226 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
infl uenced the choices made by those in the provinces who did set local regimes of
value. One view is that cultural convergence at fi rst served the immediate interests of
local elite members trying to impress each other and their imperial masters, before
the movement acquired its own momentum and spread more widely through
society (Woolf 1998). It has also been argued that a shared intellectual culture
played a key part in ensuring provincial loyalty, in the absence of effective means of
coercion (Ando 2008). Imperial dictats on what we would consider cultural
matters (largely sumptuary legislation and matters of ritual observance) were very
few, and perhaps rarely enforced, but in a patrimonial empire it is not surprising that
many imitated cultural projects conceived at the centre (Zanker 1988). What the
empire did was to create an unprecedentedly extensive market, functioning with
a reliable single currency in conditions of exceptional peace and minimal brigandage.
That was good not only for business but also for the business of forging and
spreading culture.
Explaining localized styles is more complex. Some local peculiarities (for example
of burial rite, of onomastics, human and divine, or of sanctuary architectures)
certainly did characterize places less closely connected to the mainstream than
others. But it is also clear that many local traits were developed in a sort of dialogue
with imperial or hegemonic styles, rather as dynamics of globalization today are
often seen as running in tandem with dynamics of localization (sometimes termed
glocalization). Highly localized ritual practices are the most obvious case in point,
like the cults of Ilium and Aphrodisias, which developed particular local identities
based on their supposed ancient religious connections with Rome. In some cases
local identities, and the histories and local celebrations of collective memory through
which they were manifested, seem to depend more on the Roman present than on
actual knowledge of the pre-Roman past (Millar 1993, Woolf 1996).
Cultural projects often referred to both local and global frames of reference.
Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess and Favorinus’ Corinthian Oration devote energy
to elaborating highly specifi c, local and often hybridized identities for their authors.
Texts like Strabo’s Geography , Pliny’s Natural History and Pausanias’ Periegesis
draw together a series of local cultural productions to tell stories of a culturally
multifarious empire, stories in which ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ are variously infl ected, and
in which – for reasons of local pride – the presence of Rome may be variously
suppressed or asserted, even if it is the consistent (perhaps distant) framing factor for
all political and cultural life (Dueck, Lindsay and Pothecary 2005, Naas 2002,
Murphy 2004, Alcock, Cherry and Elsner 2001, Hutton 2005). One strand of
Roman taste, perhaps especially in the environs of Rome itself and the nearby
playgrounds of the city’s elite – as exemplifi ed in the menus in Petronius’ Satyricon
and the architecture of Hadrian’s palace at Tivoli – consisted in celebrating the
diversity drawn together by empire. Another strand, represented for example by
Juvenal’s Third Satire , condemns the capital as a hybrid and effectively conducts a
polemical reversal of the celebration of diversity, while Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities
claims the Romans as Greeks and Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration has a prize orator
in the East celebrating Rome in public. Not all imperial period authors were worried
by such matters. Plutarch offers up Republican Romans and Classical Greeks alike
as models of virtue and vice in his Parallel Lives , and shows some interest in difference
of ritual and custom in his sympotic works, but Platonism is a far more important
frame of reference in most of his works, and he makes occasional use of other
traditions too including Egyptian mythology.