Antti Lampinen
University of Helsinki, Ancient languages and cultures, Dept. of World Cultures, Docent in Ancient Languages and Cultures
Currently: Collegium Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, since January 2025
- Senior Academic Librarian at the Nordic Library at Athens (Kavalloti 7), Dec 2023 to Dec 2024
- Assistant Director of the Finnish Institute at Athens from September 2018 to October 2023.
- Docent in Classical Philology at the Department of Classics, University of Turku from 2022.
- Docent in Ancient Languages and Culture at the Department of Classics, University of Helsinki from 2023.
- Between 2015 and 2017, a Newton International Fellow at the School of Classics in the University of St Andrews
- Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland at the Department of Classics, University of Helsinki (2017-18).
- PhD from the Department of Classical Studies, University of Turku (2013).
Phone: +358503614681
- Senior Academic Librarian at the Nordic Library at Athens (Kavalloti 7), Dec 2023 to Dec 2024
- Assistant Director of the Finnish Institute at Athens from September 2018 to October 2023.
- Docent in Classical Philology at the Department of Classics, University of Turku from 2022.
- Docent in Ancient Languages and Culture at the Department of Classics, University of Helsinki from 2023.
- Between 2015 and 2017, a Newton International Fellow at the School of Classics in the University of St Andrews
- Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland at the Department of Classics, University of Helsinki (2017-18).
- PhD from the Department of Classical Studies, University of Turku (2013).
Phone: +358503614681
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Edited volumes by Antti Lampinen
In particular, we feel that understanding the role of environment for ancient societies and culture should be pursued across a range of themes, allowing us to discern diachronic trends and continuities. The significance of the sea for both the concrete mobility of goods, people and ideas, as well as the usefulness of the sea as a metaphor and conceptual, occasionally heterotopic, space both elucidated through an approach that looks at the Mediterranean as an environment, and takes appropriate note of the most recent scholarship. Moreover, this volume will benefit from the use of the theoretical approach of the spatial turn that is a theoretical approach that places emphasis on space and place in disciplines linked with social sciences and the humanities. While never ignoring the fact that we are temporally (as well as environmentally) bound beings, during the past few decades, the use of this approach in different fields of
7
study has increasingly emphasised the importance of spatiality in understanding the history of the human being and of its relation with the environment. The subject is challenging, because it demonstrates that space is no longer a neutral concept and cannot be considered independent from that which it contains, and therefore neither can it be considered as immune to historical, political and aesthetic changes. Ideas of the reciprocal causal relationship between subjects and their environments have been common currency in spatially oriented disciplines (e.g. archaeology. geography, history, urban studies. This sort of approach can help set forth more nuanced theories regarding the relation between social systems and their environment - in this case, with the maritime cultural landscape – using case studies and methods applied in different disciplines such as archaeology, classics or history.
Contributions in edited volumes by Antti Lampinen
In the ancient world, art, wisdom and culture originated in the East. The Greeks were strongly influenced by the Achaemenid, Assyrian and Egyptian cultures. The way Romans looked at it, after having conquered Greece they had, in turn, brought civilisation home to the previously rustic Rome, or as Horace put it: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Ep. 2.1.156–157). However, Empire as an institution and power also originated in the Orient, combined with wealth and abundance. What the Greeks and Romans admired and wished to emulate was therefore often to be found in the Orient. When the Greeks grew stronger and first defeated, then subdued the Persians, they began to look down on them and to emphasise the negative aspects of the ‘barbarians’: autocracy, despotism, weakness, effeminacy, decadence, corruption, greed etc. The East was frequently turned into the opposite of all virtues the Greeks and later the Romans strove for.
The development of stereotypes about the East during antiquity is clearly connected to the need of creating stronger common Hellenic and Roman identities. However, it would be wrong to believe that there existed anything like a monolithic image of the Orient. The picture of the East developed and changed continuously, and during this process many Eastern peoples were characterised interchangeably through the same motifs. There may thus be a need to define a set of different ‘repertoires’ of stereotypes used in different chronological/cultural contexts, beginning from differences between Greek and Roman strains. This is complicated by the fact that part of the stereotypes tended to turn into literary topoi that were repeated numerous times, often even with close to similar formulations. The free borrowing of the ‘Oriental’ stereotypes in the subsequent tradition, and their application to different societies – sometimes by societies which in themselves were stereotyped as ‘Oriental’ by other groups – points to the inescapable conclusion that ‘Orient’ was and has always been a moving ‘(n)everwhere’, and each society in the Western tradition has been prone to construct their own ‘Orients’ and ‘Orientals’.
