NO DOUBT THE subject of this book, ancient communications, first came to preoccupy its editors’ attention in the same way that it has engaged many scholars—through their own work, such as Richard Talbert’s mapping of the classical world. The project of editing a volume of essays on ancient communications—a book that had no forerunner—materialized in 2006, when Oxford University Press approached Talbert with an invitation to join his old friend and collaborator Kai Brodersen (then professor of ancient history at Mannheim University) in co-editing a communications handbook. Discussions were still at a preliminary stage, however, when the pressure of unanticipated professional and personal obligations led Brodersen to ask to be relieved of his commitment.
Talbert then hesitated to persevere alone, especially in view of his growing concern that the scope initially envisaged for the handbook—a “roads and seafaring project,” as one e-message had summarized it—would prove unsatisfyingly limited. Moreover, it seemed to run the risk of needlessly duplicating much of John Oleson’s Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, a volume that was already approaching publication (in 2008). Talbert expressed to Fred Naiden—his new University of North Carolina colleague recruited in 2007—his sense of frustration that communications ought somehow to be addressed across a broader and more rewarding canvas. Naiden’s sympathetic reaction and shared outlook soon prompted Talbert to request that the Press offer him Brodersen’s place. It agreed. Between them, Naiden and Talbert next began to reconceive the volume as an initial exploration of a new field rather than as the kind of comprehensive reference work that could be produced for an established, well demarcated subject; in other words, as a set of essays and not a handbook.
We struggled for several years to define our vision and to involve colleagues willing and able to contribute effectively to its articulation. We are grateful to the readers commissioned by the Press to react to a first, inadequate proposal in 2008. Generous colleagues next aided our rethinking of several aspects at a meeting in Vancouver in 2009. The critical turning point came two years later, however, when the National Humanities Center kindly provided the venue for a workshop at which a dozen potential contributors presented draft papers for roundtable discussion. Their courageous efforts, and the responses to them, finally gave us the confidence to mold the work into its present form. It must still be regarded as a pioneering and experimental endeavor, because the topic of ancient communications has been so persistently neglected. Indeed, despite attention to some aspects, especially under the Roman Empire, this remains a topic that to date has received no wide-ranging treatment. Only one classical dictionary or encyclopedia includes an entry for it: “Kommunikation” in the late-1990s Neue Pauly, inevitably brief. As token acknowledgement of the challenge to be confronted, the subsequent English-language version of this encyclopedia offers not just one entry (as in the German), but two: “Communication” and “Communications.” The former offers a concise description of ancient communications, and the latter mainly gives examples.1
This volume dares to take the broad view that communications are a vehicle, not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed, too, within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. No less varied are the means and mechanisms of communication taken into account—from coins, papyri, artwork, and inscriptions on durable surfaces, to transient forms like watch-fires and mounted messengers. This said, we maintain that, for all its breadth, the scope of “communications” thus conceived should not be as extensive as that of general cultural expression, especially literary or artistic expression. Even so, works of literature and visual art merit inclusion insofar as they achieved communicative effects (resulting from public performance, for example), as distinct from achieving aesthetic effects.2 In addition, we recognize that the communicative skills required to create and deliver works of literature and art—the skills of composition, performance, and dissemination—are indispensable for ancient communication, not just in these two fields, but also in related ones ranging from oratory to graffiti. The topic of communications is larger than (and largely different from) that of technology, as treated in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Ancient World already noted. It is smaller than (and again largely different from) that of social relations, as covered in The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World. 3
The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of this volume are extended but firm. The Near East formed a diplomatic and commercial communications network by the middle of the second millennium BCE, one that included part of Greece; this network then reemerged, with all of Greece now included, before the middle of the first millennium BCE. The eastern boundary of the network encompassed Persia, and from the early first millennium onwards, the western boundary included Greek, Punic, and Italian city-states; later, this boundary moved farther west and north to include Roman possessions. Just as the volume’s terminus post quem is the emergence of a Near Eastern network in the second millennium, so its terminus ante quem is the division of the Near East soon after the rise of Islam.4 Nonetheless, we do not attempt to be comprehensive in our coverage. That would be a gargantuan, as well as premature, undertaking.
In the chapters that follow, seventeen scholars whose previous work has to some degree or other engaged with communications now devote their attention to aspects reflecting communications as a specific perspective. The diversity of these contributors is exemplary. Some are building here on decades of work, others are working from recent monographs or dissertations; some synthesize familiar evidence, others address new discoveries or forge fresh links. Altogether, the contributors’ attention is divided more or less evenly among the Near East, Greece, Greece and Rome together, and the Roman Empire as a whole. Predictably enough, a few chapters do not fit this classification, while several cross boundaries within it.
