Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)

On the Nile, the swift rapids of the cataracts required particular care and navigational skill. Ships had to be offloaded, and their passengers and cargo were transported overland to the east of the river, while the boat was guided down with cables from the shore cf. The Southern Frontier Region. Such challenging waters also invited daredevils. According to several sources, some locals took advantage of the swift currents at the first cataract to put on displays of their water rafting prowess Strabo Visitors were also known to try their hands at the rapids; the Greek intellectual Aelius Aristides, for instance, proudly claimed to have taken part in such extreme watersports Aristid.

Elsewhere in the Roman world, the role of the Tiber in transporting bulk goods to Rome, especially grain, is particularly well attested cf. After the fire of Rome, Nero used grain ships to transport debris away from the city to the marshes of Ostia Tac. As a result of all this mercantile activity, the river was often thick with smaller boats Lat.

Together with the Nile, the Tiber attests to the importance of rivers for transporting goods and people in the Roman world.

In order to be properly used, the physical infrastructure for travel in the Roman world had to be made legible to Roman officials, merchants, and private travelers. In this section I examine some of the means through which this legibility was achieved: These processes of ordering, collecting, and presenting information in textual or graphic form were at once functional and ideologically charged.

Roads were regularly marked with milestones Lat. In this way, roads themselves expressed their place in the wider Roman transportation network. These markers served twin functions, simultaneously orienting travelers and expressing space as Roman; the process of building a road and linking it to the road network of the empire represented a significant centralized intervention in the landscape.

In this sense, the Miliarium Aureum can be seen as an expression of the extent of Roman power and the connection between Roman roads and Roman control. The Stadiasmus , which was originally topped by an architrave and probably an imperial statue, provides a further link between the measurement of the Roman world and ideological expressions of Roman power and administration. Given that the Stadiamus was completed only a few years after the annexation of Lycia in 43 CE, it is likely that it did not reflect Roman improvements to the road network in Lycia, but rather that it reappropriated Lycian roads as Roman ones.

In addition to epigraphic routes, ancient geographic knowledge was also expressed through the rich tradition of textual itineraries see Elter ; Kubitschek ; Dilke , —29; Elsner ; Salway , Some, such as the Itinerarium Burdigalense see Elsner , recorded actual routes; others are almost certainly compilations, such as the third-century CE Antonine Itineraries , which begin with the Pillars of Hercules and continue counterclockwise around the Roman empire.

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The sources from which they were compiled are unknown, but they may derive from epigraphic itineraries, such as the Augustodunum fragment discussed above. As functional as these texts seem, they also express a viewpoint about the world, its connections, and its center s.

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Itineraries and their ideologies lay at the heart of Roman conceptualizations of their world. Itineraries are only capable of encoding a single journey at a time. Maps, which graphically represent physical geography and routes in a two-dimensional space, have a greater density of information, and a single map could, in principle, express every possible path through the Roman world.

Strict cartographic constructionists, such as Brodersen , , take a consistent concept of scale as a key element of mapping, and they emphasize the differences between modern maps and Greek and Roman representations of geographical space. If we allow for a slightly broader definition of a map, which places more emphasis on perspective than on adherence to a consistent scale, however, it is possible to identify at least two distinct Roman cartographic genres: Like itineraries, even these apparently very functional objects express strong views about the shape of the world and the meaning of travel through it.

Although there is evidence for several monumental maps in the Roman world see Talbert , only two survive, and both are fragmentary: While the cadastral plan of Arausio imposes Roman order on territory appropriated by the state, it seems unlikely that the Forma Urbis Romae served a similarly practical purpose. In its original context, it was mounted more than four meters above the ground on an interior wall of the Temple of Peace; it would have been impossible for a viewer to get close enough to appreciate its detailed depiction of the layout of the city of Rome Trimble , — Even though much of it would have been illegible to an ancient viewer, the marble plan served an important ideological purpose by monumentalizing the meticulously ordered cartographic knowledge that it represented see further Trimble These monumental maps were highly localized and tied to specific archaeological contexts; neither could have aided the traveler on the road.