In this chapter I take a diachronic look into the ways in which the Graeco-Roman tradition tended to justify and reify the stereotypes concerning the East and its peoples from the Classical era to the Roman Imperial period. While most of the stereotypes about Eastern groups formed in response to interactions – either warlike or peaceful, sudden or slower – the theoretical explanation structures that were used to reify and explain these were most of the time entirely internal to the Graeco-Roman intellectual tradition. I will also try to offer a preliminary typology of the main strains of stereotypes that had the longest and most influential life within the ancient culturally shared pool of images, thereby combining some broader, theoretical observations with the interpretation of a selection of passages from the Classical to the Imperial era.
In this chapter, I propose to approach the ‘Oriental’ from an oblique angle by examining the methods through which an ancient population group was ascribed ‘Oriental’ characteristics, even though they had existing ties to a different macrogeographic pool of ethnic stereotypes. To understand how the characteristics that held a degree of ‘proverbiality’ among ancient audiences were used to trigger associations with the ‘Eastern’ iconosphere, it may be informative to explore a case in which a group of people (or, indeed, individuals) not commonly understood to belong to the ‘Orient’ by their origin were nonetheless presented as possessing or having obtained ‘Oriental’ characteristics. Such representations are, naturally, full of rhetorical and polemical considerations; and it is exactly for this reason they constitute fascinating evidence for the ancient Graeco-Roman ideas of acculturation and essentialism.
This chapter explores the ways in which human movement and group membership were debated in the second century CE, primarily among the Greek authors influenced by the cultural phenomenon of the 'Second Sophistic'. It examines, in particular, their expressions of unease at the thought of "Hellenic" identities being diluted as the result of population movements within the empire, as well as the occasional dismissal of such fears. These ideas were enabled by the widely diffused set of theoretical structures that all encouraged the perception of population groups as having essentialistically defined and largely unchanging-though corruptible-characteristics. Turning this human variety and the empire's internal mobility into a tool in moralizing debate was an option that several writers within the sophistic movement took up. After discussing the epistemic basis for such nativist rhetoric, the chapter focuses on three particular cases: Polemon of Laodicea's Hellenic chauvinism, Favorinus of Arles' rejection of nativism while upholding essentialising patterns of thought, and Herodes Atticus' allegorically replete anecdote on the rural strongman Agathion as preserved in Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists.
This chapter will discuss some late-imperial texts which either engage explicitly with physiognomical theory or interact in other ways with their
contemporary physiognomical knowledge frame. Its aim is to provide some insights into the ways in which the visible phenotypic differences between the inhabitants of the Later Roman Empire could be turned into a tool for moralising polemic and essentialising argumentation about both neighbours and strangers. It will discuss how a set of mostly fourth-century CE authors directed their diagnostic gaze not only at individuals but also at the multiplicity of the empire’s subject peoples and groups beyond its borders in pursuit of a variety of rhetorical and polemical purposes. These could range from the simple character-assassination of their competitors to formulating strategies for the continued survival of the empire. Such operations seem to have assumed the existence of a fairly widely shared knowledge base that was framed in terms of physiognomical analogies. By examining Late Antique physiognomical texts in their cultural and literary context, it may be possible to garner evidence for this ‘commonly-known’ or proverbial epistemic base about the supposed properties of different peoples and what evidence it might offer regarding the segregating and integrative speech acts that the ‘visually other’ denizens of the Later Empire had to navigate. In pursuing these questions, this chapter will first discuss the epistemology of ancient physiognomy, as well as its second-century heyday, which formed an important background to the late-imperial popularity of the theory. Next, I will discuss the techniques of segregating and integrating individuals and entire population groups by their looks in later-imperial texts ranging from physiognomical treatises themselves into such works of historiography as Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res gestae. Finally, concluding reflections on the epistemic, social and cultural dynamics at play are offered.
Teoksen lähtökohta on tehdä luotauksia Bysantin kirjallisuuteen, ja sitä kautta esitellä erityisesti, mitä suomalaisessa bysanttilaisen kirjallisuuden tutkimuksen maailmassa nykyisin tapahtuu sekä millaisista näkökulmista ja millaisin metodein, bysanttilaiskauden aineistoja lähestytään.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315449487/divination-knowledge-greco-roman-antiquity-crystal-addey
beyond these domains, yet in which physiognomising gestures are frequent: ethnographical writing.
