## UNIVERSALIZATION AND ITS LIMITS: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURAL INTERACTION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

By Kristian Kanstrup Christensen

Summary: This paper employs an anthropological framework to understand the interaction between imperial culture and local traditions in the Roman world by introducing the model of universalization and localization , designed by Redfield and Marriott for the study of Indian village communities. This model is applied to evidence for provincial languages supplemented with an analysis of a corpus of material culture to illuminate how constraints to communication, transportation and education affected cultural interaction. It demonstrates that while Roman imperialism spread shared practices across wide areas, due to the aforementioned conditions provincial populations were often only partially able to access them.

## 1. Augustine and the Punic Language

' If the people of Mappala went over to your communion voluntarily, let them hear us both; let what we say be written down, and let what is written down by us be translated for them into Punic .' 1

The words are those of Augustine writing in c. AD 402 to Crispinus, the bishop of Calama. The context is the Donatist schism in North Africa at the time. Crispinus, a Donatist, had purchased an estate, which included the hamlet of Mappala, and had proceeded to rebaptize eighty people

- 1 August. Ep. 66, translation from Parsons, 1951.

from there. Augustine, opposed to Donatism, casts doubt on whether the subjects of the rebaptism were aware of its significance and challenges Crispinus to allow the people of the hamlet to be presented with the arguments of both sides of the schism. For the present inquiry the significant part of the quote is what Augustine says last: that for such a presentation to be carried out, the arguments must be translated into Punic.

The Punic language is well-known from inscriptions across North Africa,  but  these  decline  in  number  through  the  Roman  era.  Almost  no writing in the language survives from Augustine's day. The modern observer might take this disappearance as evidence of a successful Latinization of the province - which is, after all, home to some 30,000 inscriptions in Latin. 2

If so, Augustine's observations serve as a blunt correction. In one of his letters, he complains that in his part of the world the ministry of the Gospel is hampered by a general ignorance of the Latin language. 3 In a sermon given in Hippo, moreover, he quotes ' a well-known Punic proverb, which I will of course quote to you in Latin, because you don't all know Punic .' 4

These and several more comments confirm the survival of Punic as a spoken language after its disappearance from the epigraphic record. 5 To understand this survival, we may start with a closer look at the passages quoted so far. As well as being the seat of his bishopric, Hippo was a major maritime city on the coast. In this setting, Augustine refrains from employing  the  Punic  language;  evidently  Latin  is  the lingua  franca of  the community. On the other hand, as the first passage shows, when it came to tenant farmers in a hamlet, recourse to Punic was sometimes a necessity. These passages suggest that Punic had lost the most ground in wellconnected,  cosmopolitan  settings,  while  retaining  more  of  a  foothold among the lower classes in less accessible places.

2

Jongeling & Kerr 2005: 5.

3 August. Ep.

84.

4 August. Serm.

167.4, translation from Hill 1992.

5 Doubts such as those by Frost 1942: 188-90 as to the identity of the language identified by Augustine as Punic are laid to rest by Augustine himself in Evang. Iohan. 15.27, where he identifies the language as related to Syriac and Hebrew. This will have been true of Punic, a Northwest Semitic language transplanted to North Africa by Phoenician colonizers but not of languages indigenous to the region.

Through an analysis of the evidence for provincial languages and consumption patterns in the Roman Empire, the present paper will show how this divide between Hippo and Mappala follows a pattern that runs through the evidence of cultural interaction in the Roman Empire. As part of the analysis, it will present a conceptual model for understanding the cultural world of provincial non-elites and offer an alternative perspective on the cultural history of the Roman world.

## 2. Romanization and Alternatives

For most of the twentieth century cultural interaction within the Roman Empire was viewed through the lens of the Romanization paradigm. In its original form, this paradigm envisioned a one-way dissemination of Roman culture to provincial populations, a view indebted to the ideology of  European  imperialism. 6 Applying  this  paradigm  to  Augustine's  remarks on Punic, the situation in Hippo might be interpreted as an example of successful Romanization and the non-Latin speaking farmers of Mappala as a pre-Roman survival.

However, the traditional view on Romanization began to unravel in the later half of the century. More recent scholarship has shown that the spread of Roman cultural elements was not the work of the imperial centre, but was mainly carried out by, and benefited, local elites who came to identify their own interests with that of the empire. 7 Seen in this light, adoption of the Latin language in the city of Hippo reflects the political and economic interests of its elite through the centuries.

While Romanization-by-local-elite may adequately describe the cultural changes affecting the elite layers of provincial societies, scholars have sought beyond the Romanization paradigm for frameworks to encompass the cultural effects of Roman rule on the full social spectrum of the provinces.

Concepts  such  as hybridization , métissage and creolization moved  beyond the categories of 'Roman' and 'native', highlighting that both sides were transformed in the cultural encounter. 8 Applying this observation to Augustine's passages, we notice that he only considers Latin the predominant lingua franca of Hippo, but does not rule out knowledge of Punic among parts of the congregation. Perhaps the cultural identity of that city is better envisaged as a mixture of Punic and Roman, rather than as simply  Romanized?  Conversely,  while  the  tenant  farmers  of  Mappala may not speak Latin, they are the objects of rival conversion attempts by Crispinus and Augustine. They are not a hermetically sealed preserve of a pre-Roman lifestyle but are clearly impacted by religious developments in the wider world.

6 See e.g. de Coulanges 1891: 137-39; Jullian 1920: 534-37; Haverfield 1923: 9-14.

7

Slofstra 1983; Millett 1990; Woolf, 1998.

Wallace-Hadrill took this approach a step further with the analogy of bilingualism ,  which  emphasized that individuals were not restricted to one culture or another, but often participated in several, changing behaviour depending on the context. If speakers of both Latin and Punic lived in 5th century Hippo, they were not speaking a Punic-Latin creole , but kept the languages separate in their heads, switching between them as  situations  demanded.  Wallace-Hadrill  found  this  process  at  work across a wide range of cultural practices. 9

However, the hierarchical structure of Roman society and the differences in prestige accorded to various cultures by the elite meant that different  population  groups  experienced  cultural  change  very  differently. This aspect is lucidly captured by Mattingly's use of the term discrepant experience . 10 His approach reminds us that the unequal power relations of imperialism were a decisive determinant of access to imperial cultural practices such as schooling in the cosmopolitan language. The ignorance of that language among the tenant farmers of Mappala was not necessarily a cultural choice on their part. It probably reflected the political and economic disenfranchisement of their community in comparison to that of Hippo. Discrepant experience , however, is a descriptive term, not a model for surveying the processes producing discrepancies.

