The Southern Levant during the first centuries of Roman rule (64 BCE–135 CE): Interweaving Local Cultures

Preface

Every man in every time has felt the desire and the need to connect himself with the other. We experience this daily in our contemporary world, yet it was also true for men and women throughout history. We have often heard our world referred to as globalised, characterised by many interconnectivities and the possibility to know what happens everywhere. The principal aim of this work is to understand if a certain degree of ‘globalisation’ was present even among ancient communities of the Near East, that is, if there was interconnection, and whether it led to cohabitation or conflict.

First of all, I shall attempt to explain my choices. In order to facilitate the reading, the texts quoted from classical literature have been translated into English. Greek words are transcribed and, when necessary, supplemented by a translation. The chronological limits of my study are primarily based on political events. I focus on the period beginning with the arrival of Pompey in the region during 64/63 BCE (Fig. 1) and ending with the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, when Rome seemingly suppressed any independent will in the territories of the southern Levant. The chosen period includes numerous significant political events that were an upheaval in the lives of the local population. Among these, the defeat of the rebels during the Bar Kokhba revolt marked the starting point of an accelerated process of integration, rather than the annexation of the former Nabataean kingdom.

The analysis starts with a brief overview of modern theories about Roman approaches to subjected populations. Scholars have long used the concept of Romanisation, as well as the idea of Hellenisation, to explain the hierarchical relationship of a supposed ‘superior’ culture (in this case, that of the Romans and of the Greeks) over ‘inferior’ civilisations, namely the peoples that the Greeks and the Romans encountered around the Mediterranean Sea. In this view, romanisation resulted from the natural superiority of the Roman identity over local cultures (Hingley 2005, 37); it was therefore considered as an early form of progress.

In this sense, the accounts of Roman history by Western scholars often share an anti-oriental interpretation of history, one that is tinged by many prejudices against African and Near Eastern cultures (Hingley 2005, 29). The processes of cultural integration (or, sometimes, their rejection) was the results of long, multifaceted interactions and occasionally clashes. According to Saskia Roselaar, many studies about the Roman empire fall short in explaining the causes of these changes, as if the Roman conquest was sufficient in itself to justify these profound transformations (Roselaar 2015b, 1–2).

Modern social and anthropologic theories have shown that the relationships between peoples are far more complex, undermining the premise of ‘Romanisation’. In fact, the development of a global world system over the past fifty years has demonstrated that the European history cannot be taken as a model for the study of history worldwide. The Western perspective, in other words, is only one among many possible ways of interpreting history.

The case of Rome was undoubtedly sui generis. There was a vast variety of responses to the Roman conquest, even within the same province. How provincial subjects reacted to the Roman rule is complex, particularly in the Near East. Many ancient cultures and religions intertwined, modifying the expressions of Greekness and Romanness, transforming themselves into a new original culture, hybrid and original in many ways. Instead of homogenisation or Romanisation, for the eastern provinces the term resistance was the main concept and the attention was primarily directed at ensuring the survival of Greek culture (Lulić 2015, 20).

The aim of my study is to explore the centrality of processes of integration during a period that has often been regarded as formative for the culture of the empire. The coming of Rome increased the diversity of cultural identities, and even those activities that were at first instance considered unambiguously Greek were absorbed into the Roman framework. However, some local realities, like the Jews and the Arabs, differed from other subjected peoples throughout the Roman empire. They reinforced their collective identity while selectively absorbing Roman culture.

Fig. 1. Map of the political division of southern Levant after the coming of Pompey (64/63 BCE).

For these reasons, this work is focused on a geographical area marked by a very impressive intermingling of nations and people. Unfortunately, it was not possible to explore the entire Near East in detail, because the amount of material is far too vast and varied. For the same reason, I have chosen to analyse the question of religion only marginally. There are many excellent works about the religion of these ethnicities, mostly about Judaism. I have preferred instead not to compete with them. The best part of the work has been devoted to the historical and archaeological evidence, in particular to architectural and topographic features, attempting to gather all potential sources connected to the places under examination. In particular, literary sources have constituted an important role in the analysis, as well as epigraphic and numismatic ones.

The absence of defined political boundaries constitutes one of the most significant obstacles for this work. The challenge of defining these areas is connected to the lack of clear geographical or cultural entities in the area, which was interdependent and diverse even before the Roman rule. For many centuries, the area was the periphery of Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms and then it was close to the eastern frontier zone of the Roman empire.

