Why standardise? The advantages of standardisation are to us so patent, that the question hardly seems worth asking. But it needs to be asked since understanding the archaeology of Rome and the Mediterranean down to 200 BC is impossible unless we understand why one might not standardise, or might even resist standardisation. Standardisation enables people to have some confidence that the (class of) action or object in question reproduces in all essentials some other action or object. If the other action or object did something, this object that meets its standards will do the same. Standardisation is, therefore, good if one needs to be confident that the situation in which one finds oneself today reproduces the situation which has been or could be experienced at another time or in another place or by another (standardised) person. Standardised weights and standardised measures of value guarantee that the price per unit weight of a standardised commodity in a particular place and at a particular time will be the same. Standardised language guarantees that the identical sounds made, or words written, in the same place and at the same time by one person mean the same as those sounds made or words written by another person.
As my qualification ‘in the same place and at the same time’ indicates, perfect standardisation is impossible. Standardised language does not prevent the same words being taken to mean different things by different people at the same time or by the same people at different times. Standardised forms may carry different affordances because they were made at different times and places. Standardised actions regularly move from indicating that someone is au fait with the latest practices to indicating that someone is out of date. The ideal of standardisation in every respect is practically unattainable. Nevertheless, however imperfect standardisation may be, standardisation of forms and standardisation of practices facilitate exchanges of all sorts, material and immaterial, that would not be possible, or not be as easy were forms and practices not standardised.
Since it is hard to think that since the creation of Eve there has ever been a human being who did not desire to effect exchange of one sort or another (words, goods) with another human being, measures that facilitate exchange might be assumed to be an unalloyed good – until we recall the apple in the Garden of Eden and that it is equally unlikely that there has ever been a human being who did not desire to prevent exchange of one sort or another with another human being. The need for secrecy follows close on the heels of the possibility of communication, the desire for differential sharing close on the heels of the first exchange of goods. The social and economic advantages of standardisation always stand in the face of the social and political advantages of non-standardisation.
The discussions of pottery in the eastern Roman empire by Poblome, Özden and Loopmans and by Murphy give us rich insights into the means by which and the extent to which standardisation was achieved and what a cultural koine might look like; but as Jiménez highlights the formation of a cultural koine was not the necessary result of cultural contact, and properly to understand the role that material standards play we need to understand not simply what happens within a cultural koine but the circumstance in which a cultural koine is created. In what follows I look further at the case of Rome, which for a very long period evidently rated the advantages of standardisation with the wider central Mediterranean world not worth having.
We owe a lot to the refusal of the Romans to standardise. Like the fact that we do not write in the Greek alphabet. The tradition recorded by Tacitus (Annals 11.24) has the Etruscans taught the art of writing by Demaratus of Corinth, who settled at Tarquinia (and was the father of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth of the seven kings of Rome). Tacitus’ story has got garbled in some respects, and the Latins may have acquired their alphabet directly from the Greeks, but the important feature is that neither Etruscans nor Latins took over exactly the Greek alphabet they encountered. They took the principle, and they took most of the letters, but early Etruscan alphabets are unstable in their precise letter-forms and they and the Latin alphabet, though in general closest to Euboian scripts, crucially take over the crescent gamma (i.e. letter ‘c’) from Corinthian (Cornell 1995, 103–5, 124; Cristofani 1979, 381). The Latin alphabet further adopts various Greek letters not used by the Etruscans, but uses some of them, notably ‘x’, to represent different phonetic values from those carried by the Greek equivalents. The universal is particularised. The idea of standard representation of phonetic values is adopted, but the particular standard offered is rejected.