It would be useful, however, to encapsulate both the transformation and co-existence of cultural traditions highlighted by terms such as cre- olization and bilingualism and the inequalities highlighted by discrepant experience in a single framework. To that end, scholars have recently sought to apply globalization theory to the Roman world. 11

8

E.g. Webster 2001; Le Roux, 2004.

9 Wallace-Hadrill 2008.

10  Mattingly 2011: 203-45.

Designed to understand societies characterized by increasing material  and  cultural  interaction, globalization  theory has  the  advantage  of drawing attention to, and explaining, both their increasing integration and  increasing  differences.  Cultural  interaction  leads  to  the  development of shared practices across vast distances; the preponderance of the Latin language in early fifth-century Hippo would be a case in point.

Yet the result is not a homogeneous society. Rather, the economic growth brought on by increasing material and cultural exchange exacerbates social inequalities, leading to a development of local differences in tandem with that of shared practices. 12 The centripetal force of globalization thus produces a centrifugal force, glocalization , that heightens the awareness and constructions of regional identities. 13 Emphasis on this process leads the theory beyond traditional centre-periphery arguments towards a bottom-up approach that shifts focus away from the metropolitan centres. 14

Nevertheless, it has been questioned whether globalization theory really bridges the gap between cultural interconnectedness and inequality, with critics arguing that the approach marginalises violence, steep hierarchies and imperialist exploitation. 15 Interpreted as glocalization , the absence  in  Mappala  of  access  to  the lingua  franca of  the  Mediterranean world becomes a reaction to the globalizing culture of that world, yet it is  equally  possible  that  the  explanation  is  relative  isolation  as  consequence of centuries of exploitative hierarchical rule.

Interpretations of the consequences of interconnectedness are taken furthest in the works of scholars such as Ando and Revell. Here the interaction between the imperial centre and local communities is seen as strong enough to foster a discourse of a common 'Roman' identity which, while fluid enough to encompass a wide range of local varieties, served to underpin the basic cohesion of the state. 16 From this point of view, ignorance of the Latin language among the tenant farmers does not fundamentally affect their presumed Roman identity.

11  E.g.  Witcher  2000;  Hingley  2005;  Sweetman  2007;  Versluys  2014;  Pitts  &  Versluys 2015.

12  Hodos 2017: 4-5.

13  Jennings 2011: 136-37.

14  Häussler 2012: 147 and 171-73.

15  Fernández-Götz, Maschek & Roymans 2020: 1631-37.

However, critics point out that notions of the transition to Roman rule as producing a complete shift in identity fail to take into account the 'thinly  stretched  nature  of  Roman  power.' 17 In  day-to-day  affairs, Rome's diverse provincial societies largely governed themselves. 18 Is the presence of Punic speakers in Mappala best explained as a local response to  the globalizing tendency  towards  Latinization  or  as  evidence  of  the limit of that tendency? 19

The present paper explores the benefits of using an alternative framework to understand the widespread cultural interconnectedness of the Roman world without losing sight of the consequences of the steep hierarchies and indirect forms of local rule. While the processes of cultural integration during the centuries of Roman rule show similarities to the modern world, the paper will emphasize the significantly weaker intensity of pre-modern cultural integration, the conditions of which impeded the full integration of the broad population into the cultural traditions of the ruling class. 20

## 3. Universalization and Localization

The pre-modern world was an agrarian world first and foremost. Due to the lack of modern fertilizer, mechanization, and the science of plant breeding, the yield of pre-modern agriculture was quite low compared to today. It could only feed the population of a society if the large majority  of  that  society  were  peasants.  In  most  pre-industrial  societies  this meant somewhere between 80 and 90% of the population. 21 This estimate is  for  an average agrarian state but aligns quite well with figures suggested for the Roman world. For instance, the rural proportion of the population of Roman Britain is commonly given as 80 to 90% even at the height of urbanization. 22 For  the  empire  as  a  whole,  Morley  estimates about 10% of the population to have been dependent for food on the agricultural labour of the rest. 23

16  Ando 2000: 1-15, 66-67 and 406-12; Revell, 2009: 2-15.

17  Dench 2018: 157.

18  Bang 2011: 173.

19  Woolf 2021: 27 poses this same question.

20  Woolf 1998: 238-39; Bang 2013: 439-40; Lavan 2016: 155.

21  Mann 1986: 264; Crone 1989: 13-34.

The  speed  and  volume  of  pre-modern  communications  must  have slowed the process of cultural alignment in this vast rural population compared to the modern world. 24 Certainly, the peasantry was not insulated  from  wider  market  exchanges  as  once  thought.  Gaul,  Italy  and Spain all provide ample evidence for both production and consumption of ceramics, glass, leather, textiles, building materials and more in the countryside. The average peasant probably consumed less than the average urban resident, yet the much larger number of peasants would still have rendered their demand a major part of overall consumption.

In at least parts of late Republican/early Imperial Italy the peasantry appears to have been particularly mobile, engaging in a form of distributed habitation characterized by numerous small, specialized sites, with the same people presumably participating in several different forms of production in several different places. This picture does not hold true throughout the empire, however, with data suggesting the mode of living in Britain and northern Gaul to have been marked by farmsteads concentrating the productive activities in one site. 25

While not hermetically sealed from the wider economy, across the empire the peasant population is likely to have been predominately illiterate. The Roman Empire lacked an organized school system, and outside of the wealthier Hellenistic cities, it is doubtful whether much schooling was available to people beyond the elite.