IN AN ANCIENT context, what are “communications”? Can today’s communications terminology help explain the ancient variety, or were ancient communications, as Deleuze and Foucault implied, part of a world that was too simple or naïve to require any terms or ideas of this kind?5
As an academic pursuit, communications developed from the older, focused field of rhetoric. In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of communications began to involve electronics. Since then, sociology has been injected into this study, along with elements of anthropology and economics, and those disciplines in turn have taken account of communications.6 However, in spite of these developments, there is no general theory of communications, and no prospect of one. Instead, the theory of communications has become a subfield, with its own journals.7 The reconfiguring of various fields of social science and the humanities as developments in the practice of communications is a process that is just beginning, and that to date has progressed further in some disciplines than in others. The claim could be made that, within Classics and Near Eastern studies, most of the work done so far relates to Roman history.8 In Roman economic history, for example, the study of transaction costs is partly a study of the costs of transmitting information, undertaken notably by Bruce Frier and Dennis Kehoe, and now in this volume by Joseph Manning.9 Abundant earlier work on the dissemination of propaganda and ideology did not conceive of these phenomena as “communications.” The important exception to this generalization was the use of semiotics, which entered Classics and Indo-European linguistics after World War II.10 Semiotics, however, dealt only with symbolic aspects of communications; in other words, with several kinds of signs. It did not deal with communications infrastructure, or with networks as opposed to transmissions.
Describing communications in the elementary physical sense—in other words, as movement and interchange—is an obvious starting point. In the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison wrote of “communication between the western and Atlantic districts” in the United States; in other words, of the movement of people and goods as well as of information. Madison predicted that, as the nation expanded, communications would, too, and that communications would unite the nation.11 For communication in this sense, the physical environment is crucial. Madison saw it as an obstacle to be overcome. In the ancient Mediterranean, the environment was both an obstacle and a theater for communications, as Plato wrote when comparing Greek communities to frogs around a pond.12 In the Near East and India, river valleys ringed by deserts or mountain ranges played the same role, but with less isolation within watersheds and more isolation between them.
Communication in these environments bore some resemblance to its character in early eighteenth-century North America and also Europe. Sea routes were often better than routes by land.13 The thirteen colonies and Europe had nothing to match Roman roads. Waiting for the mail had already become a routine reason for annoyance or anxiety, even if use of the mail was the privilege of a relative few. Population growth produced great crowds, large armies, and grand parades, but it also created a corresponding need for new kinds of controls or stabilizing forces—for propaganda, court orders, and “multimedia” scripts for public performances.
This is one, not entirely dated, sense of “communication.” Applicable to any one region or nation, it also applies to continents or civilizations. Diplomacy is an international example of this kind of communication; commerce is another, with both international and local dimensions. Institutions like armies and navies are in turn agencies of communication.14 Communication on this scale required networks, of which three basic types may be identified: first, a hub with spokes; second, plural hubs with links from one to the next; and third, connected nodes.15 The first of these types concentrated power in senders with a knowledge of routes located at a hub. If messages took the form of information or directives, there was an issue of credibility; to resolve it, ancient communicators sometimes used exceptionally costly and impressive media. Issues of information-management also arose: ancient rulers (like their modern counterparts) needed to signal what was inconvenient or impossible for them to say, or what should be impossible for others to detect.
A salient political concern in any hub-and-spoke network was its vulnerability to an attack on the hub—that is, in the case of military communications, an attack on the commanders of an army or fleet. This vulnerability influenced both organization and tactics. The opposite possibility was that a hub might be used to block or censor communications. Several ancient societies practiced damnatio memoriae in one form or other—for example, destroying images of an individual, erasing all mention of his name, and annulling his public measures, as the Romans did,16 or more broadly, blocking communication between deposed rulers and their erstwhile subjects.
The second type of network, plural hubs with spokes, appeared in the Archaic period among the Greek city-states (poleis), but far earlier in the Near East. In this type, alternative routes provided greater flexibility, but one hub might interfere with messages meant for another. Diplomatic and commercial protocols, however, served to reduce this threat.17 In the Roman and Persian empires, where the network of plural hubs took the form of a central hub surrounded by peripheral ones, another issue arose: the degree of centralization, or of alternating recentralization and decentralization, between the imperial center and the periphery.
The third, nodal type of network resembles a grid or rhizome rather than a wheel, as with the hub and spoke. Today’s World-Wide Web is one example of such a network.18 An older example is the U.S. interstate highway system, in which each node is an interchange. Yet the oldest well-documented examples are ancient networks of archives and libraries. If archives were semi-secret, they are better described as part of a hub-and-spoke system; but if they were open to the reading public, they resembled nodes. The ancient agora or forum, with its give-and-take, was nodal, too, but used mostly oral rather than written communication.