Phoenicia, Syria, Palaestina, Arabia and Mesopotamia were so closely connected that their political boundaries were often not taken in account. The presence of nomads further entangles this already complicated situation. So many different peoples dwelt in the Transjordanian area that it is very difficult to reconstruct welldelimited borders of nations, including those that emerged during the 2nd century BCE, like the Ituraeans, the Judaeans or the Nabataeans.

All these conditions have made the study of these territories challenging, yet fascinating. Ethnicity and culture are very difficult concepts to examine in any context, but we must keep in mind that the social identities we find documented in the historical record do not necessarily reflect the entire picture. Moreover, identity itself is multifaceted and fluid. Many elements, such as those based on social, religious and political institutions, might be part of the social identity of individuals. Cultures and ethnicities are constantly renegotiated and reformulated, as each individual is part of a network of social relations and has the capacity to accept, transform or reject foreign elements.

1

Romanisation(s) in global times

1.1 The Romanisation debate

Romanisation, as well as its sister-concept of Hellenisation, is fundamentally a modern notion. It arose out of national and imperial ideologies born at the end of the 19th century, which first introduced the ideas of nationhood and empire. According to Greg Woolf, this worldview was built on two premises: a belief that not all the human races are equally civilised, and a profoundly Eurocentric vision of the world (Woolf 1998, 5). Some of these visions are still popular, although they have evolved throughout the 20th century, during which concepts like ‘civilisation’ or ‘just war’ are in fact present in current debates.

The first scholar who defined the concept of Romanisation or Romanising was Francis Haverfield in 1923. He built on the works of Theodor Mommsen, who had already explained cultural changes that had occurred across the empire using the word ‘Romanising’: for him, in fact, Roman territories showed a high degree of homogeneity, legitimated by the levelling action of Rome itself (Mommsen 1886, 193). In addition, Rome’s unification of Italy was a good model for German unification (Freeman 1997, 30). However, Mommsen considered this model to be inappropriate for the Greek East.

The romantic interest in the ethnic identities and the emphasis on race as a natural and immutable characteristic constituted the perfect background for the development of these ideas. Further support for these was found in the Darwinian theory of evolution, which led some to believe that biological inequality existed among humans (Hodos 2010, 5).

Haverfield developed Mommsen’s ideas, encouraged by the political situation of Britain at the early 20th century¹. In fact, the desire to ‘civilise’ third world countries provided an excellent justification for Britannic imperialism (Wallace-Hadrill 2012,111). The words of the British scholar are clear: ‘Here Rome found races that were not yet civilized, yet were racially capable of accepting her culture’ (Haverfield 1923, 5). Roman terminology and symbols were adopted to create a moral legitimisation of colonisation; it constituted an idealised benevolent power, which carried its superior culture to other regions (Terrenato 2005, 64).

Romanisation was a general, progressive process which involved many, if not all, areas of life, including language, art, religion, architecture and material culture. It allowed the emergence of a common culture and the extinction of differences between Romans and provincials (Haverfield 1923, 18). Romanisation deleted pre-Roman cultures in barbarian Europe as well as the Europeans, in particular the British empire, expanded civilisation ideals among primitive countries. The concept of Romanisation, in fact, has many parallels with the idea of acculturation used in anthropology and sociology during the first half of the 20th century: both ideas developed from the same cultural framework (Jones 1997, 40 ff.). For the Mediterranean East, however, the significance of the term was less certain, because it was usually replaced by a similar term, namely ‘Hellenisation’. The concept of Hellenisation has been ascribed to Droysen, who used ‘hellenism’ and ‘hellenistic’ to characterise a period when Hellenistic culture spread, causing a fusion between East and West (Droysen 1836).

Both ‘Romanisation’ and ‘Hellenisation’ had been considered separate but similar phenomena. Haverfield himself made a clear distinction between the partially romanised East and the more romanised West (Haverfield 1923, 12–13). This approach is clearly teleological, reflecting views of social evolution from a primitive to a civilised state and making a direct connection between Western Europeans and classical Rome (Hingley 2000, 124; 2005, 39). Romanisation was considered inevitable due to the superiority of Roman values. Because of their supposed superiority, colonialist views considered it natural that the colonisers prevailed over colonised natives.