Ekphrastic techniques, for their part, were embedded in the ways in which the Greek and Roman elites communicated about their world. From their early schooling onwards, they were trained in the verbal representation of objects and agents, with plausibility – however commonplace – and vividness as the declared aims. Ethnicised exemplars were commonly used as part of such rhetorical strategies, and they were often presented in common-sense, proverbial guise: as such, they did not aim to convey new information to the audience, but to trigger and evoke the 'already-known'. Thus, I choose to call such ethnically tagged but widely shared views as 'ethnographicising' instead of 'ethngoraphical'. I will seek to show in this article that the empirical claims of ancient physiognomical rhetoric, combined with the anecdotal and wholly stereotypical exempla used therein, produced jointly a powerfully essentialising discourse on the ethnic subjects of the empire.
Based on the workshop ‘Translation and Transmission in the Eastern Mediterranean , 500 B.C. – 1500 A.D.’, held on 25 September 2015 at the Finnish Institute in Rome.
On the whole, the approximation of ethnographical “feel” has been created in the Cosmography from almost the same set of texts that we have at our disposal. Isidore (always used without naming him) and Orosius are the primary sources for the ethnonyms, but Solinus and the Alexander matter are also behind some elements. By seeking to recreate and magnify the “epistemic rush”—complementing textual involution—that was part of the ancient ethnographicizing discourse, the Cosmographer explicitly set out to forge an example of a dis-course that by his time was associated with an earlier period of literature. Combining classical and biblical corroborations for his ethnographic inventions and creatively expanded lists allowed the Cosmographer to forge a style that he believed harked back to previous centuries. The resulting Late Antique feel, with church fathers and pious bishops pruning out the pagan wisdom traditions of self-important philosophers, heretics abounding, and a measureless world of strange peoples stretching out all the way until the Apocalypse, must have become a part of the Cosmographer’s aims at some stage—even if these aims mutated as his bold creation took shape.
In particular, we feel that understanding the role of environment for ancient societies and culture should be pursued across a range of themes, allowing us to discern diachronic trends and continuities. The significance of the sea for both the concrete mobility of goods, people and ideas, as well as the usefulness of the sea as a metaphor and conceptual, occasionally heterotopic, space both elucidated through an approach that looks at the Mediterranean as an environment, and takes appropriate note of the most recent scholarship. Moreover, this volume will benefit from the use of the theoretical approach of the spatial turn that is a theoretical approach that places emphasis on space and place in disciplines linked with social sciences and the humanities. While never ignoring the fact that we are temporally (as well as environmentally) bound beings, during the past few decades, the use of this approach in different fields of
7
study has increasingly emphasised the importance of spatiality in understanding the history of the human being and of its relation with the environment. The subject is challenging, because it demonstrates that space is no longer a neutral concept and cannot be considered independent from that which it contains, and therefore neither can it be considered as immune to historical, political and aesthetic changes. Ideas of the reciprocal causal relationship between subjects and their environments have been common currency in spatially oriented disciplines (e.g. archaeology. geography, history, urban studies. This sort of approach can help set forth more nuanced theories regarding the relation between social systems and their environment - in this case, with the maritime cultural landscape – using case studies and methods applied in different disciplines such as archaeology, classics or history.
In the ancient world, art, wisdom and culture originated in the East. The Greeks were strongly influenced by the Achaemenid, Assyrian and Egyptian cultures. The way Romans looked at it, after having conquered Greece they had, in turn, brought civilisation home to the previously rustic Rome, or as Horace put it: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Ep. 2.1.156–157). However, Empire as an institution and power also originated in the Orient, combined with wealth and abundance. What the Greeks and Romans admired and wished to emulate was therefore often to be found in the Orient. When the Greeks grew stronger and first defeated, then subdued the Persians, they began to look down on them and to emphasise the negative aspects of the ‘barbarians’: autocracy, despotism, weakness, effeminacy, decadence, corruption, greed etc. The East was frequently turned into the opposite of all virtues the Greeks and later the Romans strove for.
The development of stereotypes about the East during antiquity is clearly connected to the need of creating stronger common Hellenic and Roman identities. However, it would be wrong to believe that there existed anything like a monolithic image of the Orient. The picture of the East developed and changed continuously, and during this process many Eastern peoples were characterised interchangeably through the same motifs. There may thus be a need to define a set of different ‘repertoires’ of stereotypes used in different chronological/cultural contexts, beginning from differences between Greek and Roman strains. This is complicated by the fact that part of the stereotypes tended to turn into literary topoi that were repeated numerous times, often even with close to similar formulations. The free borrowing of the ‘Oriental’ stereotypes in the subsequent tradition, and their application to different societies – sometimes by societies which in themselves were stereotyped as ‘Oriental’ by other groups – points to the inescapable conclusion that ‘Orient’ was and has always been a moving ‘(n)everwhere’, and each society in the Western tradition has been prone to construct their own ‘Orients’ and ‘Orientals’.
