Blame it on the Barbarians:
Ethnic Categorisation and Jingoism in the Cultural Memory of the Sack of Rome c.390BCE
Keywords:
Gauls, Senones, Rome, Jingoism, Ethnicity, Cultural Memory, PrejudiceAbstract
As with much of the early history of the Roman Republic, the Sack of Rome c.390BCE is known more from legend than verifiable historical fact and is subject to several varying retellings in later Latin and Greek literature. One of the key variations, however, lies in who, precisely, is responsible for the attack on the city. The majority of accounts place the blame on a largely undifferentiated mass of Gauls, recently arrived in the Italian peninsula from beyond the Alps. This conflict gives rise to a centuries-spanning cultural enmity between Rome and the Gallic race in total. However, the unusually detailed first century BCE accounts of Livy and Diodorus both attribute the attack to the Senones, a single group of Gauls already resident in northern Italy for several generations. Since this latter version appears better supported by archaeological and linguistic evidence, it seems that cultural memories of the Sack gradually became warped, and the guilt of the Senones was transferred to the entire ethnic category in which they were placed. This paper aims to examine how and why this change occurred and its relationship with the rhetoric of jingoism, ethnic prejudice, and demonization in both the ancient and modern worlds.
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Plutarch Life of Camillus, in Parallel Lives Vol.II (trans. B. Perrin, Cambridge MA/London, 1914).
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Tacitus Annales Vol.I (trans. C.H. Moore, London/New York, 1931).
Tacitus Annales Vol.II (trans. J. Jackson, Cambridge MA/London, 1937).
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Tertullian Apology (trans. T.R. Glover and G.H. Rendall, Cambridge MA/London, 1931).
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Cunliffe, B., The Ancient Celts (Oxford, 1997).
Dimitrova, M., Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and its Dramatic Afterlife (London: 2018).
Drinkwater, J.F., Roman Gaul: The Three Provinces 58BC-AD260 (London: 1983).
Ebel, C., Transalpine Gaul: The Emergence of a Roman Province (Leiden:1976).
Eckstein, A.M., Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome (Berkeley: 2006).
Farney, G.D., Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome (Cambridge: 2007).
Gowing, A.M., Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (Cambridge: 2005).
Haywood, J., The Celts: Bronze Age to New Age (Harlow: 2004).
Hölkeskamp, K-J. “History and Collective Memory in the Middle Republic”, in eds. N. Rosenstein and R. Morstein-Marx A Companion to the Roman Republic (Chichester :n.d.), 478-495.
Holliday, P.J., “Celtomachia: The Representation of Battles with Gauls on Etruscan Funerary Urns”, from Etruscan Studies Vol.I, 1994: 23-45. Jones, T. and Ereira, A., Barbarians (London: 2006).
Matyszak, P., The Enemies of Rome: From Hannibal to Attila the Hun (London: 2004).
Mineo, B., “Livy’s Historical Philosophy”, in ed. B. Mineo A Companion to Livy (Chichester: 2015), 139-152.
Oakley, S.P., “Reading Livy’s Book 5”, in ed. B. Mineo A Companion to Livy (Chichester: 2015), 230-42.
Riggsby, A.M., Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War inWords (Austin: 2006).
Roselaar, S.T., Public Land in the Roman Republic: A Social and Economic History of Ager Publicus in Italy, 396-89BC (Oxford: 2010).
Rosenstein, N., Rome and the Mediterranean 290 to 146BC: The Imperial Republic (Edinburgh: 2012).
Shotter, D., “Cicero and the Treveri: New Light on an Old Pun”, from Greece and Rome Vol.54 (2007), 106-110.
Steel, C.E.W., Cicero, Rhetoric, and Empire (Oxford: 2001).
Syed, Y., “Romans and Others”, in ed. S. Harrison A Companion to Latin Literature (Oxford: 2007), 360-71.
Vasaly, A., Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: 1993).
Williams, J.H.C., Beyond the Rubicon: Romans and Gauls in Republican Italy (Oxford: 2001).
Wiseman, T.P., “Popular Memory”, in ed. K. Gallinsky Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory (Ann Arbor: 2014).
Woolf, G., Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Chichester: 2011).
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Published
2019-11-24
How to Cite
Moore, R. (2019). Blame it on the Barbarians:: Ethnic Categorisation and Jingoism in the Cultural Memory of the Sack of Rome c.390BCE. Trinity Postgraduate Review Journal, 18(1), 132–154. Retrieved from https://ojs.tchpc.tcd.ie/index.php/tpr/article/view/1310
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