exercise. It's as simple as that.

This is a book that should be read though, even if just to dismiss what is said. It provides a very strong point of view that needs to be grappled with in order to truly understand the period. Even though I ended up dismissing most of his arguments the way he constructed them did make me question my inbuilt assumptions. Which is useful every once in a while.