In this chapter I take a diachronic look into the ways in which the Graeco-Roman tradition tended to justify and reify the stereotypes concerning the East and its peoples from the Classical era to the Roman Imperial period. While most of the stereotypes about Eastern groups formed in response to interactions – either warlike or peaceful, sudden or slower – the theoretical explanation structures that were used to reify and explain these were most of the time entirely internal to the Graeco-Roman intellectual tradition. I will also try to offer a preliminary typology of the main strains of stereotypes that had the longest and most influential life within the ancient culturally shared pool of images, thereby combining some broader, theoretical observations with the interpretation of a selection of passages from the Classical to the Imperial era.
In this chapter, I propose to approach the ‘Oriental’ from an oblique angle by examining the methods through which an ancient population group was ascribed ‘Oriental’ characteristics, even though they had existing ties to a different macrogeographic pool of ethnic stereotypes. To understand how the characteristics that held a degree of ‘proverbiality’ among ancient audiences were used to trigger associations with the ‘Eastern’ iconosphere, it may be informative to explore a case in which a group of people (or, indeed, individuals) not commonly understood to belong to the ‘Orient’ by their origin were nonetheless presented as possessing or having obtained ‘Oriental’ characteristics. Such representations are, naturally, full of rhetorical and polemical considerations; and it is exactly for this reason they constitute fascinating evidence for the ancient Graeco-Roman ideas of acculturation and essentialism.
This chapter explores the ways in which human movement and group membership were debated in the second century CE, primarily among the Greek authors influenced by the cultural phenomenon of the 'Second Sophistic'. It examines, in particular, their expressions of unease at the thought of "Hellenic" identities being diluted as the result of population movements within the empire, as well as the occasional dismissal of such fears. These ideas were enabled by the widely diffused set of theoretical structures that all encouraged the perception of population groups as having essentialistically defined and largely unchanging-though corruptible-characteristics. Turning this human variety and the empire's internal mobility into a tool in moralizing debate was an option that several writers within the sophistic movement took up. After discussing the epistemic basis for such nativist rhetoric, the chapter focuses on three particular cases: Polemon of Laodicea's Hellenic chauvinism, Favorinus of Arles' rejection of nativism while upholding essentialising patterns of thought, and Herodes Atticus' allegorically replete anecdote on the rural strongman Agathion as preserved in Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists.
This chapter will discuss some late-imperial texts which either engage explicitly with physiognomical theory or interact in other ways with their
contemporary physiognomical knowledge frame. Its aim is to provide some insights into the ways in which the visible phenotypic differences between the inhabitants of the Later Roman Empire could be turned into a tool for moralising polemic and essentialising argumentation about both neighbours and strangers. It will discuss how a set of mostly fourth-century CE authors directed their diagnostic gaze not only at individuals but also at the multiplicity of the empire’s subject peoples and groups beyond its borders in pursuit of a variety of rhetorical and polemical purposes. These could range from the simple character-assassination of their competitors to formulating strategies for the continued survival of the empire. Such operations seem to have assumed the existence of a fairly widely shared knowledge base that was framed in terms of physiognomical analogies. By examining Late Antique physiognomical texts in their cultural and literary context, it may be possible to garner evidence for this ‘commonly-known’ or proverbial epistemic base about the supposed properties of different peoples and what evidence it might offer regarding the segregating and integrative speech acts that the ‘visually other’ denizens of the Later Empire had to navigate. In pursuing these questions, this chapter will first discuss the epistemology of ancient physiognomy, as well as its second-century heyday, which formed an important background to the late-imperial popularity of the theory. Next, I will discuss the techniques of segregating and integrating individuals and entire population groups by their looks in later-imperial texts ranging from physiognomical treatises themselves into such works of historiography as Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res gestae. Finally, concluding reflections on the epistemic, social and cultural dynamics at play are offered.
Teoksen lähtökohta on tehdä luotauksia Bysantin kirjallisuuteen, ja sitä kautta esitellä erityisesti, mitä suomalaisessa bysanttilaisen kirjallisuuden tutkimuksen maailmassa nykyisin tapahtuu sekä millaisista näkökulmista ja millaisin metodein, bysanttilaiskauden aineistoja lähestytään.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315449487/divination-knowledge-greco-roman-antiquity-crystal-addey
beyond these domains, yet in which physiognomising gestures are frequent: ethnographical writing.
Ekphrastic techniques, for their part, were embedded in the ways in which the Greek and Roman elites communicated about their world. From their early schooling onwards, they were trained in the verbal representation of objects and agents, with plausibility – however commonplace – and vividness as the declared aims. Ethnicised exemplars were commonly used as part of such rhetorical strategies, and they were often presented in common-sense, proverbial guise: as such, they did not aim to convey new information to the audience, but to trigger and evoke the 'already-known'. Thus, I choose to call such ethnically tagged but widely shared views as 'ethnographicising' instead of 'ethngoraphical'. I will seek to show in this article that the empirical claims of ancient physiognomical rhetoric, combined with the anecdotal and wholly stereotypical exempla used therein, produced jointly a powerfully essentialising discourse on the ethnic subjects of the empire.
Based on the workshop ‘Translation and Transmission in the Eastern Mediterranean , 500 B.C. – 1500 A.D.’, held on 25 September 2015 at the Finnish Institute in Rome.
On the whole, the approximation of ethnographical “feel” has been created in the Cosmography from almost the same set of texts that we have at our disposal. Isidore (always used without naming him) and Orosius are the primary sources for the ethnonyms, but Solinus and the Alexander matter are also behind some elements. By seeking to recreate and magnify the “epistemic rush”—complementing textual involution—that was part of the ancient ethnographicizing discourse, the Cosmographer explicitly set out to forge an example of a dis-course that by his time was associated with an earlier period of literature. Combining classical and biblical corroborations for his ethnographic inventions and creatively expanded lists allowed the Cosmographer to forge a style that he believed harked back to previous centuries. The resulting Late Antique feel, with church fathers and pious bishops pruning out the pagan wisdom traditions of self-important philosophers, heretics abounding, and a measureless world of strange peoples stretching out all the way until the Apocalypse, must have become a part of the Cosmographer’s aims at some stage—even if these aims mutated as his bold creation took shape.
beyond the Augustan era, so that remnants of the same Roman insecurity about the “Wall of Italy” being breached, especially by northerners, are preserved in narratives about later Julio-Claudians such as Caligula and Nero. This article first looks at the likely origins of the idea of the Alps as the “Wall of Italy” in Middle-Republican perceptions, projected back onto the past and presenting Rome as predestined to dominate Italy and the Gauls in particular as external intruders in the peninsula. Next, the Late Republican and Augustan stages of the motif is
reviewed, and the impact of the Cimbric Wars on this imagery is debated. Finally, there will be brief discussion of anecdotes found in Tacitus and Suetonius about
later Julio-Claudian episodes in which the fear of a northern invasion breaching the Alps seem to have gripped the Romans.
The significance of being able to assess correctly the contents and the context of Posidonius' so-called 'ethnography' is obvious, especially when keeping in mind the optimistic and trusting tone that some past reconstructions of his fragments have exhibited. With all the accruing understanding of the tradition of ancient ethnographic writing, a critical eye must be cast at a contribution so often postulated as unsurpassed in its influence.
In this article, I submit the texts usually taken as Posidonian fragments to a reading informed by recent advances in the study of knowledge ordering (e.g. in eds. König & Whitmarsh 2007), information generation 'on the middle ground' (Woolf 2011), and the interplay of Greek writers and Roman audiences (Clarke 1999). There existed a wide range of interlocking 'middle grounds' which the ethnographical writers of the Late Republic navigated, even when they pursued goals to which ethnography was wholly subservient – as ancient ethnography nearly always was. Rather than being a record of his personal observations and meetings with Gauls, to a much greater extent the northern ethnography of Posidonius was constructed through literary processes based on his reading and his conversations with Romans and Greeks.
- M. Ahonen 2014, ‘Ancient Physiognomy’, Sourcebook for the history of the Philosophy of Mind. Philosophical Psychology from Plato to Kant, S. Knuuttila & J. Sihvola (eds.), Springer, Dordrecht, 623-31.
- R. Batty 2007, Rome and the Nomads: the Pontic-Danubian Realm in Antiquity, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- D. Braund 2003, ‘The Bosporan Kings and Classical Athens: Imagined Breaches in a Cordial Relationship (Aisch. 3.171-172; [Dem.] 34.36)’, The Cauldron of Ariantas, P. Guldager Bilde, J. Munk Højte & V. F. Stolba (eds.), Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 197-208.
- B. Bäbler 2002, ‘‘Long-Haired Greeks in Trousers’: Olbia and Dio Chrysostom (Or. 36, ‘Borystheniticus’)’, Ancient Civilizations 8, 311-27.