No matter what kind of network was involved, the media, or means, by which ancient communications were conducted were as diverse as several centuries ago (although less diverse than today). Gestures, music, art and architecture, and, of course, writing and numbers systems, from personal letters to business ledgers and works of literature—all appear as early as the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and, by the start of the Common Era, in all settled regions from Britain to India, and from the Black Sea steppes to Ethiopia. Rapid, long-distance communications were lacking, although the signal-fire relays used by Greeks and Persians provided some primitive telegraphy.
Comparison between ancient communications and those of the early modern period sharpens an appreciation of the range of messages sent. Some messages are intended to impart directives or information, not necessarily always with the use of language: ancient Greek symbola or sēmeia, for example, correspond to modern tokens, flags, or signals. Other messages seek to influence their recipients. Such messages may be speech-acts (including fictions); equally, they may take the form of objects or of processes. Ancient (and modern) terms for these messages are diverse, but several examples illustrate the parallels between ancient and modern practices. Both Greek poleis and early modern nations published laws and decrees, both used military insignia, and both organized public ceremonies to legitimize magistrates as well as to inaugurate them. As James Madison understood, communication of this kind was a means of achieving political and social unity. It was affective in nature, whereas communication of the first kind was informative.
Among the informative means of ancient communication are letters and epigraphical texts; among affective means are gestures and music.19 Some means belong to both groups, and so can be regarded either as conveying a message, or as doing that and more—music accompanied by singing, for example; rituals that recount myths but also unify worshippers; works of art that glorify as well as depict. Another feature linking some means of communication is the resemblance between human practices and those of mankind’s remote, primate ancestors.20 Supplicating a Roman magistrate or a king of Judah are two instances of ritualized communication occurring on a vertical axis—ruler above, subject below—that derives from the behavior of other hominids and higher mammals.21
Informative and affective communications differ in their relation to the physical environment. The informative kind transmits messages through space; the affective kind may maintain relations over time. In the second case, the purpose is to cooperate or persuade, not to inform or coerce, and the outcome is a confirmation or change in relations, not a transmission. The two kinds may have the same content—for example, a piece of news—but in the first sense, the news is merely reported, while in the second, it is both reported and ritualized.22 The two kinds must both have senders and recipients, but only the second has an active recipient, a co-participant. Just as the first kind is economic and political, the second is religious and cultural.
Written communications appear in both circumstances. One potential effect of the use of writing is the dissemination of copies that inform and empower those in the hubs or centers of a network. Another is the assertion, and also the extension, of the privilege of literacy.23 Neither effect, however, is achieved through writing alone. Images, too, may be standardized and multiplied, and then displayed in contexts that complicate their meaning and also their social impact. Just as the spread of writing is an outstanding feature of the first two millennia covered by this volume, so the spread of standardized messages is an outstanding feature of the millennium thereafter; that is, the Hellenistic period followed by the Roman Empire.
Religious communications differ from other kinds with respect to networks and also to range. Religious communications commonly have two recipients: one, a god or spirit, and the other, fellow worshippers or priests who may observe or overhear. As a result, religious communication is oblique: what is said to one party must be redirected towards, and reinterpreted by, another. All statements are effectively double, and some are obscure. Oracles depend on this obscurity. Dedications and other acts of ostentatious piety are costly signals, like the signals conveyed by royal monuments. Signals of this sort permit the signaler to accumulate prestige; at the same time, they give material benefit to the community.
Religious communication in later periods has some of these features, but it lacks the outstanding feature found in antiquity: ubiquity. Most ancient historical records are, formally speaking, religious records: the doings of gods; the outcome of rituals, portents, and divine judgments; the countless plagues and famines caused by divine displeasure, or victories and harvests due to divine complaisance. Religion is everywhere in the ancient communications stream, as advertising is today, or propaganda was at the height of communism and fascism. In Mesopotamia, rulers wrote letters to gods. In Greece, gods inspired verses for the edification of oracular consultants. In both these societies, as well as in Egypt, gods made suburban boat trips, and worshippers for their part gratefully undertook long-distance pilgrimages. There was no avenue of communication considered inappropriate for addressing a god—not dancing or libanomancy, nor sharing food and drink. Gods were no less liberal in response, using birds in flight and nodding statues, earthquakes and sheep livers.