Comparing these features with European and North African illiteracy rates at the cusp of modernity, Harris has argued for an overall illiteracy rate of above 90% for the Empire as a whole during the Principate. 26 His figures  constitute  the  pessimistic  estimate  in  an  ongoing  debate,  and Egyptian evidence suggests a basic grasp of literacy may well have been more widespread. 27 However, even if this material is taken as representative for the rest of the empire, the limited nature of this literacy will still have excluded the majority of the population from significant engagement with the literary tradition of the elite. 28 Whereas Harris' figures are contested, the general limitations on literacy he described have mostly been accepted. 29 The illiteracy of the broad populace was no hindrance to the ancient economy, and therefore mass education in the manner of modern, industrialized nation states was never a priority. This is true in particular for rural dwellers, whom, as Harris points out, even the ancient sources themselves associate with illiteracy. 30

22  Jones 2004: 187; Mattingly 2006: 453.

23  Morley 2007: 578.

24  Woolf 2021: 25.

25  Bowes & Grey 2020: 618-29 and 636-37.

26  Harris 1989: 3-24.

Under  such  conditions,  the  present  paper  argues  that  for  large swathes of the population of the empire, the world was predominately local. Not in the sense that extralocal cultural elements did not reach them, but in the sense that the local context decisively shaped whether these elements were adopted, and if they were, how and for what purpose. In Indian anthropology, a similar view of agrarian society is the basis of the model of universalization and localization first designed by Robert Redfield, one of the fathers of peasant studies, and his associates Milton Singer and McKim Marriott. 31

Their model envisions agrarian societies as consisting of two traditions: the literate tradition of the elite and the non-literate tradition of the peasant village. The role of literacy is crucial to this division. On the one  hand,  literacy  allows  the  codification  of  cultural  materials  into  a canon that remains stable across time and space. That is, the cultural ma- terials are universalized and form a tradition that may serve as a cosmopolitan idiom into which provincial elites may be integrated. 32 On the other  hand,  lack  of  widespread  literacy  among  the  peasantry  ensures that their culture remains local in scope with variations from village to village. In the field of language, these variations take the shape of dialect continua, but it is a premise of the model that similar phenomena should be found in other forms of local culture too. 33

27  Claytor 2018.

28  Toner 2017: 168-71.

29  Beard 1991: 37; Bowman 1991: 119; Corbier 1991: 117-18 and 2006: 77-90; Cornell 1991: 7; Hopkins 1991: 134-35 and 158; Horsfall 1991: 59-76; Woolf 2009: 46 n. 1; Bagnall

2011: 39-40 and 52-53; Clackson 2015: 97; Grig 2017: 29 and 312; Eckardt 2017: 9; Tomlin 2018: 201-2; Riggsby 2019: 1-4.

30  Longus Daphnis and Chloe 1.8; Plin. HN 25.6; Plut. Arist. 7.5; Quint. Inst. 2.21.16; Harris 1989: 17 n. 54.

31  Marriott 1955; Redfield 1955: 14-21 and 1956: 40-59; Wilcox 2004: 4-5 and 148-51.

While the traditions of the literate elite and the peasantry are separate, they are not envisioned as hermetically sealed. As each is aware of at least parts of the other, they remain in a state of ongoing low-intensity dialogue  where  traits  are  regularly  adopted  by  one  from  the  other through processes termed universalization and localization . Due to the differences in the basic conditions of life between the elite and the peasantry, however, the exchange never leads to an amalgamation of the two traditions into a single entity. Instead borrowed traits are transformed to suit the new context. Universalization and localization are not simply processes of adoption, but also of reinterpretation.

To illustrate these processes in practice, we may turn briefly to the first case study to which the model was applied, McKim Marriott's 1955 examination of the Uttar Pradesh village of Kishan Garhi. Despite being located in the heartland of a three-thousand-year Sanskritic tradition, Marriott found the religious life of the village to conform to Redfield's notion of two traditions. He found local traits that did not exist elsewhere in the Hindu world, while at the same time elements common to Hinduism at large were missing. 34

Even the Sanskritic practices observed in the village had often been reinterpreted by the villagers. For instance, in Sanskrit myth, the festival of Nine Durgas celebrates the names and aspects of the great goddess and the spouses of Shiva. In Kishan Garhi, however, the celebration also included the worship of a female goddess named Naurtha, who is not found

- 32  The cosmopolitan function of the Hellenistic and Roman cultures is well recognized, see e.g. Bang 2012: 74-75; Lavan, Payne & Weisweiler 2016b: 24.
- 33  For the lack of uniformity in non-literate vernacular languages, see e.g. Hobsbawm 1992 [1990]: 52. The same aspect is remarked upon for ancient Celtic by Eska 2004: 857.

34  Marriott 1955: 191-201.

in the literate tradition. Marriott, however, determined that her name derived  from  an  old  dialect  variant  of  the  words nava  r ā tra ,  meaning 'nine nights'. During the transmission of the festival from Sanskrit literature to village religious practice, a linguistic misunderstanding had caused the invention of a new female deity. 35

Thus, localization is the process by which an element of a literate tradition is reinterpreted and transformed by its transmission into non-literate cultural life. As Frankfurter has shown, the concept can also make sense of phenomena found in the Roman world, as in the Fayum region of  Egypt  where  worship  of  the  Greco-Roman  Dioscuri  seems  to  have fused with the local tradition of venerating crocodiles. 36

Versluys has argued for using globalization theory to capture the hierarchies of the Roman world, yet he admits that its analyses of power and violence are focused on the modern nation state. 37 Localization as understood by Redfield and Marriott differs slightly from glocalization in the emphasis on pre-modern barriers to interconnectedness, such as lack of schooling and inefficient communications and transportation. Employing their model ensures analyses do not lose sight of the more extensive impediments to globalizing cultural exchanges of the pre-modern world compared to the modern.

As Marriott's work was based on anthropological field study, he was better placed to capture evidence of localization in village practice than evidence of the opposite process, universalization , the appearance of elements  from  local,  non-literate  environments  in  the  literate  tradition. However, he speculated that the Brahmanical festival of Charm Tying, where priests tie charms on people's arms for cash rewards, may have derived from folk traditions such as the Kishan Garhi festival of Saluno , where married women adorn their brothers with young shoots of barley and receive small coins in return. In both cases, a disapproval of gift-giving without reciprocation is cited as the reason for the cash payment. 38

For the purpose of the present paper, the veracity of Marriott's speculation is not decisive. It serves as illustration of a phenomenon whereby non-literate cultural elements are adopted into the tradition of the literate segment, likewise being reinterpreted along the way so as to fit with the already existing literate canon. While this phenomenon may or may not account for the similarities between the two festivals observed by Marriott, the Roman world shows an abundance of elements from local cultures being adopted into the empire-wide culture of the elite.