- R. Delbrück 1912, Antike porträts, Marcus & Weber, Bonn.
- K. Fittschen 1989, ‘‘Barbaren’-köpfe: zur Imitation Alexanders d.Gr. in der mittleren Kaiserzeit‘, BIACS 36, 108-13.
- M. Gleason 1995, Making Men. Sophists and Self-Representation in Ancient Rome, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
- A. Lampinen 2019, ‘Physiognomy, ekphrasis, and the ‘ethnographicising’ register in the second sophistic’, Visualizing the Invisible with the Human Body. Physiognomy and Ekphrasis in the Ancient World, J. Cale Johnson & A. Stavru (eds.), De Gruyter, Berlin, 229-271.
- D. Roller 2020, Empire of the Black Sea. The Rise and Fall of the Mithridatic World, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- K. Romiopoulou 1997, Εθνικό Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο. Συλλογή ρωμαϊκών γλυπτών, Tameio Archaiologikōn Porōn kai Apallotriōseōn, Athens.
- R. R. R. Smith 1998, Hellenistic Royal Portraits, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- B. D. Shaw 1982, ‘‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk’: The Ancient Mediterranean Ideology of the Pastoral Nomad’, Ancient Society 13, 5-31.
- S. Swain (ed.) 2007, Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Suunnilleen viimeisten kymmenen vuoden kuluessa on julkisessa keskustelussa Suomessa ja muualla tavan takaa käytetty Rooman valtakunnan tuhoa, "barbaarien invaasioita" ja muita vähintäänkin kyseenalaisia analogioita, kun keskustellaan ajankohtaisista, usein vahvan ideologisesti värittyneistä kysymyksistä. Tutkijakunnan velvollisuudeksi on tullut korjata räikeimpiä väärinymmärryksiä ja jopa tahallisia väärintulkintoja. Suomalaisen tutkijayhteisön keskuudesta on erottunut aktiivisella osallistumisellaan erityisesti dosentti Maijastina Kahlos. Onkin suuri onni, että tämä maamme johtava myöhäisantiikin asiantuntija sekä hyvin aktiivinen ja monialainen antiikin barbaarien tutkija on nyt kirjoittanut suurelle yleisölle suunnatun suomenkielisen yleisesityksen roomalaisten ja barbaareiksi kutsuttujen kansojen vuorovaikutuksesta.
Reading the Lucanic (Bell. civ. 3.399-425) and Tacitean (Germ. 39; Ann. 1.61; 14.30) passages on Gallic and Germanic holy groves and bringing them into conversation not only with other relevant passages by the same authors but also with the modern theories of the ‘history of emotions’, I hope to cast new light on the role that natural loci horridi of the northern ritual space played in shaping Roman collective anxieties. These, I will argue, had much to do with the imperial power’s anxieties about the loyalties of their northern subjects and ostensible allies, as well as about the capacity of certain types of imagined landscapes to symbolise atavistic religion and resistance to Roman domination. ‘Fear’ is certainly one of the emotions evoked by these landscapes, but I hope to show that this blanket category covers a remarkable emotional range in these passages.
This paper will discuss Delphi’s role as an ideological and epistemological hub for Greek and Roman barbaromachic narratives from the Galatian invasions until the Late Republic. Many of the literary sources from the most fertile, Hellenistic period of innovations are fragmentary in nature, but enough has been preserved for us to draw some conjectures about the different uses that the Galatian attack was put to among the Greeks and even in inter-cultural communication. As the ‘new universal barbarians’ (Marszal 2000, 222), Galatae/Galli offered a common template for ancient debates on identity, belonging, piety, ritual, and Hellenicity. The paper will also propose that Delphi may have been instrumental for the Roman adoption of the ethnonym Galli as a common name tag for their North-Italian adversaries. The epistemological anchoring of Roman elite’s barbaromachic posturing on Delphi is clearly visible in the literary and epigraphic sources.
Secondly, the so-called 'gentes fugaces', who only truly emerge in the literary tradition after the invasions of the Galatae, but some of the causative reasons for these peoples’ enforced mobility may stem from slightly earlier, when Aristotle and Ephorus were both referring to northern groups having to deal with oceanic inundations. This theme was later taken up as a proposed reason for the Cimbric migrations, though Posidonius, for one, had none of it. For him – and his Roman patrons – the idea of Cimbri as marauding bandits was a powerful delegitimating theme. This points out to the way that the topoi of fugax gens and gens vaga could be swapped if need be; a given author’s polemical or other agendas could recommend one or the other model – such as in the case of Polybius’ “Scythicized” Celts.