If religion was important from the very beginning of ancient communication, a second distinctive feature emerged mostly in the last millennium or so BCE, under the Achaemenid Persian and Roman empires, and also the empire of the Maurya in India. Such far-flung states not only ruled diverse peoples—a phenomenon going back to the unification of Egypt, and then Mesopotamia, in the fourth and third millennia—but also integrated them through deportation or immigration, the establishment of garrisons and military colonies, and the encouragement of urban growth through building projects. Although there had always been bilingual populations at the interstices of ancient societies, such as the Phoenicians and later the Greeks, now there were bilingually administered empires, like Persia, which used Persian and Aramaic, and Rome, which used Latin and Greek. In such empires, religious life, too, was more complicated than in earlier states, and commerce was more active, better organized, and farther-reaching. Communication tools like maps and coins became more sophisticated as well as more common.
These changes were not only extensive but also intensive. In the most populous and wealthy regions, like Egypt, the intermingling of populations from the Hellenistic period onward led, not just to bilingualism, but to biculturalism, too. In Rome (its population as high as one million) and leading cities elsewhere—including those of the rival Parthian and Sasanian empires, like Ctesiphon with a reported population of 400,000—the multiplication of inscriptions and images combined with the larger and more diverse population to cause a growth in communications comparable to what the modern world has experienced. The quantitative change was so great that the quality of communications must have changed also: it became cross-cultural.24
Two means of communication illustrate this change—currency and religious proselytism. For the first time in antiquity (indeed, in history), fiduciary coinage appeared, the result of innovations in Roman financial policy during the third and fourth centuries CE. Moreover, for the first time, Greeks and Romans came into extensive, permanent contact with the interior of the Levant, the Iranian plateau, and India, and with religions notably more different from their own than those they had encountered in Celtic Europe or the Punic Mediterranean. The spread of Christianity to Roman cities was one eventual result. At the end of antiquity, the Mediterranean basin had more money than it would again until the early modern period, and more places with Christian majorities than it ever would again.
EACH OF THE seventeen chapters here touches on one or more of these issues, but each chapter also primarily addresses either a communications network, a means of communication, or a dimension of religious or cross-cultural communication. These broad themes comprise the four parts of the volume. The order of the parts is consciously progressive: “Networks” make communication possible; “Means” render it variable; “Divinities” make it ambiguous; and cross-cultural “Engagements” make it complex.
Grant Parker’s chapter introducing Part I, “Networks,” underscores the importance of the physical environment, both water and land, while also issuing a timely reminder that the Mediterranean Sea has been a topic unjustifiably neglected by modern scholarship. To be sure, as early as the eighth century BCE, Homer features Odysseus’ epic travels across a Mediterranean of the imagination, etching him permanently into the memory of all educated Greeks and Romans (and readers ever since, too) as a quintessential traveler. Nonetheless, scholarship has been slow to appreciate the remarkable contrasts in the region’s landscape, climate, and ecology, not to mention the varied means by which connectedness was achieved across such a vast expanse and beyond. The slowness may be explained in part by the relative reticence of the surviving geographical writers: they focus their attention on places for the most part, with less regard for the opportunities and difficulties of moving between them. Parker redresses the imbalance by singling out Delos, Delphi, Ostia, and Palmyra as instructive examples of how places may be connected; the last of the four—a desert oasis—most strikingly by the creative integration of land, river, and sea routes.
In addressing libraries, the author of the next chapter, Matthew Nicholls, broadens traditional scholarship to gauge the roles of these institutions in promoting the exchange and transmission of ideas and values, and the mobility of people, objects, and texts. The privileged ability of libraries to select and canonize texts has long been appreciated, but recognition of their widespread communicative value in Greek and Roman society is a revealing recent advance. Among Hellenistic rulers, efforts to develop libraries as centers of culture and learning became a significant form of interchange and rivalry. At the same time, such libraries furnished a valued means of communication between the ruler and his subjects, most notably in the case of the Ptolemies. Also in the Hellenistic period, Roman aristocrats developed a similar passion for libraries. However, it was Augustus’ new regime at Rome that elevated the importance and visibility of libraries to an unprecedented degree. Their sheer physical scale here, the scope of their collections, the sense of permanence that they projected, and above all their open embrace of a broad, public readership, were extraordinary. Moreover, the communicative and commemorative roles of the great libraries in Rome itself were expanded into a network by the establishment of similar prestigious institutions at the heart of leading cities elsewhere across the empire.
It is Taco Terpstra’s claim, made in the third chapter of Part I, that scholarship on Roman long-distance trade has been preoccupied by questions of its scale and importance for the overall economy. In consequence the role and importance of communication for this Roman trade have remained overlooked. Terpstra’s chapter therefore seeks to recover the nature of this communication—both written and oral—and of the communications network in circumstances where the pace at best was pitifully slow by modern standards, and, to make matters worse, was often prey to storms, say, or bandits. Given the nearly complete loss of commercial correspondence from classical antiquity, but not from the medieval period, Terpstra draws on material from the latter for evidence. He also assigns a higher value and importance to oral rumor than scholarship has typically favored. For anyone engaged in business, he urges, it was vital to maintain a solid reputation, and the development of centers where traders would operate in close proximity—the “Piazzale delle Corporazioni” at Ostia serves as an outstanding example—undoubtedly increased the chances of information being passed on verbally.
