CULTURE 227Local appropriations of metropolitan cultural projects went well beyond imitating
the architecture of the Flavian Amphitheatre. Some of the iconic images of Augustan
Rome were reproduced in the provinces: a copy of the Shield of Virtue was found at
Arles, of the pedimental reliefs of Venus, Mars and Caesar from the Temple of Mars
Ultor in Carthage and of a group fi guring Anchises, Aeneas and Ascanius in Merida.
The latter image was parodied in a painting from Pompeii, in which Aeneas and
Ascanius have dog heads. This visual model was later appropriated in varieties of
public and private reliefs to make a range of pointed comparisons, some encomiastic
and others clearly polemical (for instance when early Christian art appropriated the
motif of Anchises, Aeneas and Ascanius for the triumphant Hebrews escaping
Egyptian persecution after crossing the Red Sea (Elsner 2011)). Rather than
separating out global from local cultural productions, then, it seems preferable to
envisage a series of different kinds of cultural play between universal and local
identities, broad identities and minority ones – play through which the empire found
more of a unity than in any pretended cultural homogeneity.
There is, to be sure, a danger in taking the fact of empire as the master reference
point for cultural production. An interest in post- colonial reading of Roman cultural
life has, paradoxically, accentuated the trend to understand the literary and artistic
cultural production primarily in terms of its imperial situation. But when we turn to
kinds of cultural action that were not controlled by local elites, the imperial frame is
not always so evident. A good example is the great body of Jewish writing produced
in the period across a diaspora that stretched from Italy (at least) in the west to
Babylonia in the east, that is beyond and across political borders. Some of this was
in Greek, like Josephus’ historical writing and Philo’s unusual blend of Greek
philosophy and Jewish tradition (Berthelot 2011). But the Mishnah, composed in
Hebrew, and the Talmud, composed partly in Hebrew, partly in varieties of Aramaic,
show relatively little engagement with the Roman (or indeed the Persian) empire
(Ben-Eliyahu, Cohn, and Millar 2013). Perhaps other diasporas, including that of the
Greeks, should be considered in the same way, as might be the spread of new religious
cults, such as Christianity and Manichaeism, which both had vibrant lives in the
Parthian/Sasanian world as well as the Roman. Was there anything imperial about
imperial Greek epigram or the prose romance in both Greek and Latin beyond the
period of its composition? Do historicist readings of Flavian epic risk overestimating
one context (the political) at the expense of others (games of literary appropriation,
tacit notions of gender, competitions for cultural esteem, to name but a few)? Many
of the cultural forms created during the Principate had long afterlives not only in late
antiquity but beyond the fragmentation of the empire, just as some had roots long
before its creation. For some kinds of cultural activity the Roman empire was an
incidental, rather than a determining, context.