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The fifth international conference of the Centre for Black Sea studies was dedicated to the impact of Rome on the Black Sea Region. In this volume, nine of the papers presented at the conference are published, but like any conference volume, the present book fails to do justice to the inspired discussions after the papers, in the intervals, at dinner and over drinks.

In the opening paper, “From kingdom to province”, Jakob Munk Højte traces the strange political metamorphosis of Pontos as it is revealed in the patterns and practices of everyday life. Within two generations, Pontos went from a late Hellenistic kingdom ruled by a warlord with expansionist, indeed imperial ambitions to a peaceful provincial backwater ruled by the ex-magistrates of late republican Rome. Swords were turned into ploughshares and the Pontic hammer became an anvil. What visible effects did this have locally? Højte traces the evolution of three aspects of daily life: settlement patterns, calendar systems and the development of the “epigraphic habit” – the last is a topic that is taken up by several other contributors.

The imposition of Roman rule is also at the centre of the chapter by Liviu Petculescu, examining in detail not only how the Roman army achieved and maintained control over Scythia Minor, but the cultural and economic consequences, first and foremost in the sphere of urbanism, that followed. Militarised and Latinised, the military zone of Scythia Minor provides an instructive contrast not only with de-militarised and un-Latinised Pontos but with the Greek cities on the coast of Scythia Minor, which were far less affected by the advent of Rome.

With the contributions by Daniela Dueck, Thomas Corsten and Jesper Majbom Madsen, we move back to Asia and into the cultural sphere of Pontic Hellenism. The Roman province of Bithynia et Pontus is particular interesting for the study of Roman influence and Greek reactions. The cultural complexity of this composite province offers a rare possibility to compare the response to Roman hegemony in different societies with different cultural patterns. An important question is whether there are significant differences between the ways in which people in the Greek colonies, in the Hellenistic city-states and in the communities colonized by Rome reacted to the Roman presence. For instance, were the residents of the ancient Greek colonies more reluctant to live and identify themselves as Romans than citizens of the communities that were founded in the Hellenistic or Roman periods? From the preserved fragments of his history, Dueck brings the historian Memnon of Herakleia to life before our eyes and shows how, despite living in a vast Empire divided between Greek and Roman, Memnon is first and foremost Pontic and Herakleian in his outlook. For all the cosmopolitism of a world empire, parochialism was still a powerful force.

More literary figures make their appearance in the following chapter by Jesper Majbom Madsen. Was the literary revival of the first and early second century known as the Second Sophistic a reaction against the spread of Roman influence in Greece and Asia Minor (Swain 1996; Goldhill (ed.) 2001) or an attempt on the part of the Hellenised elite to demarcate themselves from their social inferiors? Madsen takes a two-stage approach to the problem. In the first half of his paper, he critically examines the case for the second Sophistic as an example of cultural resistance, and in the second part, he uses epigraphic behaviour to diagnose the cultural preferences of the literate middle and upper classes. As we have already seen in Højte’s paper, names are important; to name something is to appropriate it. The voluntary acceptance of Roman names by the Greek elite implies that they had been appropriated by the dominant Roman culture. Abandoning a perfectly good Greek name in favour of a Roman or Latinised one was a serious matter, and though well received by the Romans, it could earn the disapproval and derision of one’s peers – Apollonios is credited with the witty remark that “it is a disgrace to have a person’s name without also having his countenance” (Letters, 72). While intellectuals such as Plutarch or Dion viewed the spread of Roman mores with some scepticism, the onomastic evidence indicates that their sentiments were hardly representative of the provincial elite as a whole.

Thomas Corsten addresses the same source material as Madsen, but with a different point of departure and a different interpretation. To Corsten, the transition from Greek to Latin names in the Bithynian inscriptions does not reflect the enfranchisment of the elite and the adoption of Roman names by Bithynians, but a wholesale replacement of the old Thraco-Bithynian gentry by a new class of Roman entrepreneurial landowners. The idea that Romanisation was carried into the conquered provinces by a class of immigré kulaks has respectable antecedents; it was central to the analysis of the western provinces by Rostovtzeff (1926/1957) but rejected by Hatt (1959). It addresses complex issues concerning the social structure and ethnic differentiation of provincial society, a subject that would merit a conference or a volume of its own.

While the preceding contributors have seen the Roman Black Sea from an indigenous perspective, Greg Woolf and Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen try to view Bithynia et Pontus through the eyes of a Roman recently arrived, Pliny the younger. Woolf strongly warns us against the perils of treating Pliny’s correspondence as a slice of Roman gubernatorial life. Pliny shows us his province and the Roman Black Sea region as he wants us to see it, and himself as he would like to appear to our eyes. Bekker-Nielsen is less concerned with what meets the eye, or what Pliny wants to meet our eyes; instead he searches for the invisible factors of local politics, rooted in the twilight world of back-room deals, rumour-mongering and pasquinades.

Conceptualising cultural interaction as a process between cultural traditions that are themselves developing and changing introduces an extra dimension into the model and reveals the limitations of the classical theories of Romanisation. It also leads to the realisation that cultural change is rarely a zero-sum process: becoming more Roman does not necessarily mean becoming less Greek (or less Gaulish, less Scythian, less Bosporan, etc.). The last two contributions in the volume, by Anne Marie Carstens and Jørgen Christian Meyer, both deal with such (in Meyer’s phrase) “multi-identity cultures”. Modern populist-xenophobic politicians see cultural diversity as a threat to the stability of society, but the analyses of Carstens and Meyer indicate that the social resilience of Achaemenid and Roman structures of dominance owed much to their cultural diversity and the readiness of the dominant population to accept and even adopt the mores of their subjects when the situation called for it; the “ability to have several identities” (Meyer) and the possibility of “creative negotiation” (Carstens).

Reading through this volume, the reader will find diversity, multiple cultural identities and occasional disagreement. It is hoped that it will provide food for creative reflection on cultural change in the traditionalist and parochial, yet dynamic and cosmopolitan environment that was the Roman Black Sea region.

University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg

September 2006

Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen