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The Impact of the Roman Army B. To many inhabitants of the Roman Empire the army was the most visible representation of imperial power. Roman troops were the embodiment of imperial control. Military installations and buildings, the imperial guard, other troops, fleets, and militarily tinged works of art brought home the majesty of Rome to anybody who saw them, in Rome and in other parts of the Empire.
With Roman armies came administrators, taxes and requisitions in cash and kind, traders, permanently residing veterans and military personnel, useful relations between local notables and Roman military cadre, and chances of upward social mobility.
This sixth volume in the series Impact of Empire focuses on these topics. Copyright Year: E-Book PDF. Prices from excl. VAT :. Add to Cart. About MyBook. View PDF Flyer. Contents About.
By: L. De Blois and E. Lo Cascio. Pages: i—xxii. By: Luuk De Ligt. Pages: 21— By: Paul Erdkamp. Pages: 47— By: Nathan Rosenstein. Pages: 75— By: Olivier J. Pages: 91— By: Armin Eich. Pages: — By: Jasper Oorthuijs. By: Hans Michael Schellenberg.
By: Elio Lo Cascio. By: Karl Strobel. By: Pierre Cosme. Quick Quiz. Choose One A break down an enemy city's gates. B carry the soldiers' backpacks.
C protect a group of soldiers. D send spears into an enemy army. Our new Quick Quiz feature allows students to take quizzes right here!
Gain access! This is my alert message. While Roman coinage sometimes have standards on them with SPQR inscribed on the edges, it is difficult to find any evidence that they were ever on military flags carried by the army.
Military historians like Rosemary Moore, a professor of ancient history at the University of Iowa and a veteran herself, noted to me the complete omission of such detail by ancient authors and artists:. The absence of evidence is of course not evidence for absence.
Despite that video games, movies, and myriad modern pop culture images that associate SPQR with the Roman army of the Republic —31 BCE , this seems to be a modern fiction. Even normally reputable sources like the online Ancient History Encyclopedia fall prey to perpetuating the idea of the link between the army and the acronym.
In an entry for Roman military standards, they note:. The Standard, then, represented not only the legion or cohort which carried it but the citizens of Rome, and the policies the army represented. Although Constantine would use SPQR as part of his propaganda in the early 4th century CE, it fell out of favor in the period of the later Roman empire.
It would resurface in the high medieval period. And just as Augustus had manipulated the iconic abbreviation for his own agenda, it would again be repurposed and reinterpreted to fit the needs of the institution and the institutor. It notably does not have SPQR on it, but does have the goddess Victory holding a wreath to crown a victor image via Wikimedia.
Professor and medieval historian Carrie E. SPQR and this false vision of Rome continued to be a canvas upon which others could both project their own meaning while still conjuring a familiar visual connection to the bygone power of an empire. This was to become particularly true with the political movements of the early 20th century.
Then the image of Rome took a new direction during the invasion of Abyssinia and the declaration of an Italian empire in In the third phase in the late s a climate of increasing racism was created and the Romans and the Latin language were used to define the supposed physical and spiritual and cultural superiority of the modern Italians. His stamps of power used the familiar Roman abbreviation. Mussolini also popularized the use of SPQR manhole covers seen across the urban landscape of the city even today, though the practice predated him by a number of years.
Encouraging popular unity through the use of a familiar symbols of power is and was a common tactic of Fascism. Historical fiction, TV shows, and videogames focused on ancient Rome have all perpetuated the use of SPQR as symbolic of the Roman military, which may have influenced white nationalist groups to adopt it as well. Their use of tattoos , t-shirts, and flags that provide an aesthetic rallying point and the visual equivalent of a dog whistle has not gone unnoticed by Dozier and others attempting to translate the icons of the alt-right.
Historians are quick to point out that Roman antiquity is not the only historical period that white nationalists have appropriated or borrowed from. Cord Whitaker, a professor of English at Wellesley College, noted:. Along with the adaptation of Mussolini-era uses of SPQR, the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and other racist groups have taken up the writings of Italian philosopher and pseudo-medievalist Julius Evola.
Other historians have also pointed out the penchant for ignoring the factual history of the abbreviation and seizing upon their own fiction of the past. One of them is Dame Mary Beard , who has herself waded into discussions of race and ethnicity with some success, but who has also been criticized for colonialist language. In some ways it is a slogan that is very hard to pin down which I rather like … and the fact that it is still all over the place in modern Rome helps that un-pin-down-ability.
Still, Beard believes the appropriation is perhaps more prevalent in the U. The key to understanding the use and abuse of SPQR for over two millennia is perhaps flexibility. While not all applications of SPQR are meant to reference white supremacist ideals, the current work of classicists, medievalists, and modern historians to isolate, translate, and then underscore its current abuse has been heartening to many who wish to understand how the past has become distorted in the lens of the alt-right.
Sign up for our email newsletters! In Infinities, guest-edited by curator and art historian Nadia Kurd, artists and writers discuss the influence of Islamic visual cultures in Canadian contemporary art. In a psychological context, confabulation refers to obvious falsehoods invented by individuals to fill gaps in their memory. From supporting artists who work with traditional media to those who base their practice in digital, crypto, VR art, or NFTs,.
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