Imagining Imagined Roman Community
Photo: Mary Harrsch modified by Scott Coleman
My blog has been a source of anxiety, pride, disillusionment and terror. I have never conquered my fear of public writing. Writing for a known and unknown audience. My thoughts tend to worry about whether I am right or wrong about many of the remarks I write here. This worry and anxiety suppresses many of my thoughts, and they do not make it into the digital ethos. I must remember that this blog has evolved to perform various functions, but it is still meant to present my informal ramblings. So, it's time to get a thought out that’s been on my mind for a long time.
In 1983, Benedict Anderson published his powerful work Imagined Communities (1983), which argues for the significance of print media in the process of creating unified identities across large geographic expanses. In other words, print media help create national identity, i.e., Canadian, German, French, etc. Anderson defines the nation as: "an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1983; 28). He claims it is imagined because individuals who consider themselves part of a collective whole will likely never meet or know each other. Still, they assume identical or uniform communal ideologies and identities based on language, ethnicity, political position, etc. Anderson argues print media supported the development of national identity, i.e., Nationalism.
Anderson's work is a formative piece of scholarship that has influenced much of my thinking on the creation of identities via coins in the ancient and medieval world. Since the beginning of my academic life as an undergrad, I have always been troubled by the term Byzantine. The term applies and implies an otherness to the East Roman state. A mystical, overly complicated and declining offshoot of the classical and imperial Roman Empire. Byzantium is an imagined community, not from the perspective of the Romans but from contemporary perceptions. Modern scholarship. This term continues to persist in our contemporary world from its inception as a professional discipline in the late 19th century. However, many Byzantinists would agree that the Byzantines called themselves Romans.
But did they?
Literary sources do support the existence of Roman identity. It is a question of what being Roman means. There is no doubt that Romanness and Roman identity shifted, evolved, assimilated and excluded numerous traits that would inform and create individual and communal identity over the Roman State's long history. It is here that I wish to posit a different stream of thought. Imagining the Imagined Roman Community.
What do I mean by this? Well, I am still trying to sort that out. Briefly, I mean that our imagining of Roman identity based on the dishonest label Byzantine removes us from thinking deeply about how Romans imagined their communities. We (academics) claim the Byzantines were Roman. But how imagined was Romanness, that is, the construction of what constituted a Roman or Roman identity amongst a significant proportion of the population underrepresented in Roman sources? What role do coins have in constructing imagined Roman communities, and how do scholars use coins to imagine the Imagined Roman community?
Does this make any sense?
I argue that coins are the original mass print media. Coins facilitated an imagined community of belonging under the auspice of Romanness. As Anderson noted, with the invention of mass print media, hundreds of thousands of monographs and documents could and were produced, inevitably leading to higher literary rates due to accessibility to print, which then allowed for the creation of imagined national communities with defined boundaries based on contemporary ideologies. Coins were minted in even higher quantities and far earlier in History than the printing press. Thus, their influence on creating imagined Roman identity, belonging, and community is very likely. However, this is not to say the eastern Roman state had a national identity. I think the opposite. The literature of the medieval eastern Roman state was a very elitist perception of Roman identity, one that attempted to construct a Roman ethnicity. An imagined ethnic identity that was not necessarily shared by much of the urban and agrarian population. However, coins, as an iconographic and print medium that required very little literacy, if at all, by much of the population, could link communities over vast geographical areas under a Roman economic system. The transitory nature of coins dictates communication between people, even those who have never met or known each other. Roman coins facilitate an overarching imagined Roman ethnicity, community or Romanness.
These thoughts may be speculative conjecture, but I think it is a valid - though very rough - starting point to think about how coins influenced notions of identity and belonging within the eastern Roman State. Furthermore, it forces us to reflect on our scholarly approaches to the ancient world. If there was an imagined community of Romanness, how does modern language like Byzantine influence our approach to Imagining the Roman Imagined Community? From the public history perspective, does labelling coins Byzantine in museums create the allusion or disillusion of imagined ethnicity, identity, and community for public reception? And when coins are labelled Byzantine and then appended with the Roman label to explain the exhibit’s historical context, how does this distort public knowledge of the East Roman state? What imagined community is authentic to the public?
Does any of this make sense to you, dear reader? Enter anxiety.
