Roman Army Studies and Posthumanism?
A most unlikely of cocktails, but perhaps one of immense (virtual) potential?
Here I excavate a theme — or, rather, a line of flight — which I addressed in a recent seminar paper: what can posthumanism offer Roman army studies?
What do we think of when we think of Roman armies?
Perhaps it is Roman legionaries, marked out by a rectangular shield (scutum) and overlapping plate armour (lorica segmentata), and marching in uniformed unison (a trope which is somewhat ahistorical). Or perhaps it is the daily life activities of soldiers and their many (sometimes outnumbering) camp followers; communal drinking with cups, spinning with wheels, or playing games with dice.
Regardless of what you conjured up, in all these instances our Romans are being shaped through their interactions with objects and ‘things’: equipment, cups, spindle whorls, dice and more. Our Romans emerge from these relations anew, constantly becoming ‘Roman’ through their (inter)actions with these (and other) things.
However, when the more social dimensions of armies have been conceptualised in scholarship, objects are often passive and placed in the theoretical backseat. This is not to say that materials are not considered — there are many great works which catalogue, examine, and analyse our material record, such as the illuminating works by S. Sommer on the settlements that grow around forts, or the extensive and detailed volumes, edited works, and monographs on military equipment in all its splendour and mundanity (the latter, of course, a feature of its splendrousness).
Rather, this is to say that objects are seen as passive in the emergence of social fabric; forces of change and affect1 only because they act as media of feedback between social structures and agents (such as spinners) or because of some perceived symbolic importance. These were indeed parts of their ‘role’, but we should move away from this conceptualisation of the world, where humans sit at the centre of the tree and objects lay suspended in its canopy. As Rachel Crellin and Oliver Harris observe:
“human beings are one of many components that make up our world, and things cannot be understood apart from the wider relational assemblages, and specific historical process of which they are part”.
We thus need a more horizontal view: one which sees objects and humans on the same playing field, free from a universal anthropocentric ‘centre stage’ and embedded in their wider assemblages.
This view is offered by posthumanist and new materialist archaeologies. These are (in short) centred around the critique of universal truths, essentialist opposing dualisms, and the centrality of ‘man’, with new materialism specifically also focusing on the emergence of all things via difference (Crellin Harris 2021).
But what would this look like in Roman armies?
Instead of seeing the scutum as a product (solely) of human ingenuity and mastery over nature, we can see the Roman scutum as a product of various material and immaterial happenings. Instead of simply an item used as intended by a Roman soldier, a scutum’s material properties affected how soldiers were able to fight, facilitating certain ways of acting which were not possible prior (I assume it would be quite difficult to do a perfect testudo without one) and closing off others (it is now harder to run).
In short, the Roman soldier emerges through the coming together of both scutum and soldier.
Does this mean Romans could not do stuff intentionally? Does this mean the markings on a scutum were not meaningful? No. This does not deny agency nor meaning, it explores how these emerge from arrangements of things.
Despite valid fears expressed concerning its supposed apolitical nature, a new materialist posthumanist archaeology pays heed to the complexity of life. As Kathleen Stewart writes in Ordinary Affects, agency is:
…not really about willpower but rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in things.
Eva Mol and others have already brought this thinking to Roman studies, demonstrating the complexity of what Others (both human and object) could do in the Roman world. Like Eva, I believe that new materialist posthumanism is a future for Roman studies, one we should explore. And, while there is a great deal more to say, I challenge us all to muse on how we can explore what things and people could do in the Roman world.
Reading list
Rachel J., and Oliver J. T. Harris. 2021. ‘What Difference Does Posthumanism Make?’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31 (3): 469–75 (and other contributions to this issue).
Mol, Eva. 2023. ‘New Materialism and Posthumanism in Roman Archaeology: When Objects Speak for Others’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33 (4): 715–29.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary affects. Duke University Press
All of the JRMES!
understood as the capacity to impact and be impacted.