However, Haverfield was aware that the archaeological evidence shows a much more complex picture, including surviving pre-Roman remains (Haverfield 1923, 22; Webster 2001, 211; Hingley 2005, 35). Given this evidence of the enduring presence of native culture and, in some cases, of the revival of ancient tradition during the last phases of Roman dominion in Britain, in the 1930s Robin George Collingwood in the 1930s challenged Haverfield’s vision. In fact, he affirmed that the civilisation of Roman Britain was ‘Romano-British, a fusion of two things into a single thing different from either’ (Collingwood 1932, 92). For him, some natives had never embraced Roman culture and, instead, many country villages were romanised to a very low degree (Webster 2001, 212).

From the 1960s, archaeological excavation and surveys were undertaken throughout Europe. From them, archaeologists found a great variety of settlements testifying many different attitudes to the arrival of the Roman army. The significance of ‘Romanisation’ in the Eastern Mediterranean was also debated. Some argued that it was an individual choice made for advancing a political career (Welles 1965, 44), while other scholars were more sceptical about its use (Bowersock 1965, 72).

In response, the ‘nativist’ movement emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. For the first time, the notion of local resistance to Romanisation appeared clearly. Nativists considered the adoption of Roman elements as a mere façade, while the majority of indigenous people preferred to not become Roman. In this period, new thoughts entered in theoretic debate in archaeological and historical fields, causing the emergence of new historiographic perspectives, usually labelled as post-colonial views. It is not a coincidence that this reaction against Romanisation found a fertile ground in Britain, which was experiencing the effects of post–colonialism. This model, like the Romanisation model, although it has been important for having given attention to submitted people, failed to explain the development of new features that make unique every provincial experience.

The emergence of nativism created two distinct poles and did not let go beyond the dualism that was already evident in Romanisation thinking (Webster 2001, 213; Curchin 2004, 9–10). One of the better developed criticisms of colonial views was postulated by Edward Said. In his book Orientalism, he explained very well that colonial discourses created binary oppositions, favouring colonial cultures, depicted as civilised, dynamic, complex, modern, while depicting the others as inferior, passive, savage, lazy, simple and primitive (Said 1978). Said, in fact, has examined the ways in which the West saw the Orient, that is the Middle East, based on the ideas that European scholars have of eastern Mediterranean people.

From this first phase, other approaches to understanding the way colonised people have been represented were developed in the literature on colonialism and the nature of colonial identities. In particular, many studies about identities flourished, including those exploring the complexities of the relationship between conquerors and subjected people.

The dualism between the Romans and the native people was overemphasised by Martin Millett, who described Romanisation as a ‘dialectical process, determined on the one hand by Roman imperialist policy… and on the other by native responses to Roman structures’ (Millett, Roymans and Slofstra 1995, 2–3). Millett’s model was built on Haverfield’s theories, but attempted to reconcile his views with the nativists’ objections. However, unlike Haverfield, Millett considered local elites as active agents of Romanisation, claiming that the rapid adoption of Roman customs was the result of spontaneous challenge among natives, as Paul Zanker had already pointed out (Zanker 1990, 316).

The Roman empire, indeed, was able to successfully establish patron-client relationships with the local elite. In this way, the rule of very distant and different territories did not require a strong military and administrative intervention (Millett 1990).

Non-elites were ‘romanised’ second-hand through their emulation of the upper classes, who mediated Roman culture. The major weakness of these postulations is that they do not consider the possibility of grey areas. Lower classes appear only as passive recipients that experienced Rome through the mediation of romanised elites (Webster 2001, 216). Furthermore, if Romanisation was primarily a matter of local elites who had to re-negotiate their authority with their new rulers, it is not clear why eastern elites were less romanised than those in the western Mediterranean. Romanisation studies have focused on the western provinces because they offer more visible evidence of changes in material culture, often forgetting that the meaning of objects is not fixed but changes when they pass from hand to hand (Morley 2010, 112–113).

However, according to David Mattingly, these approaches fail to consider how power dynamics operated, because ‘the Romanization paradigm is a classic example of a common tendency to simplify explanation by labelling complex realities with terms that exaggerate the degree of homogeneity’ (Mattingly 2011, 206–207).

From this brief analysis, it is clear that the term Romanisation assumed varied forms during the 20th century and it is still in use, assuming a number of different significances. Furthermore, it seems to be a debate that arose and spread, first of all, among Anglo-Saxon scholars. Miguel John Versluys has recently pointed out that the ‘individual scholar’s view of Romanization appears to greatly depend on the area that he/she studies, as well as on the historical and archaeological sources available for that particular region’ (Versluys 2014, 9). This assumption seems to be confirmed by the fact that Continental scholarship, unlike Anglo-Saxon scholarship, has not rejected the term ‘Romanisation’ at all.