A second genre of maps, which either survive on papyrus or are shaped to resemble a papyrus roll, suggests the possibility of more portable maps that contained detailed route information. Two such maps are extant, although both seem too luxurious to have been used as a road atlas. An incomplete map, produced in the first century BCE or CE, appears on the front of the Artemidorus Papyrus, alongside a geographical text and highly skilled sketches of human faces, feet, and hands MP 3 A second, the so-called Peutinger Map, a medieval copy of what is likely a fourth-century CE original, survives as eleven parchment segments, which can be joined together to form a long and thin map that closely corresponds to the dimensions of a papyrus roll cf.

Talbert , ; average dimensions of papyrus rolls are calculated by Johnson While neither of these maps seems likely to have been used to enable travel, both appear to share a set of cartographic conventions for depicting settlements, waterways, and land routes, and both seem to have distorted their dimensions in order to fit within the constraints of their medium see Gallazzi, Kramer, and Settis , — What, then, were these two maps used for?

In this section I turn from the physical and intellectual infrastructure of the Roman world to show how travel was integral to the construction, maintenance, and regulation of Roman power in both political and economic terms. In both practical and ideological terms, the physical and intellectual infrastructure I have described in the preceding section defined the extent of the Roman world and enabled Rome to exercise centralized control over it: A high proportion of travel in the Roman world can be attributed to either military or commercial interests; the needs of the Roman army and the desire for economic opportunities contributed to motivating and financing the infrastructure on which other forms of travel depended see further Roman Army and Roman Economy.

The Roman road system, for instance, was essential to the movements of the army, whose maritime activities appear to have been limited to the transportation of supplies Roth , —95; see Bremer on the use of rivers to supply military camps. It is often argued that roads were constructed primarily to support military activities, and that commercial activities were only an indirect benefit Schlippschuh , 87; Kissel , 54—77; Roth , — The same infrastructure that enabled the movement of the Roman army also enabled travel for economic purposes.

Literary and documentary sources, especially papyri from Egypt; goods recovered from ancient shipwrecks; and the distribution of finds of specialized products such as Italian wine and snails attest to the quantity and variety of merchandise exchanged throughout the Roman world Scheidel a ; Wilson a , b , , —88; see Tchernia , ; Panella and Tchernia on Italian wines; Marzano discusses the winter snail trade in Roman Egypt; traders themselves often formed associations; see P.

The degree to which trade was central to the Roman economy, however, remains a subject of debate Scheidel a , 7—10, offers a concise summary. Economic formalists argue that the Roman Empire was governed by a market-based economy that integrated local economies on an empire-wide scale argued for in detail by Temin ; Temin provides an overview; see Erdkamp and Manning for important limitations in our evidence for ancient economic activity.

While these models differ in the degree to which the wider Roman market and, therefore, trade and infrastructure were important for influencing local prices and production, both models predict significant amounts of commerce, which would entail corresponding travel by merchants for examples, see Meijer and van Nijf Private individuals also traveled for education and employment, as the fourth-century CE curriculum vitae of a certain Conon discovered in modern Ayasofya in Eastern Pamphylia attests: Conon spent his life on the move; travel had penetrated the conditions and values by which he lived his life.

Slaves represent a final group of individuals whose travel can be attributed to the exercise of Roman economic and political power.

Travel in the Roman World - Oxford Handbooks

It is a sobering fact that they likely represent the largest group of economic travelers. A central principle of slavery is the abnegation of basic elements of human agency, such as freedom of movement. When slaves traveled, it was almost always at the behest of their owners cf. Bradley , Travel by officeholders and the emperor himself helped to articulate the contours of Roman power, playing an important role in governing and maintaining a geographically, culturally, and ethnically diverse territory.

Because movement by Roman state officials was only experienced by those on the road, profectio departure and adventus arrival rituals played a central role in making their travel manifest to a wider public. Taken together, these rites constitute a form of Roman spatial religion.

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Both adventus and profectio rituals were highly choreographed, transactional performances between the governing and the governed. Through ritual practice the conceptual geography of the Roman world was temporarily inverted: Like many formal characteristics of Roman religious and civic life, rites of arrival and departure had their origins in the Roman republic and were continued in the Roman imperial period, but the use of rituals to demarcate official movement is in fact part of a much wider Mediterranean phenomenon.