35  Marriott 1955: 200-1.

36  Frankfurter 1998: 99.

37  Versluys 2021: 37-41.

38  Marriott 1955: 198-99.

To take just one example, the spread of the cult of Epona from eastern Gaul to significant parts of Europe in the second and third centuries AD accords well with the model. The deities of pre-conquest Gaul appear to have been mostly zoomorphic, and the anthropomorphic depiction of Epona in Roman times is probably a reinterpretation opening the way for an originally equine deity to co-exist with the classical Greco-Roman deities. 39

The central point is that while the literate and non-literate layers of society possess different cultural traditions, these traditions continually interact. Indeed, the tradition of the literate segment is originally created  from  materials  from  the  non-literate  sphere.  It  is,  in  Marriott's words, 'a more articulate and refined restatement or systematization of what is already there.' 40

In Redfield's terminology the two traditions are called the great and the little tradition . As Chakrabarti points out, however, these terms carry an insinuation of 'civilized' versus 'primitive,' whereas the conceptual underpinnings  of  the  model  make  clear  that  literate  traditions  are 'greater' than non-literate ones only in the sense that literary codification allows them to be transmitted across a much larger territory. 41 This paper will reconfigure the model to emphasize that only this latter sense is  intended in the analysis by referring to the literate tradition as the universalized and to its non-literate counterpart as the local .

Redfield's model enjoyed widespread usage in Indian studies in the latter half of the twentieth century, becoming particularly popular in the field of Buddhist studies. 42 It has found use in other fields as well, being applied e.g. to popular traditions in early modern Europe, to Chinese imperial ideology, to a comparison of Bantu and medieval Scandinavian culture and to an investigation of food systems in Jordan through the ages. 43 It also served as basis for Gellner's model of the agro-literate polity. 44

39  Webster 2001: 220-22.

40  Marriott 1955: 197.

41  Chakrabarti 2001: 95-96.

42  Wilcox 2004: 156. See e.g. Staal 1963; Mandelbaum 1964; Orans 1965; Bharati 1971 and 1978;  Singer  1972;  Corwin  1977;  Scott  1977a,  1977b  and  1985;  Eschmann  1978;

It has, however, been neglected in studies of the Roman world save for its application to religion in Roman Egypt by Frankfurter and to ancient Jewish communities by Schwartz. 45 However, the rest of this paper will demonstrate how it may fruitfully be applied to the phenomenon of cultural change within the empire as a whole. This will be done by applying it to the evidence for several provincial languages, supplemented by an analysis of an archaeological corpus so as to test the model's effectiveness across different types of source material.

## 4. The Punic Language

Returning to the case of Punic, let us examine the existing data on the language. Roman-era inscriptions in the language are divided into two corpora based on their script. The earlier corpus is written in the NeoPunic script, a development of the Phoenician. Its latest dateable example is from 92 AD, but others may derive from the second or even the third century. The later corpora, the Latino-Punic, is written in the Latin script. Its earliest example dates to between 123 and 137 AD while the latest date to the fourth and fifth centuries. The Latino-Punic corpus derives entirely from Tripolitania. 46

The change in script and the geographic confinement are not the only signs of a decline of the Punic epigraphic tradition. Monumental inscrip-

Chakrabarti 2001. For criticisms of the model within anthropology, see e.g. Dumont & Pocock 1957 and 1959; Dube 1961 and 1962; Miller 1966; Tambiah 1970; O'Flaherty 1987, as well the evaluations of these criticisms in Chakrabarti 2001: 89-92; Wilcox, 2004: 156-57.

- 43  Burke 1978; Odner 2000; LaBianca 2007: 275-87; Bodley 2011 [1994]: 263-91.

44  Gellner 1983: 8-18.

45  Frankfurter 1998: 97-144; Schwartz 2010: 3.

46  Millar 1968: 130-33; Adams 2003: 230-31; Jongeling & Kerr 2005: 1-9 and 60; Wilson 2012: 269 and 307-9.

tions cease at the end of the first century with only brief formulae surviving from later periods. 47 In  later  inscriptions there are examples of several generations of the same family where the older generations have predominantly Punic names and the younger predominantly Latin, and examples of faulty  Punic  syntax  caused  by  attempts  to  emulate  Latin phrases, titles or expressions verbatim. In contrast, evidence of Punic formulae being imitated in Latin inscriptions is virtually absent. 48

These developments seem to evidence the last gasps of a dying language. Yet as Augustine's writings from the early fifth century demonstrate, Punic was still spoken in areas where epigraphic activity had long ceased. Rather, the decline of Punic epigraphy may be seen as a downward movement in prestige for the language. Until 146 BC Punic was akin to Latin as the main language of politics, literature and religion of a farflung, imperial realm. The disappearance first of the indigenous script and  monumental inscriptions  then  of  writing  altogether  probably  reflects  the  increasing  domination  of  the  Latin universalized  tradition in North Africa.

The penetration of Latin script and Latin formulae into written Punic may be seen as examples of localization ,  whereby elements of the new prestige tradition come to be adopted by locals as well. Yet among these segments of society, too, Latin eventually replaced Punic as the language of writing. In Augustine's time we see the final stage of the process visible to us, with Latin as the sole written register of society and Punic surviving as a spoken vernacular. This suggests the full integration of the social segments  using  writing  into  the  imperial  Latin universalized  tradition , while at the same time supporting the hypotheses of a significant population of illiterates by demonstrating the limits of the universalized tradition when it comes to effecting wholesale language change throughout the provincial population.

47  Wilson 2012: 305.

48  Adams 2003: 213-15, 223-24 and 230.

## 5. The Gaulish and Phrygian Languages

While the Punic language is a case of a formerly imperial and literary language decreasing in status, the Roman world also contained numerous languages with more limited indigenous writing traditions. Examining two of the better preserved ones, Gaulish and Phrygian, further illuminates the nature of the interaction between the universalized and local spheres.