Many of the studies in the 1900s, starting from divergent reactions to Millett’s theories, focused a new attention on the relationships between the imperial power and the local elites. In fact, the promotion of Roman life style was a concern of the Roman administration, yet local elites were not simply assimilated, but actively participated, in the creation of a new social order.

One of the main challenges to archaeology posed by post-colonial theories, there has been a reconsideration of how archaeologists represent the past. Historical archaeologists have often stressed the ability of material culture to give a voice to subaltern people, who are often underrepresented in historic texts. However, the Romanisation approach misreads material cultures, because it fails to take into account the different identities shown by archaeological evidence (Whittaker 2009, 199). As John Moreland has pointed out, ‘objects were actively used in the production and transformation of identities’ (Moreland 2001, 84). Indeed, during the 1990s, archaeologists gave more attention toward the responses of native people.

Among these scholars, Greg Woolf refined Millett’s assumptions, stressing that adopting Roman culture might be a status marker, not of political or ethnic identity (Woolf 1998, 239). He notes that the use of Roman materials did not mean a complete acceptance of all Roman values. The importance of Woolf’s account lays in trying to go beyond the dichotomy between the Romans and the natives, emphasising that Roman experience diverged greatly from one place to another (Woolf 1997, 341). Native people were not merely assimilated into an already constituted order; instead, they actively participated in creating a new one (Woolf 1997, 347). Another important feature of Woolf’s book is the notion that Roman identity is a fluctuating concept that differs from time to time and from place to place and that it has been created in the local context through acts of accommodation.

Nonetheless, Woolf has continued to follow the path traced by Haverfield and Millett, as far as elites’ relationships are concerned. The majority of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean region consisted of lower social actors, like peasants or craftsmen, who showed a great variety of cultures and who were much more conservative than elites.

Woolf also sparked debate about the Romanisation of eastern communities. In his view, Romanisation here involved both cultural and political elements. He was well aware of the semantic confusion and the difficulty in applying this common term to every region of the empire (Woolf 1994, 116–117). Susan Alcock, who completely avoided the use of the term in her valuable volume about the Roman Greece (Alcock 1993), some years later agreed with Woolf about the necessity to re-evaluate and reinterpret the evidence in order to better study the consequences of Roman actions (Alcock 1997, 2–3). However, scholars disagree on how to label the phenomenon surrounding the encounter between Romans and native peoples.

A number of archaeologists started to use the term ‘Creolisation’, taken from the American history, instead. This term indicates that Roman culture did not simply replace previous cultures, but they together created a new, mixed culture. As outlined by Jane Webster, creolisation is a process of negotiation between asymmetric power relations (Webster 2001, 218). The most important assumption of this theory is that it does not explain the adoption of new customs or material goods with the simple desire of a less civilised people to emulate another. On the other end, as noted by David Mattingly, the application of this model to the Roman world risks reading into the historical record a steady resistance through the use of material culture (Mattingly 2011, 41). Mattingly himself has preferred to use the concept of ‘Discrepancy’ to describe not only the existence of different identities in a Roman province, but the full spectrum of distinctive experiences of relationships among peoples (Mattingly 1997b, 12–13; 2011, 216). Scholars have disagreed on labelling this phenomenon, utilising a vast range of words. In fact, in addition to creolisation and discrepancy, many other terms have been used, such as hybridity, middle ground, mestizaje (or métissage), and so on. It appears clear that we are confronting a set of concepts that do not lend themselves an easy definition or consensus. They have been alternatively used for expressing the creation of new transcultural forms, a complex situation of mutual influencing and imitation.² These new views have tended to recognise a sort of dynamism within cultural processes, which diverge over time and space. They have helped to destabilise boundaries by creating buffer zones where different cultures converge. The idea of a homogeneous and clearly-defined Roman culture, easily recognisable in all its aspects, has now been considered as a modern invention.

In this context, Chris Gosden has examined the interplay of people and material culture. In his analysis, he identifies three forms of colonialism, among which Roman Empire would belong to the second one (Gosden 2004, 31–32). These three models are:

1. Colonialism within a shared cultural milieu. In this case it is difficult to distinguish colonial and non-colonial types of relationship, because the societies involved shares cultural values.