The alphabet is worth dwelling on briefly because the whole significance of an alphabet is that it enables communication. Here, one might think, is an area where standardisation has clear advantages. What more confusing than to take signs from an alphabet used by others but assign new phonetic value to them? But of course that is what the Greeks themselves had done in adopting the letters used by the Phoenicians, and that again is what the speakers of Latin do. The implication must be that the communication enabled by the alphabet was to be local, and only local, even that barriers to communication beyond the locality were desired. This is perhaps less surprising given that being able to read the writing is of little use to those who do not know the language that is written: while languages remain distinct, the pressures to standardise the alphabet used are reduced. Rome and Latium were far from being alone in not adopting a standardised alphabet. Even within the Greek world, where local distinctions in language were slight enough not to impede mutual intelligibility, it was not until late in the Classical period that alphabets became standardised.
The absence of any desire simply to take over their alphabet from the Greeks from whom they acquired the idea of writing goes closely with a Roman lack of interest in copying Greek material culture. Not only has a wide range of Greek pottery dating to the second half of the eighth century been excavated from the Sant’Omobono sanctuary in Rome – Euboean, Cycladic, Corinthian – but Greek potters seem to have set up in Rome or perhaps nearby in Veii before 700 BC (Holloway 1994, 166–7). Other sites in Latium are equally well connected to the Greek world – above all Gabii (modern Osteria dell’Osa) and Castel di Decima. There is no reason to think that Greek material culture and Greek ideas were any less familiar in archaic Rome than they were among the Etruscans, whose own products display a detailed familiarity with Greek mythology from the seventh century on, and perhaps even a particular familiarity with the Odyssey (Snodgrass 1996, 96; True and Hamma 1994, 182–7). Nevertheless, while the material culture of archaic Rome and Latium shows many signs of awareness of Greek as well as of Etruscan traditions, in a pattern that will later be repeated across the Roman empire, it constantly modifies and adapts those traditions, rather than simply imitating them. This is visible, for instance, in the series of miniature kouroi from the votive deposit beneath the Lapis Niger and at Gabii (Cristofani 1990, 3.1.23–29, 7.3.1–20). Within the Greek world miniature kouroi are found only on the south-eastern fringes – in Knidos, Rhodes, Cyprus and Naukratis; the much smaller Roman tradition (ht. 6–8 cm rather than 15 cm) is quite independent (cf. Bartman 1992, 34). It is visible too in the use of the satyr in architectural terracottas – a familiar figure put to novel use (Cristofani 1990, 3.4.1, 3.6.1, 4.1.4, 8.4.3, 8.5.2, 9.3.4, 9.6.71, 10.1.4) – or in the replaying of the bull-headed man iconography of the minotaur outside the context of the story of Theseus (Cristofani 1990, 3.2.13). This is in contrast to Etruscan attempts to imitate, as well as import, very large quantities of Corinthian pottery and Athenian black- and red-figure pottery. Particular qualities that are universalised here, as the general appearance but not the detailed iconography of the Greek pottery is imitated, identify the standards that it was felt important to match.
The much discussed ‘Hellenisation’ of Rome from around 200 BC (Wallace-Hadrill 2008), aspects of which are explored by Jiménez, is not a story of Rome’s discovery of the Greek world, for the Romans had discovered the Greek world at least half a millennium earlier, it is the story of how Rome and Italy came to embrace, rather than to resist, standardisation with the central and eastern Mediterranean. From this point on, being seen to emulate Greek culture was a potential source of admiration, as is most obvious in Latin literature with its ever-expanding embrace of the various genres of Greek literature. But it is apparent also in artistic styles and even in pottery, where, as Jiménez points out, the terra sigillata tradition has firm Greek foundations and sells a variation on a Greek product, the so-called ‘Megarian bowls’.