My paper suggests that in some cases of the High-Imperial material – perhaps particularly those aligned with the interests of the ‘Second Sophistic’ – we are seeing indications of Greek authors either expressing or reacting to fears about increased mobility threatening the distinctiveness of group identities in the Empire. Another potentially relevant concept may be the ‘narratives of reverse colonization’ (Arata 1996, 255-56): if an empire poses, in some ways, a challenge or even a threat to the identity of the imperial people, then mobility within the empire is the lived, structural vector of this threat. This has been theorised very well in the case of the fin-de-siècle European literature produced in the colonising societies of France and Britain, but there is perhaps some heuristic value in seeing whether this might apply to the case of the Roman Empire and its dominant – though interwoven – Greek and Roman identities. In the case of the Greeks, the complex ideas relating to Greek identity/-ies during the Second Sophistic seems even to have cast the Roman rule as an example of ‘mobility of the others’.
A presentation given at the conference "Mediterranean flows: People, ideas and objects in motion", held online by Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on 10-11 December 2020.
Although the Livian narrative of Hannibal’s crossing is the most famous one of the Late-Republican expressions given to the historical exempla of breaching the Alps, the Roman preoccupation with the Alps as the tutamen of Italy owed their epistemic immediacy to a much more recent event – the Cimbric Wars. This traumatic episode had reawakened imagery of the northern enemies penetrating the ‘Wall of Italy’, which in some cases went back all the way to the Mid-Republican traditions of the Gallic Invasions. Much more demonstrable, however, are the way in which this very theme was back-projected into earlier historical threats, and the enduring significance of this imagery even during the Augustan era. Remnants of the same Roman insecurity about the ‘Wall of Italy’ being breached, perhaps especially by northerners, are even preserved in the historians of later Julio-Claudians, such as Caligula and Nero.
My paper will first look at the likely origins of the idea of Alps as the ‘Wall of Italy’ in the Middle-Republican back-projections of the predestined nature of Rome’s dominance within Italy and the role of Gauls, in particular, as an external intruders in the peninsula. Next, the Late Republican (broadly, but not solely, ‘Livian’) stage of the motif is reviewed, and the impact of the Cimbric Wars (113-101 BCE) on this imagery is debated.
What do these pieces of the ancient evidence actually allow us to say about the extent of empathy with emigrants and displaced groups in the Late Roman society? They are of course highly partisan pieces of rhetoric, but by definition their arguments needed to have some sort of basis on their audiences’ expectations. My paper offers a set of cases where, by close-reading the texts and relating them to both the ancient theories about emotions and the ancient historiographical tradition, we can uncover some of the dynamics at play. Rhetorical pathos and descriptions of dramatic peripeteiai all played their part in shaping these vignettes; in addition to this, the topos of a gens vaga or a people on the move was already a well-established motif. Overall, however, even with the myriad techniques of ‘othering’ that we see characterising the Late Antique writing about outgroups, the possibility of evoking empathy even towards displaced barbarians seems to have been recognised by Roman historians.
Today I would like to examine, however briefly, the ways in which the Cosmographer manipulates his inherited religious polemics and imagery of pagans. Basically, only a handful of scholars has studied the Cosmographia in the past forty years, and there is much to be said about the ‘ethnographicising gestures’ therein, as well, but today will be about religion. Essentially, the themes of religion and ethnography circumscribe the basic ambiguity of the Cosmography, its fine balancing act between tongue-in-cheek narrative of marvels and a pessimistic, even quasi-apocalyptic reflection on the limits of human knowledge. I think what will emerge will demonstrate the many instances of irony and subversion in the treatment of Aethicus’ supposed material – but also reveal the limits of seeing this text as entirely devoid of seriousness.
Pidetty 20.5.2021 esinauhoitettuna Zoom-luentona.
Paperini pureutui helleeniyden kapeaan ja nativistiseen käsittämiseen Polemon Laodikeialaisen 'Fysiognomia'-teoksen säilyneissä fragmenteissa sekä muissa Polemoniin viittaavissa keisariajan lähteissä. Tavoitteena oli etsiskellä toisen sofistiikan identiteetinmuodostuksen murtumalinjoja etenkin maskuliinisuuden ja helleeniyden kategorioiden suhteen, ja lopulta pyrkiä selittämään näitä ottaen huomioon mm. Paige DuBois'n, Maud Gleasonin, Tamsyn Bartonin ja Angelos Chaniotiksen debatoimat teoriarakeenteet ja kontekstit.