In the last chapter of Part I, Fred Naiden reminds us that ancient warfare was, among much else, an act of communication. He explores the ways in which communication determined the outcome of battles in classical Greece—encounters where an army’s victory would depend upon its continued cohesion and its soldiers’ ability to remain in effective communication with one another. Neither Thucydides nor Xenophon (our principal sources for the battles in question) draws specific attention to these two vital needs, let alone their synergy, but Naiden demonstrates how readily identifiable they are. A distinction is to be drawn between networks of “horizontal” communication among an army’s mass of soldiers on the one hand, and officers’ top-down “vertical” communication on the other, the latter form conveyed by symbolic gestures as well as by verbal instructions (sometimes including calculated resort to falsehood). Well-drilled Spartan armies—and, to a lesser extent, Boeotian ones—stood out not least for as many as six officer-ranks, for their communication through music, and for their ability to execute orders conveyed in the heat of battle, including the maneuvers for an orderly withdrawal. To be sure, Spartan steadiness also stemmed from the ingrained mentality of a citizen body where individual private identity was to be subordinated to the needs of the community. Athenian performance was more typical: here, army discipline was inferior by contrast, although in Xenophon’s estimation the navy’s discipline did match that of the Spartan army.
The chapters in Part I all place institutions and organizations—libraries, trading associations, and armies—in a natural setting. The chapters in Part II, “Modes,” consider manmade environments dominated by the arts and by social and literary conventions. James Osborne’s opening chapter on Hittite and Neo-Assyrian monuments engages with some of our oldest evidence for communications, as well as some of the most spectacular. For his discussion, Osborne exploits two interpretive concepts, one that he terms “relationality,” and the other, known as “costly signaling theory,” imported from recent work in evolutionary anthropology. Relationality calls for reckoning with changes over time in how a monument communicates messages and how it is perceived; costly signaling theory serves to explain why some monuments communicate more effectively if they are large and expensive. Both concepts assist in analyzing the ideological content of the monumental royal sculptures that form Osborne’s focus. Familiar as these objects may be for Near Eastern specialists, Osborne shows how the perspective of communications can reveal interpretive complications. One is religious: many monuments are placed on inaccessible sites where the apparent viewer is a god. In this respect, these monuments resemble Mesopotamian royal letters to the gods, but in the form of colossal stone parcels, not the epistolary tablets that are the subject of a chapter by Seth Richardson in Part III.
In the next chapter, Jennifer Trimble argues that the size, diversity, and connectivity of the Roman Empire in the first centuries CE fostered developments in image communication. This was a world where levels of visual literacy, especially among city populations, should be considered quite well developed. At the same time, a full grasp of a monument’s iconography was not essential for effective communication at a range of levels. For our understanding, a “transmission” model of communication (with the message intended by the sender in individual instances forming the primary concern) is liable to prove less satisfying than a broader, “ritual” one. Here collective, repeated expressions become the focus, with special attention devoted to particular social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. A remarkable, seemingly modern phenomenon of the period is the proliferation and stability of image use, enabling complex, varied interplays of empire and place to be articulated in all segments of society, with or without the involvement of the authorities. Trimble illustrates this interaction with reference to three contrasting uses of the same visual motif, a man wearing the Greek himation (mantle) in the “armsling” scheme.
Like art, music is an avenue of communication with both aesthetic and political dimensions that differentiate it from gestures. For Timothy Power, writing on archaic and classical Greek music in the third chapter of Part II, the political dimensions of musical expression are paramount. There is little Greek evidence for instrumental music apart from poetry meant to be sung, and also little evidence for musical scores as opposed to the words—the “libretti,” as Power terms them—that were meant to accompany the instruments. Music, accordingly, presents us with a synaesthetic form of communication: verse, instruments, often dance and, in Athenian drama, prose dialogue. The modal complexity of this kind of communication was unrivaled; so, too, Power implies, was its political impact. Solon and other politicians used music, while Pindar and other poets introduced political motifs into performances of their works. In Power’s view, the generally accepted notion that early Greece was a “song culture”—differing in this respect from ancient Mesopotamia with its scribal culture, or from imperial Rome with its predilection for monuments and public spaces—should not lure us into laying undue stress on private life and personal communication. On the contrary, this culture was not only saturated with political values, but also periodically reoriented through innovative uses of song to introduce new political ideas.