The question of what had happened to make standardisation a desirable goal for the Romans is a crucial one for this volume and its aim to get beyond instrumentalism and representation, and Jiménez rightly stresses the role of archaeological categorisation of material in this. It is easy to tell the story of standardisation as a story about politics and identity, where standardisation essentially follows empire, and the central Italian city-state which had long striven to maintain a distinct identity realises that not only is such a distinct identity no longer needed, it stands in the way of making the empire work. This simply assumes that archaeological classifications map onto Roman categorisations, but it is the process by which things are put in the same category that is part of the story of standardisation in the first place. Given political unification, standardisation of categories was the crucial first step to increasing the profits of empire by lowering transaction costs and by creating a sense of underlying cultural unity – all the stronger for this being the culture of the conquered, not of the conqueror – that would discourage bids to renew independence. But for Greeks newly caught up in empire, standardisation was equally attractive; not only did the adoption of their cultural products as standard offer prospects of economic gain, it also offered a route to power. If we tell the story like this, then material culture becomes instrumental in achieving political and economic ends and standardisation comes to represent a particular socio-political identity at both the individual and collective level.
Can we, and should we, tell the story in a way that gets beyond representation and instrumentalism? The chapters by Poblome, Özden and Loopmans and by Murphy in this section have explored how standardisation works within the world of the early principate, a world that has long been expected to have been standardised. They both show the extent and the limits of ‘local’ standardisation, that is of standardisation within the products of the potteries in a single place, and the way in which broad standardisation can be driven by a set of stylistic preferences that are widely shared and may exist independent of any material object substantially realising them. In this long-standardised world, where standardised objects are the norm, the material environment, from the town plan and architecture through to the pots and coins, entangles individuals in such a way that any variations around the standard potentially reveal more about the user of the object than the user might wish.
It is here that the impossibility of total standardisation becomes crucial. As Jiménez points out, ‘The type is created through the selection of certain characteristics that are crucial in contrast with others that are accessory’, that is types are conventional. But the conventions are never fixed and always subject to negotiation and change – the attractions of Wallace-Hadrill’s image of standardisation as an organic process must not be allowed to obscure this. Given the differences between human individuals and groups, both inherited and constantly being generated, any ‘standardised’ action or item may be turned into an outlier, because in particular circumstances or by particular groups or individuals additional traits are considered crucial. We might speculate that, for instance, those possessing a skilled eye could detect the pot described by Murphy which had had inclusions removed and patches inserted, and might form a (low) view of those who purchased such ‘seconds’. Objects and expressions which pushed at the boundaries of a cultural koine had the potential to present, or represent, an individual or indeed a whole community as failing to conform, in a way that might signal, for example, ‘rusticity’ or ‘hyper-urbanity’ – either of which might, in different circumstances, be admired or derided. In part, the material environment does things to the individual and the group because it represents them to others in a particular way, but equally it does things to them because it has shaped their own habitus – and indeed their doxa, the system of classification producing so perfect a ‘correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization’ that ‘the natural and social world appear as self-evident’ (Bourdieu 1977, 164).
In the world of the third and second centuries BC, where standardisation is only newly being adopted, what a thing does, its material agency, is particularly hard to plot. There is, in a sense, so much variety in what different people want to do with things that assessing the part played by the material affordances of one type of house or style of portrait statue or shape of pot in limiting or enabling a particular behaviour becomes very hard to assess. As Van Oyen and Pitts point out in their introduction to this volume, ‘competition is only enabled in relation to a material environment already characterised by a certain degree of standardisation’; for things to be in a competitive relationship demands that those who use them are using them to do more or less the same thing. When there is a high degree of variety in what people are using things for, it ceases to be clear that the same physical objects are serving the same ends. The degree of variety in what people are using things for makes a difference because few affordances are in the end entirely determined by physical features and their practical consequences – a lot of different pots can be drunk from, used to store liquids, etc. What matters is as often what a particular pot shape (or whatever) is perceived to do (i.e. what it represents), as it is what can actually be done with it.