They were an important feature of Seleucid kingship Kosmin , —80 and of their Achaemenid predecessors Briant ; Tuplin Dignitaries were first met extramurally by crowds, speeches, and acclamations Dion. Outside the walls an ordered citizenry presented itself to welcome and be viewed; ancient accounts suggest that the crowds were arranged by age, gender, and social status cf. Cicero boasts, presumably not without hyperbole, that he received an extreme version of this treatment on his return from exile: In the second movement, the city gate was opened; once inside, dignitaries could expect to be greeted by a large crowd and a second set of acclamations and festivities gate— Lehnen , —69; Suet.

Klauser]; Lehnen , ; Herod. The city itself was decorated for the occasion: If the first movement of the adventus ritual presented a welcoming human presence, the second movement was significant for its spatial dynamics. The city was laid open and presented to its visitors. Failure to welcome with sufficient pomp and circumstance might be taken as an offense Livy Implicit in the process of arrival is a complex social, cultural, and religious negotiation between host and visitor; in exchange for his presence, the local community bestows on the visitor honors, and in some cases treats his arrival as the epiphany of a deity.

Although literary sources generally present adventus ceremonies as spontaneous displays of affection, documentary sources reveal that extensive preparations were required Lehnen , — In addition to the cost of the ritual itself, dignitaries had to be fed and housed Millar , 32—35; cf. Avoiding such spontaneous displays could become a badge of honor.

The valences of adventus differed depending on where the ritual occurred. This eugertistic practice seems to have become so well-established by the fourth century that a panegyric for Constantine includes anticipated donations as part of an invitation to visit Autun Pan. Millar , Adventus at Rome worked differently. The Roman triumph may be interpreted as representing a particularly elaborate version of this ritual. Despite such similarities, there are significant differences, not least in that triumphs were formally granted by the Senate and the triumphator was the primary bearer of the costs see further Beard , esp.

One of the obstacles that he faced was the need to divert resources away from his potential triumph to repay a loan he owed to Caesar cf. When it came time to leave, departures profectiones were also marked by ritual. Rites of departure often receive only the barest of mentions in Roman sources, but they performed an important function in publicizing and displaying official travel and military campaigns see Livy In one of the fullest extant descriptions of a profectio ritual, Livy describes the departure of the Roman expedition against the Macedonian king Perseus in BCE:.

During those days the consul Publius Licinius, after the pronouncement of vows on the Capitol, departed in military dress from the city. Not just concern for their duty, but also a desire for spectacle spectaculum drew them to see their leader, in whose authority and judgment they entrusted the preservation of the entire republic.

They thought about the many contingencies of war, how uncertain the outcome of fortune was … would they soon see him with his victorious army ascending the Capitol to the same gods from whom he set out or would they soon offer this pleasure to their enemies? While Romans hoped for and expected state officials to return, commemoration of imperial visits was even more important outside of Rome, where they were rarer.

An anonymous panegyric for Constantine from CE, for instance, imagines how the citizens of Augustodonum will react to his depature: The process of monumentalizing an imperial visit took many forms. Several communities held festivals commemorating the day on which the emperor entered the city P. FD III 4 [], no. While rituals of arrival and departure make an immobile community fellow participants in official movements, members of those communities also experienced travel themselves.

Travel looks rather different from the perspective of individuals, such as the pair of Roman citizens, in all likelihood soldiers cf. I, Lucius Trebonius Oricula, was here. I, Gaius Numonius Vala, was here in the thirteenth consulship of the emperor Caesar, eight days before the Calends of April.

The contrast between these religious pilgrims and Lucius and Gaius, unlikely forbearers of the genre of narcissistic travel graffiti, raises important questions about the nature of two closely linked categories of travel, tourism and pilgrimage, which can be difficult to distinguish from one another in an ancient context cf. Dillon ; Rutherford and Elsner ; Rutherford , 12—14; Morris discusses pilgrimage more broadly. Both types of journey are undertaken by individuals, groups, and community representatives; both focus on visiting and viewing specific sites, objects, and spectacles; and finally, both sets of travelers search for memorable experiences, which are often commemorated in text, inscription, and votive offerings.