The Gaulish language is attested in materials stretching back to preRoman times. Of the evidence from the first century AD, the materials from the pottery at La Graufesenque are particularly noteworthy for the light they shed on the interaction between local and prestige languages, and how the universalization and localization model suggests a different conclusion than those of earlier treatments. 49

At La Graufesenque there may have been an influx of potters from Tuscany. Whether or not this is the case, the pottery types produced were certainly imported from Italy. The linguistic evidence from the site consists mainly of firing lists documenting the ownership of the various potters over the products made. There are lists written both in Latin and Gaulish as well as in a mixture of the two. 50

Flobert has argued that this material is evidence of an already moribund Gaulish language. According to his thesis, technical domains such as account-keeping are liable to preserve indigenous words for longer than the spoken language of the surrounding society, suggesting that Gaulish must have been in decline in and around La Graufesenque. 51 Adams likewise sees evidence of ongoing linguistic change, this time in the texts where Gaulish and Latin features are mixed. Here, Gaulish names are more likely to acquire a Latin us ending than Latin ones are to acquire a Gaulish os one, suggesting the Latin language is in the process of overpowering Gaulish. 52

49  For the corpus, see Marichal 1988; Lambert 2002.

50  Oswald 1956: 107; Adams 2003: 689, 694 and 717-18 and 2007: 281.

51  Flobert 1992: 112-13.

52  Adams 2003: 708-9. For the texts in question, see Marichal 1988: 142, 154-55, 166, 178, 198 and 226-28.

The universalization  and  localization model may be deployed to challenge these hypotheses. The argument that the material can be used to show  a  progressive  Latinization  of  a  Gaulish  community  presupposes that the interaction takes place on neutral ground. However, literacy itself  belongs to the sphere of the universalized tradition .  Gaulish had no connection  to  a  larger  state  formation,  and  the  corpus  of  pre-Roman writing in the language is quite limited. For the vast majority of Gaulish speakers, it seems most likely their language will have been known to them only as a spoken one, and it is therefore best considered a local tradition . 53 In such a setting, Latin writing cannot be disruptive of Gaulish writing, since the latter mainly exists as a result of the former. Any literary activity by the potters at La Graufesenque is an emulation of the Latin practice, a localization of traits deriving from Latin. A predominance of Latin features need not reflect a weakening of spoken Gaulish since it simply reflects the origin of the tradition of writing in the first place.

Flobert presupposes the existence of a Gaulish tradition of account keeping which may then be progressively Latinized. Yet the whole notion of literate recordkeeping derives from the Latin tradition, and as the pottery produced at the site is done in an Italian style, it should not occasion surprise that the products are often described in Latin terms. As for the retention of the Latin ending us , this may be an adherence to the original cultural package from which the practice of writing is derived. As Latin writing is the baseline for all writing in the area, writers may simply have ended Gaulish names with us because to their minds, this is how names looked when written down.

That a population taught to make pottery in an Italian style should also be taught rudimentary skills of Latin writing for recordkeeping purposes is hardly surprising. Given that the original instruction in writing must have aimed towards Latin literacy, a community where Gaulish was moribund would presumably have produced texts in Latin. It is more notable  that  upon  acquiring  basic  literacy,  the  potters  also  composed  a large quantity of texts in their native language. This would rather suggest a vibrant local tradition capable of adopting traits from the universalized sphere for its own use. Given the necessity of basic literacy for their livelihood, the potters at La Graufesenque were probably the ones most exposed to Latin in their community. It therefore seems a reasonable supposition that Gaulish remained a vibrant spoken language in the area.

How long Gaulish carried on being spoken is hard to determine. Evidence for the language is found at other potteries such as Banassac and Lezoux, whose more limited corpora persist into the second century. 54 Evidence  from  later  centuries  is  scarcer.  Since  peasants  were  neither wholly immobile nor insulated from wider market exchanges, this decrease presumably reflects a step-by-step retreat of Gaulish. The slowness of the process, however, is demonstrated by a corpus of spindlewhorls from eastern France with inscriptions in the language dated to the third and fourth centuries. 55 Gaulish is also mentioned as a spoken language in the second century by Irenaeus and Aelius Lampridius, in the third by Ulpian and in the fourth by Jerome. 56 The possibility of its survival in Brittany long enough to exert an influence on Breton is an ongoing linguistic debate. 57

Whereas the Gaulish evidence showed a provincial and a prestige language interacting directly, the evidence for Phrygian is useful to our understanding of local cultures due to the manner in which it vanishes and reappears.  The  language  is  found  in  two  different  epigraphic  corpora with a gulf of centuries between them. The first corpus, Paleo-Phrygian, dates from the eighth to the fourth century BC while the second, NeoPhrygian, dates from the first to the third AD. The Neo-Phrygian corpus consists entirely of epitaphs, mainly maledictions on future grave-robbers. 58

Notably,  funerary  maledictions  in  the  Greek  language  are  likewise rare in the area during the Hellenistic age yet increase in popularity in the Imperial period before decline sets in by the third century AD. 59 Thus both the appearance and disappearance of Neo-Phrygian run parallel to developments in regional Greek epigraphy. This is exactly what is to be expected of a local tradition . In Roman times, the Phrygian language had no recent indigenous epigraphic tradition. But for a relatively short period, epigraphy in general became so widespread that it was localized by a Phrygian-speaking population which in other centuries existed without it.  The  corpus  they  left  behind  documents  that  rather  than  being fully  integrated  into  the universalized tradition ,  they  partly  inhabited  a cultural world of their own. They were in close enough contact with the wider world to adopt epigraphy, but not close enough to necessitate language change, maybe not too dissimilar to the peasants studied by Bowes and Grey, who were integrated into wider market exchanges but never as major consumers. 60

54  Lambert 2002: 149-70.

55  Lambert 2002: 319; Clackson 2015: 133-34.

56  Jer. Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Galatas 2.3; Ulp. Dig. 32.11; Schmidt 1983: 1009-11. Blom 2009: 24-26 expresses scepticism as to whether Aelius Lampridius refers to the Gaulish language and not a Gallic dialect of Latin but considers it plausible that Ulpian does.

