ROMANIZATION – OBSOLETE?

Guy de la Bédoyère MA FSA FRNS

Over recent years there’s been an increasing debate, or at least a so-called debate, about whether the word Romanization is a suitable one for describing what happened to Britain during the Roman period.

Some people think it’s an obsolete term, harking back to the time when British antiquarians and archaeologists of the late 19^th century saw themselves and their culture as the natural descendants of the Romans. They thought Britain was a fundamental force for good, bringing the benefits of British civilisation to other parts of the world, as the Romans had done in their own time. The most vocal critic of the term Romanization is Professor David Mattingly of Leicester University who, in his book An Imperial Possession, has suggested that we now see the impact of Rome in Britain as being a far more complex process. He’s suggested the term ‘discrepant identity’ to describe a Roman Britain with a much more varied experience of the influence, or rejection, of Roman culture.

To my mind the problem with this is that it expresses a very restricted understanding of what Romanization means, and it reduces the issue to little more than an argument about semantics. Essentially the Discrepantists (for want of a better word) only regard ‘Romanization’ as a very narrow concept: the imposition of Roman culture on another. But the word has been around for a very long time, and like most words, its meaning has changed to suit the times. Richard Hingley of Durham University’s Archaeology Department recently claimed in British Archaeology (July/August 2007) that Romanization was first used by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1885 as part of a ‘crisis of imperial confidence’. Dr Hingley sees it as British imperial society trying to bolster its own self-belief by seeing its own effect on the world as a mirror of what happened in the Roman Empire and creating the term Romanization to express this.

But in fact Romanization was first used by an American philologist and scholar called William Dwight Whitney in a book about the study of language in 1867. The phrase he used was ‘Italy after its first Romanization’. This is the primary use of Romanization listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. Whitney was born in the United States and he worked in America so he hardly constitutes a member of British imperial society suffering from a crisis of confidence. That was a time when the United States was beginning to become a major world power. Whitney used it as a purely descriptive and convenient term for the process by which Roman customs and manners were adopted by others. Since many of the peoples in Italy accepted this, indeed even welcomed it, it is plain that this did not have to amount to forcible imposition. In other words Romanization does not necessarily have to mean what the Discrepantists insist that it does, and it is fairly remarkable that the 1867 usage seems to have been overlooked in the effort to shoehorn the evidence into a predetermined agenda.

Indeed Romanization comes from the verb ‘to romanize’ which goes back to the early seventeenth century and comes itself from a medieval Latin word romanizare – no prizes for guessing what that means. Even the Romans themselves had the term romanitas which means essentially the same thing.

To my mind this is ultimately a futile and artificial debate. It strikes me that a cabal of academics are mildly desperate to show to themselves and the world that their subject is in a dynamic state of development. The truth is that the complexity of Romano-British society is recognised much more today than it was before, so I’m perplexed by the claims that it will take a new word to uncover this. Roman influences were colossal, and varied, and more to the point they are more readily detectable in the record we have to hand whether that means looking in Tacitus for an account, excavating a rubbish pit in a new Roman town, tracking the dramatic impact of Roman culture on an Iron Age rural farmstead or trying to understand a rural settlement where Roman influence is barely detectable archaeologically.

The trouble for archaeologists is admitting that it isn’t really possible, from archaeological evidence, to distinguish a rectangular house owner who hated the Romans but like the comfort from another rectangular house owner who loved the Romans. Likewise one cannot distinguish a roundhouse owner who stuck to a prehistoric form because he despised the effete decadent comfort of Roman housing from another roundhouse owner who yearned for a stone rectangular house with a tessellated floor but could not afford one. Nor could you distinguish either from another roundhouse owner who couldn’t care less. Whoever they were, and whatever they did, they all used Roman money because that was what there was to use. You can’t distinguish anyone in Britain today by the money we use, or the taxes we pay. It’s even been suggested that native styles of sculpture were consciously retained and used as a means of refuting, resisting Roman classical styles. This may be true in any one instance but how could we ever distinguish that one instance? And how would one distinguish that from someone who was simply not very good at carving?

Sadly we cannot normally extract motive from the archaeological record.

In my opinion the unpalatable truth is that the archaeological record of Roman Britain is not equal to the questions being asked of it. In other words, the evidence does not exist to resolve certain questions. Of course, academics do not like admitting this. What they want to present to the world is a dynamic subject in a state of exciting flux since this helps justifies their privileged positions, in which they are spearheading a thrilling unravelling of the past. This might explain some of the more absurd superlatives provided in the publicity material for Mattingly’s book, including, ‘extraordinary’, ‘brilliant’, ‘radical’, ‘the first major narrative history of Roman Britain for a generation’ (debatable) and a ‘controversial’, experimental, speculative and heretical’ text.

In actual fact the history of Roman Britain hasn’t really changed at all, since we have the same written and epigraphic evidence we have always had, apart from a few limited additions. Even the Vindolanda letters, while providing a vastly more colourful image of a single fort over a couple of decades, has been automatically used as a kind of universal template for the whole Hadrian’s Wall system (despite predating it), every other fort in Britain and a lot of forts elsewhere. It’s an indication of how little we have. Imagine using a box of burned papers from a Napoleonic-period fort in Kent to use as a basis for understanding the British army in 1914, 1940 or even 1998.

Whatever archaeologists like to claim, no excavation has done anything to tell us who owned villas, where they came from, what their estates were, or a host of other legitimate social and economic questions. I was once asked by Time Team’s originator, Tim Taylor, which excavation of a site in Roman Britain ‘had completely changed the way we think about the subject’. I had to say I couldn’t actually think of one that had done that. That was a bit extreme but on the whole it’s fairly true; if anything, it’s been the detectorist finds, uncovered in totally unexpected contexts and places, that have changed things. Not of course that many academics would admit that.

So instead we are subjected to occasional, desperate, ‘initiatives’ like the one that seeks to reject the word Romanization. It creates the impression that something has developed in the subject, that academics are on the cutting edge of discovery, when all that has really happened is that one word has been replaced with another. Look past that, and you can see that nothing has changed at all other than a cabal of academics trying to claim that by changing a word it has. Personally I think it borders on being a con.

The fact remains that the decisive visual, textual and artefactual difference between the Roman period and others is the arrival of Roman material. That is what we have, and it’s how we define the period. Of course it doesn’t matter what we call it. But Romanization has been around a long time. It is a word most people can understand immediately. The closest we have today is Americanization – we all know what that means, and we all know it covers a multitude of possibilities from singing one’s favourite songs from Oklahoma! to pushing American goods on Third World countries and vast US military installations in strategically located parts of the world.

So rather than waste time or paper on arguing that the whole debate hinges on Romanization’s contemporary suitability or not (founded on a false idea that it only ever meant one thing), we’d do a lot better by being honest about the limitations of the record available to us than pretending that changing one word will open the door to new revelations.

It won’t.

In September 2007 I entered secondary school teaching. The long-term hope is to reintroduce Classical Civilisation at A level for September 2008 to a joint sixth form covering three schools. However, I have already discovered that while the OCR board has retained Roman Britain as an option for the new syllabus, the AQA board has elected to drop it. This should be of a very great deal more concern to all of us, especially university academics, than attempting to redefine the study of Roman Britain by altering the terminology. That is unlikely to do more than help propel Roman Britain further into the oblivion of irrelevance to most of the population who care not one jot about a remote period of our history that had a very limited impact on what came after it. Those who do care about it, and enjoy it, know what Romanization means. ‘Discrepant identity’ simply elicits from most people a response on the lines of ‘… er, what?’ and I think that says it all.

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