The following chapter, Gregory Aldrete’s study of gestures, addresses the oldest of all means of communication, shared by mankind with primates. Yet it is also one of the most complex, since it often occurs in conjunction with other means: first, speech, and second, culturally created means such as images and music. To convey the subtleties and flexibility of gestures in short compass, Aldrete focuses on Roman practice, mainly during the late Republic and Principate. However, he also takes into account Roman encounters with Greeks, as well as variations of gesture at different levels of Roman society, from the imperial court to the arena. This environment of stereotyped gestures depends upon protocols for time, place, and purpose of use; yet Aldrete demonstrates repeatedly how Romans distorted, or even violated, these protocols to diverse effect. Some of these acts of manipulation involve religious gestures of the type treated at greater length in Part III; other such acts relate to the intercultural communication treated in Part IV, by Sheila Ager especially. Nonetheless, encounters between individuals remain Aldrete’s main focus, rather than networks of communication on a larger scale.
WHILE THE FIRST two parts of this book display topographical and chronological variety, Part III, “Divinities,” limits itself to three of many eligible ancient religions, and to two closely related practices. It opens with a chapter by Seth Richardson, in which he addresses worshippers’ messages to Mesopotamian gods and explores the duality of this kind of communication. Certain “genres” of communication, as he terms them, are for the worshipper to initiate; some, but not all, require expert assistance. Other such genres, in contrast, are for a god to initiate; here, too, the worshipper may require outside assistance. Moreover, there is always the possibility that some messages meant for a god will fail to arrive: hence, Richardson stresses occasional “general failure” of communications. At the same time, some messages sent from the gods prove inscrutable, creating another reason for failure. Because of this risk, the Mesopotamians developed protocols to account for failures. They also developed an elaborate communications infrastructure—places, genres, and formulae. Richardson’s focus encompasses, not just individual worshippers, but shrines and their staffs, too. Notably, he identifies a characteristic Mesopotamian style for religious communications: it is at once elaborate and pessimistic.
Ian Rutherford’s chapter, which follows, illustrates how the perspective of communications may reveal unnoticed features in familiar phenomena. Extending the scope of his 2013 monograph on theōria—pilgrimage by delegates sent to religious festivals by Greek poleis—here he considers pilgrimage in other ancient societies, and takes the opportunity to differentiate between features that were distinctively Greek and those that are commonly found. His insight into pilgrimage networks highlights how important the polis and the federation were as Greek forms of religious organization, and how they contributed to the special character of Greek pilgrimage. Moreover, Rutherford’s discussion of how pilgrimage reinforced cultural norms and contributed to social cohesion leads him to an instructive comparison between Greece and ancient Israel. The latter society might appear to be the polar opposite of Greece, since sacrifice and accompanying religious activities were long confined to a single shrine, the Jerusalem Temple. In fact, however, pilgrimage to the Temple largely resembled Greek pilgrimage to shrines like Delphi or Delos; indeed, Rutherford speculates, it may have been modeled partly on Greek pilgrimage. This resemblance vindicates several decades of scholarly work—by both Rutherford and others—visualizing Eastern Mediterranean religions as a spectrum in which neighboring religions have much in common.
Among types of religious communication, oracles are paradigmatic, as Julia Kindt explains in the third chapter of Part III. Man proposes, but God disposes, so the act of communication cannot be said to accomplish any of the typical aims that otherwise may be taken for granted—such as transmitting information, influencing recipients or observers, or fostering relationships. The same limitation applies to portents and epiphanies, too. However, only oracles institutionalize this sort of communication, reduce it to writing, and make it available to all manner of inquirers, from states seeking political advice to individuals asking about marriage, business prospects, and other personal matters. A distinctive feature of oracles in Greece was their verbal ambiguity. Although any portent—and many other messages—might be misinterpreted, some Greek oracular shrines encouraged misinterpretation by adopting an enigmatic style of expression that mixed ambiguity with vagueness, opacity, and a countervailing impression of divine infallibility. Kindt focuses on this “enigmatic voice” at Delphi, the most famous ancient oracle. She seeks to explain why this voice characterizes some oracles but not others; how it complicates the interpretation of oracular messages; and how oracles confirm, but adjust, the Greeks’ notion of a barely bridgeable gap between human and divine participants in their polytheistic religion. Kindt’s chapter complements Rutherford’s explanation of how Greek worshippers communicated with each other while addressing the gods in such unambiguous practices as festival-going.