2. Middle-ground colonialism. Cultural change results to be multilateral, because all parties think they are in control.

3. Terra nullius. It is the most violent approach, where pre-existing cultures are not recognised by colonisers, who instead destroy them.

In the middle-ground model, the dominant power does not necessarily displace pre-existing traditions and material cultures; instead, a new set of cultural habits emerges. However, Mattingly has outlined that the Roman expansion was much more complex, covering all the three models shared by Gosden. In the early stages of the extension of its imperium over Italian peninsula, we can talk of Roman colonialism within a shared cultural milieu. However, the terra nullius model would have been shared by many Roman writers, who, according to Brent Shaw, were unable to give a true picture of peoples outside the limes because of their prejudices against barbarians (Shaw 2000, 374).

These approaches have been criticised recently by a number of scholars: Nicola Terrenato, for example, has claimed that ‘some of its key concepts, such as resistance or creolization, assume colonial encounters in which ethnic factors have an overriding importance’ (Terrenato 2005, 70). He has sought to definitely overcome the old view of pre-modern empires as structurally different from the modern ones. From its inception, archaeology had a clear local perspective. Thus, the first target that a new generation of scholars is trying to go beyond post-colonial approaches and to analyse the concept of connectivity, influenced by modern global transformations.

Based on her studies about Roman Greece, Maria Papaioannou has suggested a good alternative, one that merits consideration. She has affirmed that we should find an alternative among the Greek-speaking context. For these reasons, she has proposed the use of synoecism to denote a variety of political and cultural combinations (Papaioannou 2016, 39).

1.2 Globalisation and the Roman world

As Andrew Gardner has recently pointed out, beyond the many theories among postcolonialist scholars, there is a broader debate about the value of globalisation and its spatial and temporal limits (Gardner 2013, 6).

Approaches to globalisation have their origins in Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems theory. He believed that the first enduring and stable world economy started during the 16th century (Wallerstein 1974). His claim was challenged by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, who dated the phenomenon of World Systems back to 5000 years (Frank and Gills 1993).³ These concepts derived from the World History have constituted the base for globalisation theory. Under this theory, globalisation does not describe a single universal period of universal history, but has been present throughout history and touched all peoples (Jennings 2011, 13). Furthermore, globalisation is not identical in every historical period and place. However, the interactions and integrations among different peoples are a clear and consistent aspects of globalisation.

Antony Gerald Hopkins has given a good explanation of what globalisation means: ‘Globalization involves the extension, intensification, and quickening velocity of flows of people, products and ideas that shape the world. It integrates regions and continents; it compresses time and space; it prompts imitation and resistance’ (Hopkins 2006b, 3). Indeed, globalisation does not represent a singular phenomenon, but it is the result of many processes working together. The presence of interconnectivities and networks is one of the most important features of globalisation theories. In this sense, as Manuel Castells has pointed out, globalisation ‘appears to have happened not only in the 19th century of the common era, but thousands of years ago’ (Castells 2006, 158). The principal role of connectivity in the past has already been outlined in the book of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, who depict the Mediterranean as a set of micro-regions traditionally interdependent (Horden and Purcell 2000).

For Martin Pitts and Miguel John Verluys, the Roman Empire was a perfect model of an interconnected world (Pitts and Versluys 2015b, 17), one that provided many opportunities for an economic expansion. Each individual identity is the product of this social interaction. In this view, the Roman Empire is a jumble of local groups, a very heterogeneous society, in which individuals operated differently for becoming Roman, on the one hand holding their inherited identity and, on the other, following a centralising imperial culture. This process is particularly emphasised by Michael Sommer, who, following the words of Aelius Aristides, has found that the effects of Rome’s power were mainly felt in three areas: space, law and belonging. The Mediterranean, depicted by Greeks as a sea full of alien and fantastic worlds, was transformed in a ‘globalised’ area. Furthermore, throughout its institutions, Rome gave a standard of legal security previously unknown. Although diversities continued to exist, many Graeco-Roman features in activities such as architecture, cuisine, bathing, entertainment and religion changed the provincial world, not only in the West Mediterranean, but also in the Semitic world (Sommer 2015, 176). Nevertheless, we cannot forget that the integration happened not only at a vertical level – namely between Romans and natives – but also at a horizontal one. In a globalising world, in fact, communities had much more opportunities to contact each other. It seems that Rome never attempted to interrupt this process in favour of homogenisation (Naerebout 2014, 278). In this sense, being Roman means being a part of a larger community, in which it was possible to preserve one’s own identity.

