• Monday 17 March - Panel II

Between Venus and Dionysius. Establishing Identities in Roman Houses

Shelley J. Hales

The aim of this paper is to consider how the domestic art of the Roman empire might be thought to reflect the identity of homeowners and their visitors. It will argue that, despite the collective similarities of media and motifs used in houses across the geographical and chronological span of the empire, the
iconography of mosaics and wall painting do not provide an easy guide to how to be Roman. Instead, they often deliberately exploit themes which seem to embrace the difficult, dangerous and alien worlds that might be understood as a threat to Roman order and civilisation. By setting such scary fantasies against apparently 'safer', more familiar (at least to Roman eyes) themes, these media embroil their viewers in a series of antithetical positions, which must be played off one against the other. The evidence of domestic art, then, might imply that to assume Roman identity is not, in fact, to emulate a series of positive role models that embody a clearly definable Romanitas, but instead to wrestle with the many contradictions and ambiguities of being Roman. The paper will contend that Romanness is won through playing a part in the struggle rather than in overcoming it. In fact, it will go as far to suggest that there can be no winners here since there is no such thing as pure, uncontested Romanness.

In asserting this hypothesis of the nature of Roman identity and in tracking its dissemination and renegotiation through a process of acculturation in the material world, the paper will also ask a second, more fundamental question. How might the visual media be expected to reflect or actively change identity? Does the potency of art lie simply in the choice of iconography or rather in the processes of viewing and the relationship viewers choose to assume between themselves and the images around them?

The paper will focus its broad arguments by concentrating on images of Venus and Dionysus, together the most popular motifs found in domestic contexts (whether mosaic, painting or sculpture) throughout the Roman empire. We will look at how an audience can participate in the game of being Roman by embracing, subverting, rejecting and even just plainly ignoring different guises of the pair.

The University of Bristol, Department of Classics & Ancient History,
University of Bristol, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TB.

Shelley.Hales@bristol.ac.uk