57  Fleuriot 1978: 75-79 and 1982: 57-58; Tanguy 1980: 446-47 and 462; Galliou & Jones 1991: 145-47; Press, 2009: 427.

58  Brixhe 2002: 248 and 2008: 70-74; Clackson 2015: 23.

The gap of nearly half a millennium between the disappearance of Paleo-Phrygian and the appearance of Neo-Phrygian is particularly telling. It proves that ancient provincial languages were not dependent on written traditions for their survival. The argument of this paper - that the Greco-Roman universalized tradition co-existed with a culturally distinct local world - must have been a reality in parts of Phrygia between the fourth century BC and the first AD, even though that local world is invisible to us. The same appears to be the case for an uncertain amount of time after the third century AD, as the language is apparently still spoken in the fifth, where Socrates Scholasticus reports that the bishop Selinas 'was Gothic from his father, but Phrygian through his mother, and because of this he taught readily in both languages in church.' 61

The existence of spoken Punic in Augustine's time and the survival of Phrygian from the Classical to the Imperial epochs demonstrate that the critical sphere for the preservation of provincial languages is unlikely to be found in our material. It rested in everyday speech. Our evidence gives only very limited access to that sphere, but that may also tell us something of the limited reach of literacy. This is borne out by the existence of Albanian, Basque, and Brythonic. There is little to no sign of either of these languages in Roman times, yet their later forms preserve evidence of interaction with Roman-era Latin (and, in the case of Albanian, Ancient Greek). 62 Their ancestor languages were spoken in the Roman provinces, yet never committed to writing. They suggest once more that the vitality of local languages in the spoken sphere need not have been as precarious  as  the  overwhelming  supremacy  of  the universalized languages in written materials suggests. 63

59  Strubbe 1997: xiv.

60  Bowes & Grey 2020: 628.

61  Socrates Hist. Eccl.

5.23, translation from Janse 2002: 350.

The examples discussed so far are unlikely to be representative of every  local  community  under  imperial  rule.  The  scarcity  of  later  evidence for Gaulish presumably reflects its disappearance from parts of Gaul. 64 In Spain the early evidence for the Celtiberian, Iberian and Lusitanian languages dried up by the Augustan period. 65 On the other hand, North Africa preserved not only Punic but also more than a thousand inscriptions in the enigmatic Libyan language, one possibly dating as late as the third century AD. 66

Local languages are almost entirely unattested in most of the Balkans, but a general paucity of inscriptions, and the low quality of some of the preserved Latin, leave open the possibility that this rather reflects the limits of literacy. 67 In contrast, the eastern provinces are rich not only in Greek writings, but also in several dialects of Aramaic (Nabataean, Palmyrene, Samaritan, Syriac) and in Egyptian. 68 The switch in the writing of the latter from Demotic to Coptic mirrors that from Neo-Punic to Latino-Punic, as a previously imperial language loses its indigenous style of writing in favour of drawing on the writing system of the new elite language (in this case Greek).

- 62  Kati č i ć 1976: 184-88; Evans 1983: 963-74; Tomlin 1987: 18-25; Harris 1989: 183; Gorrochategui 1996: 40-43 and 49-53; Trask 1997: 8-10, 125, 169-72 and 259-61; Eska 2004: 857; Fortson IV 2004: 390-91; Simkin 2012: 82.
- 63  For the effectiveness of Latin in killing off epigraphic traditions in local languages, see Mullen 2019.

64  For southern Gaul, see Mullen 2013: 276.

- 65  Untermann 1990: 93 and 125 and 1997: 369-70 and 725; Clackson 2015: 23.
- 66  MacMullen 1966: 1; Millar 1968: 128-29; Jongeling & Kerr 2005: 5; Rebuffat 2013: 3.
- 67  Mócsy 1970: 221-28 and 1974: 262-63.
- 68  Harris 1989: 189-90; Clackson 2015: 151-53 and 167.

Altogether, the fate of local languages under Roman rule is likely to have varied greatly across the provinces, just as Bowes and Grey demonstrate that peasant lifestyles differed widely between both regions and time periods. 69 However, the ample evidence of long-lasting languages shows that the imperial prestige languages were not uniformly capable of supplanting them. This in turn demonstrates the importance of the local to the cultural worlds of the empire's inhabitants, even after hundreds of years of domination by a universalized elite.

## 6. Material Culture in Roman Essex

The previous sections have demonstrated how the universalization and localization model may be applied to our knowledge of provincial languages in the Roman Empire and enhance our understanding of the limited evidence they have left. However, to evaluate the usefulness the model as a possible outline for a broader cultural history of the Roman Empire, it is necessary to determine whether traces of local traditions submerged below the universalized one may be found in other forms of evidence as well. In this final part of the paper, the approach previously applied to language will therefore be turned to the field of material culture.

Unlike in the field of languages, differences in material culture cannot be associated with the lack of general schooling, and thus limited degree of literacy, in the pre-modern world. Instead, as the following pages will show, a significant difference in material culture is evident between the urban and the rural worlds, reflecting the connection of the universalized tradition not only with literacy but also with urban life. The paper will argue that similarly to the signs of language survival, the difference in material culture reflects a divide between a heavily interconnected urban world, prone to sharing a unified culture across vast distances, and a variety of rural communities which despite interactions with the urban retain their fundamentally local character.

This argument will be demonstrated specifically through an analysis of  ceramic material from Roman Essex. This corpus has been selected both for the view it facilitates of cultural divisions in material culture in a Roman provincial setting, but also because previous interpretations of the corpus have in turn emphasized both inequality and interaction.

69  Bowes & Grey 2020: 637.

The pottery assemblages surveyed date from the first century AD to c. 250 and derive from two urban centres, London and Colchester, as well as smaller towns, villages and villas across the Essex countryside. A clear difference between the cities and their hinterland is evident simply from the forms of pottery detected.