An example will clarify the point. The standardised glossy surface of terra sigillata was arguably more important because it was perceived by some to make this pottery ‘like silver’, not least because this was a standardised quality of this pottery, than because sigillata was significantly more like silver, in terms of what it could and could not do, than other pottery. Its competitive advantage relied on the perception that it was ‘like silver’ being widely shared; for those who did not see it that way, or who did not value silverware in the first place (i.e. those who had not bought into a certain set of standardised values) the glossy surface offered no special advantage. ‘Material culture is not … so easily separable from mentality, habit and moral culture’ (Woolf 1998, 242): what things do and what they represent turn out not to be separate or separable. Modern advertising relies exactly on this – the creation of standardised values and the representation of particular standardised commodities as peculiarly good at satisfying those values. Just as modern consumers as often want to acquire the image as the thing, so when the Romans decided to acquire, rather than resist, the high cultural products of the Greek world they did so in order to ditch one image, one set of values, and acquire another. Standardisation itself is as much about standardisation of values as about standardisation of things.
But who were these Romans who decided to ditch one image and acquire another? As soon as we ask whether this process is top-down or bottom up (cf. Millett 1990; Woolf 1998; Spawforth 2012; Osborne 2012), we are forced to look again and more closely at the affordances of what was acquired. When Plautus and Terence turned Greek New Comedy Roman they certainly did it for an audience who knew their Greek myth, but hardly for an elite audience (Feeney 2016, 180, 184). Comedy afforded fun, and the comedy of Plautus and Terence afforded fun in relation to the wider world that was opening up. To laugh at these comedies was to feel that one could take on the Greek world into which Roman military activity had expanded. The desire to speak the (cultural) language of the wealthy Greek East, to be entangled in the wider Hellenistic world, will have been widespread across Roman and Italian society – and it is unlikely that Greeks will themselves have been reluctant to push their cultural products, material and immaterial, so as to extend their entangling web. Standardisation builds networks and building networks does not merely increase information flow, it frequently also increases the flow of money (Morley 2015). One of the things that things did was to bring in profits, and profits not just at one point of cultural transfer, but repeatedly, at all the nodes of the network.
As Poblome, Özden and Loopmans’s discussion of LRD demonstrates, individual objects create demand for other objects of the same category, just as terra sigillata travels in sets. Indeed, what standardisation does is to make it easier to acquire other objects in the same category. It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of Roman engagement with Greek culture is essentially one of heavy resistance, with no single item of Greek origin acquiring a central place at Rome, followed by complete capitulation. As soon as people engage with things at all, indeed in order to engage with them, they classify them, making them representatives of something wider. In doing so they may well enable them to do things that their makers never envisaged – just as LRD describes a tableware that users knew and loved but that no one set out to make.
To focus a discussion on the mature Roman empire is to focus a discussion on a world where politically very little was at stake – something that Gibbon stresses when he picks out the Antonine age as a uniquely golden one: ‘The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws’ (Gibbon 1909, 86). Arguably the standardisation explored in this section had a significant part to play in maintaining that stability – indeed the globalisation of material goods and of institutions and patterns of action was one of the things that served to make the globalisation of political power unsurprising. In such a context, what things do may seem to be shaped primarily by economics. We should be wary, however, of imagining that this golden age provides a model for standardisation in antiquity more generally.
If we reflect rather on the last two centuries BC, when politically a great deal was at stake, both locally and across the whole Mediterranean, and build on Jiménez’ observations, what was at issue over standardisation appears much more clearly. The opportunities offered by standardisation were and are also threats. If we do not keep an eye on instrumentalism and representation we risk being swallowed up by empire, repeating the same story. Instrumentalism and representation are not rival approaches that need to be replaced by emphasis on standardisation, for it is only against a more or less standardised background that the dynamics of instrumentalism and representation can be assessed. When they long-resisted standardisation, the people of Rome and Italy knew what they were doing. Their political independence depended on their not-conforming to the standards of Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Only once they were politically dominant could the common culture of the Hellenistic world become the instrument of their own domination and serve to represent Roman imperial power. As long as instrumentalism is a feature of human behaviour, it is folly to move too far beyond it; rather, we must go behind, for only if we understand the economic, social and political possibilities offered by standardisation will we be able to appreciate the importance of the instrumental representation of those material standards.
* Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.