Like Rutherford’s chapter, Michael Kulikowski’s, on Christianity, illustrates how the perspective of communications may bring to our attention the importance of underappreciated features in familiar topics of study. It is indeed already widely appreciated that (as Kulikowski observes) Christianity would have been unable to develop in the unprecedented way it did, had not the Roman Empire already opened up a vast domain to networks of communication. Almost from the moment of its origin, Christianity conceived itself as a network of congregations professing the same faith and maintaining communication (or communion) with one another. Kulikowski goes much further, however, when he brings to our attention two unforeseen consequences of Christianity’s success in eventually securing the adherence of emperors from Constantine onwards. First, Constantine’s decision to declare the rulings of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE universally binding on all Christians, and his successors’ concern to enforce orthodoxy, inevitably strained Christian interaction. Even so, Christianity’s regional groupings and the communication network within each of them gained strength as a result, enabling them to endure independently—in the West especially—after the imperial governmental structure on which they were based fell apart. Second, despite their intervention in church affairs, emperors could not serve as arbiters of matters of belief (all-important to Christians), so that laymen in search of guidance turned to alternative, and often competing, sources of authority. In time, the habit served to influence their political thinking, too: again, it was the West that became most susceptible to division and less dependent upon the traditional imperial structure.
This synoptic view of a major religion concludes Part III. In Part IV, the chapters turn from topics that mostly involve one culture, religion, or period to larger topics such as great-power diplomacy and cultural exchange, imperial finance, and worldview. This part opens with a chapter by Matthew Canepa that immerses us in a world where the Persian Empire had long been the physical and cultural center, and Northern India and the Mediterranean were no more than outliers to the east and west. Canepa’s concern is the cross-cultural interaction that developed during the Hellenistic period in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire as the land and sea routes between the Mediterranean and India opened up. Despite their constant warfare, the kings who dominated this region established diplomatic ties influenced by Persian, Greek, and Indian thinking, one reliant upon a rich range of linguistic, visual, spatial, and ritual idioms: among much else, lavish spectacles were mounted, gifts exchanged, and learning displayed. Moreover, Canepa urges, Mauryan pillars and inscribed edicts issued by Emperor Aśoka should be viewed as responses both to local South Asian traditions of religion and empire, and also to those of the Achaemenids and Seleucids. The coinage issued by the Hellenistic kings, too, introduced a new technology for communicating power and propaganda into western and south Asia. The cross-cultural interaction of this period not only transformed contemporary worldviews and traditions, but also formed the basis for future exchanges among the Romans, Arsacids, Kuṣāṇas, and Sasanians.
The next chapter, in which Joseph Manning focuses on Egypt, offers a paradigmatic case of cross-cultural communication. This is partly because Egypt was the longest-lived ancient society, and one of the most highly developed, yet partly also because of the superficial impressions—articulated by authors from Plato onwards—that it was hieratic and unchanging. Manning stresses that, from its very beginning, Egyptian society was multicultural. Even so, Egyptian communications had a single focus, the pharaoh, who set high standards for monumental communications of the type examined by James Osborne in Part II. Because it was pictographic, Egyptian hieroglyphic script combined the literary and the visual in a way that rendered communication both a priestly privilege and a royal one. It was an important public phenomenon, too, analyzed by Manning in terms of transaction costs. Commonly applied to the study of the ancient economy (the nature and extent of transaction costs would affect economic growth), this concept also explains why and how the pharaohs used monuments and decrees to unify a diverse society. The use of hieroglyphics did not prevent the use of other scripts as well, and in Late Antiquity, Egypt became partly bilingual. Bilingualism had always existed at the interstices of the ancient world, in major marketplaces and at royal courts, but it now became widespread—a situation with a single parallel, the Roman Empire, of which Egypt was an important part.
Sheila Ager’s chapter, the third in Part IV, returns to the subject of diplomacy, but with the Mediterranean world as the center of attention. Her discussion invites comparison with Canepa’s chapter as well as with several others. Her rejection of the widespread impression that diplomatic communication was severely hampered by the slowness of travel recalls Grant Parker’s emphasis on how creatively connectedness was in fact maintained. Equally, her warning that diplomacy by no means necessarily took improved relations as its goal, but might be driven as much by aggression or deceit, reminds us that inter-state relations were liable to suffer from “information asymmetry,” like the long-distance commerce treated by Taco Terpstra. This was a world of manifold networks, where knowledge was power, and where the safeguards provided by formal, permanent international institutions of the modern type were lacking. In the same spirit, the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilīya (summarized by Canepa) approached diplomacy as an extension of war. Although envoys were not professionals, the means of conducting diplomacy were varied and sophisticated, with tones ranging from wheedling flattery to blunt coercion. Symbolic messages of various kinds (including inscriptions, monuments, and coins) had an important role to play. In certain circumstances, kinship diplomacy might prove decisive, as might “deprecation” offered by third parties to avert a catastrophe. Our understanding, gained as it is through incomplete or unsatisfactory sources of information, relies heavily on what was said or done publicly; it is impossible to gauge the importance of what was said behind closed doors.