Within this context, it seems rather interesting and quite relevant to have a look whether the historiographical references to Assyrian figures conform with the sort of ancient explanation models that sought to categorise and explain the ‘national characteristics’ of Assyrian and Syrian groups.
Throughout the paper I will in particular pay attention to how the Roman administrative divisions, primarily provinces, begin in the High Imperial period to obtain a degree of ‘entitativity’ – the quality of being naturalised entities of stereotyping – and emerge as meaningful frameworks of ‘common knowledge’ instead of the previously more narrowly ‘ethnicised’ categories. This would have highlighted the already-existing Greco-Roman tendency to think about population groups in an ‘essentialising’ fashion; an ideological pattern which resulted both from inherited literary tropes and some of the most elaborate technical theory-building of the ancient world – particularly the climatological, astrological, and physiognomic ones.
Esitelmäni tarkoituksena on luoda alustava, etupäässä alkuperäislähteisiin ja niiden kirjalliseen kontekstualisointiin keskittyvä preliminäärinen katsaus erääseen lupaavalta vaikuttavaan post doc –aiheeseen. Tämä väitöskirjani kronologista kehystä myöhäisempi ja täten vain muutaman alaviitteen varaan aiemmin jätetty aihe hyötyisi käsittelystä, joka korostaisi gallialaisen kirkollisen eliitin tuottamien tekstien kirjallista traditiosidonnaisuutta sekä yhteyksiä klassillisoivaan topiikkaan. Näin ollen tutkimuskirjallisuuteen, metodologisiaan sekä muihin apuvälineisiin kohdistuvat kommentit ovat erittäin tervetulleita. Etenkin keltologian alalla (Celtic Studies) on lähes systemaattisesti yliarvioitu hagiografisten lähdetekstien ja kirkolliskokousten päätösten todistusvoima mitä tulee esikristillisen uskonnollisuuden säilymiseen Gallian alueella. Osaksi tästä syystä tutkimukseni pyrkii sijoittamaan kansanomaisen uskonnollisuuden aiempaa keskeisemmin antikvarisoivan kirkollisen sivistyneistön mielikuvissa muodostuneeksi artefaktiksi, joka kertoo enemmän antiikin eliitin uskonnollisesti värittyneen retorisen rekisterin jatkuvuudesta kuin esikristillisen kansanuskon säilymisestä. Ymmärrettävä sosiologinen motiivi substandardin kansanuskon konstruoinnille löytynee ’jatkuvan kääntymisen’ (ongoing conversion) legitimoivasta paradigmasta, johon viittaamalla uskonnollisten spesialistien on mahdollista perustella erityisoikeuksiensa säilyttämistä (vrt. Charles Ramble Tiibetin buddhalaisuudesta). Gallian vaikutusvaltaisen ja sosiaalisesti suhteellisen eksklusiivisen eliitin kohdalla tämä vaikutin lienee varsin mahdollinen."
This workshop organised by the Finnish Institute at Athens aims to gather together a diverse group of experts on ancient ethnography, geography, and ‘septentriography’ – i.e. writings on the northern parts of the oikoumene – to discuss the parameters of the Greek perceptions of ‘northernness’ from a variety of perspectives. The programme seeks to delve into the elements that made the North and the northerners stand out as an entity or commonality in the Greek thinking from Homer to Late Antiquity and Byzantium, as well as to bring the different aspects of the septentriographic tradition into a fuller conversation with each other. The workshop is closely connected to the institute’s long-standing and ongoing research interest in the interactions between Nordic regions and the Mediterranean, as well as Antti Lampinen’s own current research project on ancient ethnography.
What made the north ‘North’ for the Greeks? What marked a person, people, or a region as ‘northern’? ‘Eaters of flesh, drinkers of milk’ (Shaw 1982) could be found not only in the north; dressing up in animal skins or pelts was imagined as having also been the norm among the very early stages of civilization elsewhere; tattooing was practiced in various lands, as was human sacrifice; other mountain barriers could perhaps match the Rhipaean Mountains in edge-of-the-world symbolism; and there were other blessed peoples in the furthest margins of the world besides the Hyperboreans. Yet ancient explanations of the common qualities of northern groups – both physical and mental – clearly imagined them as parts of a shared whole, and this impression is reinforced by the way in which the tradition transposes ethnographic elements from one population to another. Hazy and interchangeable commonplaces were reshuffled and reused by authors for whom the markers of northernness offered a valuable resource, with immediate purchase in the ‘commonsense ethnogeography’ (cf. Geus & Thiering, eds. 2014) of the north.