The  rural  sites  are  dominated  by  jars,  some  quite  heavily.  For  instance, in Strood Hall, they make up around 70% of the assemblage, in Braintree and Stansted from 70% to more than 80%, while in first century Witham and in Rainham they exceed 90%. In contrast, the proportion of jars is significantly smaller in the urban areas, making up about a quarter of the London deposits and slightly more of the Colchester ones. Only two other locations in the region, Boreham and Little Oakley, have jarproportions of less than 50%. These were both villa sites which like the cities are designated by the archaeologists Perring and Pitts as 'high status'. 70

The lower proportion of jars in the high-status deposits reflect a much greater variety of pottery products in use in this environment. Particularly  in  the  cities,  vessels  forms  such  as  mortaria,  flagons,  bowls,  lids, tazze, unguentaria and honeypot jars are far more prevalent than in the countryside. Evidently, the high-status locations partook in a practice of pottery usage that set them apart from the rural landscape. 71 This contrasts with the findings of the Roman Peasant Project in southern Tuscany, where the material culture and diet of the peasantry does not set them markedly apart from nearby urban populations. Yet the contrast simultaneously confirms one of the tenets of that project by demonstrating peasant cultures to have been historically specific entities, rather than an unchanging 'eternal peasantry'. 72

In the case of the high-status pottery in Essex, Perring and Pitts associate it with social practices known from the rest of the empire and often found at sites related to the Roman infrastructure. These 'more 'global'

70  Perring & Pitts 2013: 116-17, 120, 126-28 and 153-59.

71  Perring & Pitts 2013: 146-55.

72  Bowes & Grey 2020: 617 and 627.

forms of social practice' are particularly evident in the significant proportions  of  dining  vessels  in  London  and  the  two  villas. 73 While  the shared object-scape forming throughout the Roman world is accessible to both urban and rural populations, in the urban sphere the engagement is far more intense. 74

Even Colchester deviates from the pattern of the other 'high status' sites with a smaller proportion of dining vessels and a significant amount of Gallo-Belgic imports. The Gallo-Belgic pottery developed as a direct consequence of Roman imperial decisions, specifically Augustus' focus on  the  Germanic  frontier.  The  increasing  urbanisation  and  improved road networks of Gallia Belgica and the establishment of military garrisons on the Rhine which followed from this focus led to the development and flourishing of a standardised form of local pottery. 75

While the evolution of Gallo-Belgic pottery was intimately related to the progress of Roman imperialism, it is nevertheless a product whose distribution aligns less with sites directly connected with Roman colonisation and more with places in southern and eastern Britain and northern Gaul connected with pre-Roman royal power. This suggests a continuation of a pre-conquest cultural network, albeit one whose pottery is nonetheless transformed by its integration into the Roman state. 76

Several smaller Essex towns share the Colchester patterns, and these sites are moreover distinguished by a greater proportion of drinking vessels, interpreted by Perring and Pitts as the continuation of social practices connected to the remains of the pre-conquest elite and their dependents, centred on the former royal seat of Colchester. 77

Nevertheless, the main divergence in the Essex pottery is still between 'high status' sites and the rest of the countryside. This is further underlined by the differences in pottery fabrics. In Colchester, and even more so  in  London,  imported and regionally traded finewares are common.

73  Perring & Pitts 2013: 153-55.

74  Versluys 2017: 194-99.

75  Pitts 2019: 85-86.

76  Pitts 2015: 89-91 and 2017: 50-1.

77  Perring & Pitts 2013: 1-5, 144-45 and 153-55.

Fineware fabrics are not unknown at the rural sites, yet mostly their proportions are quite small. E.g. the deposit at Strood Hall contains a variety of them, yet the vast majority (c. 70%) of the deposit consists of jars, and the  remainder  is  split  between  only  two  forms  -  beakers  and  a  small number of bowls. 78

With little fineware to speak of, the rural deposits consist mainly of coarseware.  Again,  their  usage  differs  from  the  high-status  sites.  The predominant coarseware fabric of pre-Roman times was grog. Grog declined  in  the  first  century  AD,  being  replaced  by  two  distinct  fabrics: sandy grey ware (GRS) and black-surface ware (BSW). The introduction of GRS was connected to Roman colonial communities, whereas BSW was a continuation of the grog-tempered pottery tradition that drew on Roman styles for inspiration. 79

The appearance of local pottery that emulates Roman forms, but only up to a point, is not unique to Essex. 80 Pitts has demonstrated how pottery  consumption  in  north-western  Europe  was  fundamentally  transformed by the establishment of the Roman Empire, and the ensuing developments in urbanism and road networks. As described earlier, even phenomena such as the Gallo-Belgic pottery, which aligns particularly with  centres  of  pre-Roman  power,  were  nonetheless  products  of  this transformation, as their development, standardization and geographic spread would be unthinkable without Roman infrastructure. 81

GRS quickly became the sole form of coarseware used in Colchester. In London, grog remained common through the first century AD, but in the  second  this  disappears  in  favour  of  GRS  and  regionally  imported coarsewares. Almost no BSW is found in either city, while at high status sites in the countryside such as Little Oakley, GRS is predominant and BSW is found in smaller amounts. 82

78  Perring & Pitts 2013: 125-28 and 144-62; Pitts, 2019: 192-93.

79  Going 1987: 4-11; Pitts 2015: 78-79 and 96 n. 33-34.

80  See e.g. van Enckevort 2017: 19 for a similar phenomenon in the Lower Rhine region.

81  Pitts 2019: 14-5 and 207-16.

82  Pitts 2015: 79. At the aforementioned villa site of Boreham, though, the proportions of GRS and BSW are almost equal.

Unlike dining vessels and fineware fabrics, however, GRS is in no way limited to high status sites. It co-exists with BSW throughout Roman Essex, even exceeding the amounts of BSW at some low status rural sites such as Strood Hall. As the Roman Peasant Project has demonstrated for southern Tuscany, the Essex data shows that peasants were not insulated from the wider market exchanges. The main divergence in coarseware between high and low status sites is not a lack of GRS at the latter, but the utter absence of BSW from the former. Both fabrics were evidently easily obtainable, yet apparently urban consumers avoided BSW. 83

The usage pattern of coarseware fabrics shows the opposite pattern of cultural divergence compared to the earlier examples. Rather than urban populations accessing a culture unavailable to rural communities, they are here seen avoiding one associated with those communities. Similar behaviours are found elsewhere in the corpus, as e.g. the case of the biconical beaker. This vessel type derived from northern Gaul but spread through the increasingly interconnected consumption network brought about by the Roman conquest. Nevertheless, in Essex it is found in only small amounts in Colchester and London, whereas it is far more prevalent at non-urban sites. 84 Urban populations appear to reject products for their lack of association to Roman urban culture.