Conversely, even under Roman rule many areas were left out of this process and indigenous elites ruled their communities with a substantial degree of continuity from the pre-Roman period (Downs 2000, 209; Hingley 2005, 115). Such a persistence of local features is another aspect of globalisation, sometimes defined as ‘global localisation’ or ‘glocalisation’. In this way, Rome was both globalised and globalising, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse claimed, which makes clear the need to decentralise Rome in studies of ancient history, and sheds light on the Eurocentric perspective of modern history (Nederveen Pieterse 2015, 333).⁴ Robert Bruce Hitchner has outlined that the Roman Empire was global in the sense that it was able to replace a highly fragmented system of states with a system of interdependent provinces. This integration was particularly favoured by investments in military institutions and transport infrastructures (Hitchner 2008, 3–4). The provincial societies reformulated their own identities, in a different process for each province. Therefore, the global system itself enhances cultural differences, hybridisation and even the marginalisation of those civilisations who are unable to participate in new global perspectives, because global and local are two faces of the same movement (Pitts 2008, 494). At the end of the 1990s, Zygmunt Bauman already noted that ‘globalization divides as much as it unites’ (Bauman 1998, 2). The introduction of new features into an existing culture, in fact, can even be seen as part of the diversification, and not as homogenisation of the indigenous pattern (Naerebout 2014, 276–277). It is therefore impossible to identify a unique and uniform Roman culture, because it probably has never existed in a ‘pure’ state, but only as a set of diversified cultures.

The main differences between the ancient and modern worlds are linked with the scale of networks, the speed of communications and the politic and economic relationships (Pitts 2008, 494). If we look at an economic level, it appears clear that a single world market emerged only at the end of the 18th century and not before. A number of authors refuse to adopt the term ‘globalisation’ if applied to eras before modern times, when the phenomenon has become truly global (Naerebout 2006–2007, 156; Greene 2008, 80). The Roman Empire obviously could not have the modern highspeed technologies that led to the time–space compression. Accordingly, globalisation is seen as an empty concept, utilised instead of older concepts like colonialism or imperialism in the context of pre-modern societies. For some global historians, like Helle Vandkilde and Richard Hingley, globalisation is a characteristic of all human societies because social, cultural and economic systems have always been present in human societies (Vandkilde 2004; Hingley 2005). However, Frederick Naerebout criticises this view and considers globalisation as a strictly recent phenomenon, because time–space compression and interconnectivity are possible only during our era (Naerebout 2006–2007, 165–167). Certainly, such communication was unknown in the Roman world.

The doubts which have emerged recently merit careful consideration, and the risk of replacing Romanisation with another generic term is high. I am more inclined to talk of ‘globalising attitudes’ that involved human kind in all his history, more than globalisation per se. It is undoubted that a certain kind of interconnectivities have always existed and that modern technologies have favoured the time–space compression. In this way, a globalising aspiration, namely the desire to have relationship and comparison with the other, has always been present in human actions. Rather than replacing the term ‘Romanisation’, this aspiration needs to be clarified and better explained, thus erasing old connotations of colonialism and imperialism and in the light of the new social and historical instances brought by World History.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, in fact, has already affirmed that ‘Romanisation is Globalisation’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2015, 233). This idea is quite old: in 1934, Fritz Schulz proposed that the spread of Roman citizenship should lead the Mediterranean to be considered as a unique nation rather than a set of different peoples (Schulz 1934, 96 ff).

1.3 Identity and ethnicity

Globalisation itself has, in many cases, revived interest in ancient traditions and identities. Recently, there has been an explosion of interest in issues of ethnicity, nationalism, race and religion, arising from a renewed concern with defining and affirming collective identities. However, defining these terms is very difficult, and such definitions are often lacking. As recalled by Geoff Emberling, in fact, many scholars have preferred to avoid discussing these terms altogether (Emberling 1997, 300).

The question of so-called ‘collective identity’ is recurring in ethnic and migration studies. This view of identity best answers questions such as ‘Who are we?’, ‘What distinguishes us from other groups in this society?’, ‘Where do we draw the lines (or boundaries) between our group and others?’

Bernard Knapp outlined that identity designates a broad category, of which ethnicity is a factor (Knapp 2008, 31). ‘Ethnic identity’ is often used to refer to a particular group’s shared sense of belonging. This connection is based on certain experiences and notions deriving from group-members’ perceptions of their common cultural heritage