They differ primarily in degrees of religiosity and intensity of experience: The term pilgrimage often carries with it a series of associations related to Christian tradition, but there are clear differences between pagan and Christian religious travel, even if there are also points of overlap see Elsner and Rutherford For Christians, pilgrimage carried with it a distinct set of conventions and expectations, that need not apply to the pagan case: Further distinctions are made by both modern scholars and ancient sources between individual, personally motivated religious journeys and travel undertaken on behalf of a community.

In Greek and Roman contexts, state-sponsored travel to religious sites and spectacles is well-attested from the sixth century BCE through the third or fourth centuries CE, but there is evidence for forms of pilgrimage in the Mediterranean from at least the second millennium BCE Elsner and Rutherford , 10— Apart from intellectuals for whom sacred travel was part of their identity as sophists, sages, and wise men, pilgrimage was an integral part of the reign of the emperor Hadrian, who spent more than half of his rule on the road, making frequent sacred journeys to significant religious sites, especially in Greece Millar , 36; Holum ; Rutherford , 49— Troy was a long-standing site of pilgrimage in the ancient world, which had been visited by Xerxes Hdt 7.

Cornelius Scipio Livy Through his many pilgrimages, Hadrian reanimated the sacred sites of the Greek past with his presence and codified Greece as a site of religious and cultural memory. An important aspect of pilgrimage in the Greco-Roman world was the role it played in the performance and formation of the identity of individuals and communities see esp. Kowalzig ; Hutton a ; Lightfoot ; Rutherford , — Many of these aspects of cultural interaction in modern travel are central to the anthropology of tourism see further Bruner and Comaroff and Comaroff , who emphasize the commodification of ethnicity in the tourist trade.

A prime site for studying such cultural interactions is Egypt, a popular destination for tourists and religious pilgrims during the Roman period, whose arid climate has helped to preserve a rich record of their visits Hohlwein ; Foertmeyer ; Frankfurter , esp. In addition, travelers visited and often left their marks in the form of graffiti at a range of Egyptian sites, such as the Memnonion at Abydos originally the mortuary temple of Seti I and subsequently a temple of Osiris, which later housed an oracle of Bes; see Perdrizet and Lefebvre ; Rutherford , the Sphinx at Gaza, on which visitors inscribed poems IMEGR —28 [first or second century CE], [second or third century CE]; cf.

Bernand , and, most famously, the two colossi of Memnon at Thebes see Travel and Pilgrimage for a further list of sites. The pair of colossi—in fact two monumental statues of Amenhotep III—were identified by Greek and Roman travelers as depictions of Memnon, the mythological king of Ethiopia. Through their celebrity, the colossi became sites for literary and cultural interaction. This final section treats the place of travel in the Roman cultural imaginary, considering how literature represents and responds to the Roman impetus for exploration and how literary texts participate in shaping Roman conceptualizations of the travel, movement, and space of their world.

Travel in the Roman World

It is impossible to separate the practice of travel from the representation of it, and in a sense this final section presents a false dichotomy between praxis and representation. And yet many Roman texts can give us insight into how people at different places and times conceived of travel and geography. Movement looks very different depending on where the observers stand; the narratology of space provides a framework and vocabulary for describing the contribution of narrative to the presentation and depiction of movement in literature.

Two such narrative modes were outlined by Pietro Janni , who drew on the earlier work on spatial perception and presentation by the psychologist Kurt Lewin The chronotope of the road represents a hodological view of travel, that is, a highly restricted narrative perspective, which reflects the perceptions of the traveler without orienting the reader in a broader geographic and cartographic context cf.

Janni , 79—, esp. It is a powerful structuring device in Roman literature. Its hodological first-person narration resists translation onto a cartographic perspective: By contrast, Campbell adopts a thematic approach, one that selects a handful of discrete topics and explores them across the whole of the Mediterranean over a relatively long period of time But rivers were more than simple lines on a map that demarcated physical regions or provincial or imperial boundaries.