How do we make sense of this diverse data on pottery usage? In their 2013 survey of the material, Perring and Pitts demonstrate that the urban centres, rather than serving as markets for the countryside, largely drained the rural surplus through tribute, rent and taxation, providing little in return. On the basis of this asymmetrical relationship, the authors advance an urban-versus-rural paradigm, casting the urban locations as 'alien cities' and 'cultural islands' in opposition to an 'underlying pre-Roman landscape' which 'was left surprisingly intact.' 85

Yet as their data shows, this conclusion is too bleak. Even low status rural sites did have some access to fineware, imported wares and GRS, and the local tradition of pottery, while rejected by the urban population, evolved from grog to BSW under the influence of Roman pottery styles.

83  Pitts 2015: 78-79.

84  Pitts 2019: 193.

85  Perring & Pitts 2013: xviii-xix and 248-51.

The asymmetrical relationship is certainly evident, yet a general interpretation of Roman rule must also encompass the interactions that took place as even the poorer sites were not as such insulated from wider market exchanges.

In a 2015 article Pitts did so by drawing on globalization theory to explain several facets of the material. The strength of this theory is evident from the explanation it offers for the rejection of BSW in urban communities. Globalization often exacerbates pre-existing inequalities, and Pitts argues that the differences between GRS and BSW provided a way for urban populations to distinguish themselves from a rural population still partly reliant on a pottery tradition with antecedents in local Iron Age practices. 86 This new approach paved the way for Pitts' 2019 work on pottery across north-western Europe, which articulates differences in material culture as the reflection of distinct, though intimately related, objectscapes. 87

Pitts' interpretation of the consumption pattern in Colchester, however, highlights an important difference between globalization theory and the universalization and localization model. Pitts considers this to be evidence for a ''globalising' and 'globalised'' network of pre-Roman power structures, thus classifying the phenomenon in the same category as the emerging imperial culture. 88 Yet  just  as  provincial  languages  lacked  a written  canon  to  preserve  them  unchanged,  this  pre-Roman  network lacked an imperial superstructure to codify and sustain it. Some decades after the conquest the cosmopolitan urban consumption tradition of the wider Roman world indeed displaced it. Though under different circumstances it might hypothetically have evolved into a universalized tradition , as far it appears in the material the network is a cultural phenomenon distinct from cosmopolitan prestige traditions such as the Greco-Roman.

In his case study, Marriott included an intermediate category for elements being in the process of universalization or localization , and so falling between the two main traditions. He described these as regional traditions , evident e.g. in the case of non-Sanskritic deities that might possess vernacular  literatures,  temples  and  professional  devotees  but  without claims to cultural universality. 89 The pre-Roman network is better interpreted as an archaeological parallel to such phenomena so as to distinguish it from cultural traditions that codified elite identities across vast imperial territories. While the pre-Roman network was attached to commercial networks brought about by Roman imperialism and in consequence subjected to increasing standardization, it was not universalized but remained confined to its region of origin.

86  Pitts 2015: 78-79.

87  Pitts 2019: 151-52.

88  Pitts 2015: 89-91.

The universalization and localization model has the potential to solve the discrepancy between the sharp urban-versus-rural character of Perring and Pitts' 2013 conclusions and the globalizing impulses emphasized in Pitts' later work. The model presupposes some degree of low-intensity contact between the local and the universalized . While preserving distinct cultural outlooks, the urban and rural worlds maintained some form of connection, the preponderance of GRS fabrics in both places being the most striking example of a shared access to the same markets.

This connection explains the various phenomena detailed in the previous pages: when the local grog-tempered pottery evolves into BSW by emulating Roman styles, this is a localization of a specific trait from the universalized tradition . Yet it is not an integration of the local pottery manufacturers into that tradition, since BSW remains a feature only of the local countryside. The small quantities of finewares and imports at the low status sites are a parallel phenomenon. As the preponderance of jars in the countryside demonstrates, even though the two worlds are connected, the cultural alignment between them is simply too limited to speak of a meaningful integration of the rural world into the globalizing culture that is reflected in the urban and villa deposits.

## 7. Conclusion

As the cases above have shown, the universalization and localization model allows cultural interaction and cultural hierarchy to be analysed within a single interpretative framework. The analysis demonstrates that impe- rial cultural influence was felt throughout provincial societies. Latin literacy and vocabulary reached speakers of indigenous languages, and Roman pottery styles transformed pre-Roman pottery traditions.

However, the analysis also shows limits of this integration. The universalized tradition was not a national culture but a prestige culture uniting the segments at the top of the social hierarchy. The shift from Punic to Latin in North African monumental inscriptions and the long-distance import of finewares to London are just two examples of the progressive integration of provincial elites into this tradition. Yet the survival of spoken Punic in Augustine's day and the more local and more limited pottery consumption in rural Essex show that cultural dialogue between this prestige tradition and the local world did not result in a merging of the two into a single culture. The establishment of the Roman Empire made possible a spread of shared practices - such as the Latin language and the material objectscapes of north-western Europe - but limits on literacy and a stark divide in consumption between urban and rural sites meant that in many places, these shared practices were only partially accessed, and are likely to have co-existed with distinct local traditions.

In  the  case  of  provincial  languages,  the  most  significant  feature  is their appearance in writing at all. As the model makes clear, literacy is a feature of the prestige tradition, and so it should not surprise us to find the vast majority of North African epigraphy inscribed in Latin or written Gaulish emulating Latin grammar. The survival of Punic and Phrygian, sometimes for centuries without any writing at all, as well as the existence of Albanian, Basque and Brythonic, demonstrates that provincial languages existed mainly in the oral sphere.

As a supplement to the tenuous nature of our evidence for local language, the survey of pottery deposits from Roman Essex shows cultural division on a large scale between agricultural producers and well-connected urban centres. Rural and urban consumers were able to access some of the same products, yet the wide divergences in the nature and scale of their consumption emphasizes cultural hierarchy to have been as central to the experience of Roman imperialism as cultural interaction.

Applying this conclusion to Augustine's statements from the first part of this paper, we might say that cultural and material interactions caused the integration which by his day made Latin the dominant language of Hippo. Yet social hierarchy and the conditions of pre-modern society constrained this process to such a degree that it did not effect the same change among the tenant farmers of Mappala.

Acknowledgment: This article was made possible by funding from the Carlsberg Foundation. I am grateful to Dr. Peter Fibiger Bang for suggesting the model of universalization and localization to me, and to Dr. Myles Lavan and the anonymous peer reviewer for valuable comments and corrections. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

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