The fourth chapter, by Kenneth Harl, deals with Roman coinage as a distinctive type of communication that developed in the centuries preceding the empire’s fall in the West and the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Moslem caliphs in the East. During this period, the Romans minted standardized images in the hundreds of thousands, even millions. In Part II, Jennifer Trimble showed how multiplication of images affected visual and verbal discourse in various public settings, and now Harl, echoing this theme, describes how such a massive output of coinage affected marketplaces, and through them the economy of the empire. Linked to coinage in this period was unprecedented government regulation of the economy, a further extension of the capacity of both rulers and—in their reception of coinage—the ruled, to communicate with one another. Harl concentrates on by far the most important innovation, the establishment of a fiduciary coinage in the third and fourth centuries. While this step has typically been taken to signify economic decline or incapacity, Harl argues that fiduciary coinage represents a new level of communication, in which what is conveyed so widely—the value contained in a circulating medium—is an abstraction.
The conveying of abstractions is also a theme in the final chapter of Part IV, Richard Talbert’s consideration of the conceptual foundations of Roman map-making. The ancient notion of a “map” was so different from today’s that this term itself should be used with caution, a surprising as well as disappointing conclusion, because classical antiquity witnessed scientific progress in the related fields of astronomy and geography. Instead of describing the earth as accurately as was possible at the time, the maps of the Roman era depict, and glorify, Roman rule of what was, for the Romans, the larger part of the inhabited world. In this respect, maps served the same purpose as panegyric of the imperial period. Even so, there was much more to Roman maps than this propaganda purpose. On one hand, some maps, like the colossal Marble Plan of the city displayed in Rome itself, were costly signals, conveying their meaning by the effort made to express it, a theme in the chapters of Osborne and Manning. On the other hand, much of the Marble Plan was invisible to any spectator, implying that it was also intended for divine spectators, and thus had a kind of double identity evoking religious communication, as analyzed by Kindt and Richardson.
AS CO-EDITORS, WE extend our deepest thanks to all fifteen colleagues who bravely accepted our invitation to contribute to this groundbreaking volume, helped us shape it, and then patiently awaited its publication. We are no less grateful to our editor at Oxford University Press, Stefan Vranka, who has unfailingly supported our prolonged efforts to develop and deliver a work very different in nature and scope from what he commissioned in 2006. Other colleagues whose advice and encouragement at critical stages have been especially appreciated include Lin Foxhall, Bruce Frier, Willem Jongman, Ted Lendon, Bernard Levinson, Elizabeth Meyer, Michael Peachin, and Kurt Raaflaub. We thank Raymond Belanger, Alexandra Locking, and Gabriel Moss at the Ancient World Mapping Center (awmc.unc.edu) for their excellent cartographic work.
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill
March 2016
1. Hadot (1998); (2002); Neumann and Kolb (2002).
2. Cf. the treatment of literature in Hedrick (2011).
4. For essays on medieval communications, a subject of comparable scope, see Mostert (1999); Canepa (2010a). On Late Antiquity: Ellis and Kidner (2002).
5. Deleuze (1990); Foucault (1998). A contrary view: Chase-Dunn and Hall (1999).
6. Early evolution of the field: Innis (1951); Inose (1979). For anthropology and sociology, see Vansina (1985), who addresses communications explicitly; Geertz (1973), who addresses them implicitly.
7. Note Shepherd et al. (2006). A possibly unique philosophical treatment: Habermas (1970a, b).
8. Achard (2006); Corbier (2006); Nicolet (1991).
9. Frier and Kehoe (2007). Signaling theory underlies their work, as in Connelly et al. (2011), following Spence (1973).
10. A general treatment of this much-discussed subject: Manetti (1993).
11. Federalist Papers, no. 14.
12. Pl. Phaedo 109b.
13. Note, in this connection, Andreau and Virlouvet (2002).
14. Note Brosius (2003).
15. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 illustrate the first and second types.
17. For modern protocols, see Galloway (2004).
19. For epigraphy in its social context, see Meyer (2011). A general study of gestures: Bolens (2009). Gestures in other nonverbal forms: Catoni (2008).
20. Maynard-Smith and Harper (2003).
22. Ancient Greek news and information-gathering: Lewis (1996); Russell (1999). Roman circulation of information: Capdetrey and Nelis-Clément (2006).
23. Ancient writing as communication: Arslan (1998); Bresson et al. (2005).
24. A survey: Canepa (2010a).