Chapter 3 is broadly concerned with the legal instruments used to manage water and riverine landscapes, to ameliorate the potentially harmful actions of rivers, and to regulate the relationships between the river, its local users, and the Roman state. Drawing upon the Digest and the corpus of the agrimensores Campbell illustrates a perpetual balancing act between state and society: Connected to this are the attempts of the agrimensores to manage the disruptions caused to landholders and their property rights by the inherent unpredictability of flood-prone fluvial environments.

Campbell turns to religion and art in Chapter 4 and surveys the various depictions and representations of rivers in a variety of media. In this vein, he remarks upon the relative insignificance of the Tiber in Roman state religion. Chapter 5 illustrates the military uses of rivers: Since riverine environments were highly variable, they were only infrequently regarded as hard and fast imperial boundaries and the Roman army might operate on both sides of a major waterway. On the whole, Campbell finds that although rivers figured heavily in Roman military thinking, no overall strategic plan or policy underlay their exploitation.

Ranging widely over topics such as navigation, transportation, canals, dams, and water distribution, the chapter is nearly a microcosm of the book as a whole. Still, this leads only to some very minor errors and omissions, particularly in a section of water mills, irrigation, drainage, and wetlands. The papyri are rich in evidence for these issues among others and a greater attention to the scholarly literature on these topics would have helped to flesh out the relevant sections of the chapter.

With old-style Roman politics in disorder, Pompey stepped in as sole consul in 53 B. Less than a year later, Caesar was murdered by a group of his enemies led by the republican nobles Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius. With Octavian leading the western provinces, Antony the east, and Lepidus Africa, tensions developed by 36 B. In the wake of this devastating defeat, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. He instituted various social reforms, won numerous military victories and allowed Roman literature, art, architecture and religion to flourish. Augustus ruled for 56 years, supported by his great army and by a growing cult of devotion to the emperor.

When he died, the Senate elevated Augustus to the status of a god, beginning a long-running tradition of deification for popular emperors. The line ended with Nero , whose excesses drained the Roman treasury and led to his downfall and eventual suicide. The reign of Nerva , who was selected by the Senate to succeed Domitian, began another golden age in Roman history, during which four emperors—Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—took the throne peacefully, succeeding one another by adoption, as opposed to hereditary succession.

Under Antoninus Pius , Rome continued in peace and prosperity, but the reign of Marcus Aurelius — was dominated by conflict, including war against Parthia and Armenia and the invasion of Germanic tribes from the north. When Marcus fell ill and died near the battlefield at Vindobona Vienna , he broke with the tradition of non-hereditary succession and named his year-old son Commodus as his successor.

The decadence and incompetence of Commodus brought the golden age of the Roman emperors to a disappointing end.

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His death at the hands of his own ministers sparked another period of civil war , from which Lucius Septimius Severus emerged victorious. During the third century Rome suffered from a cycle of near-constant conflict. A total of 22 emperors took the throne, many of them meeting violent ends at the hands of the same soldiers who had propelled them to power.

Meanwhile, threats from outside plagued the empire and depleted its riches, including continuing aggression from Germans and Parthians and raids by the Goths over the Aegean Sea. The reign of Diocletian temporarily restored peace and prosperity in Rome, but at a high cost to the unity of the empire. Diocletian divided power into the so-called tetrarchy rule of four , sharing his title of Augustus emperor with Maximian. A pair of generals, Galerius and Constantius, were appointed as the assistants and chosen successors of Diocletian and Maximian; Diocletian and Galerius ruled the eastern Roman Empire, while Maximian and Constantius took power in the west.

The stability of this system suffered greatly after Diocletian and Maximian retired from office. Constantine the son of Constantius emerged from the ensuing power struggles as sole emperor of a reunified Rome in He moved the Roman capital to the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Roman unity under Constantine proved illusory, and 30 years after his death the eastern and western empires were again divided. Despite its continuing battle against Persian forces, the eastern Roman Empire—later known as the Byzantine Empire—would remain largely intact for centuries to come.

Rome eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bloated empire, losing its provinces one by one: