Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul

by Greg Woolf

This book studies the processes conventionally termed "Romanization" through an analysis of the experience of Roman rule over the Gallic province of the empire in the period 200 BC-AD 300. It examines how and why Gallo-Roman civilization emerged from the confrontation between the iron-age cultures of Gaul and the civilization we call classical. It develops an original synthesis and argument that will form a bridge between the disciplines of classics and archaeology and will be of interest to all students of cultural change.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Ancient, Roman History, Archaeology, Reference

316 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

What was Gallic culture like before the Romans came, saw, and conquered? Actually, was there a Gaul to begin with, or was that a Roman idea? Once they arrived -- and they did, surely -- what aspects of Gallic culture changed? How did the culture change, and why? Was Roman culture forced on the natives, was it adopted by prgamatic go-getters for the advantages that it offered? For that matter, what do we mean by Roman culture? Woolf's exhaustive study of written and archaeological evidence sets out to answer those questions. He examines written accounts, epigraphy (with an eye towards euergetics), consumer waste (oil and wine shipping containers), ceramics, villae remains, road networks, geographic boundaries, urban planning, and religious centers, among other things.

This book raises as many questions as it answers, but I suppose that's inevitable. At a distance of 2000 years, much of what culture is has turned to vapor.

[am]

oh brother

[モーリー · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real struggle to get through despite being short and clear (there is just something about the writing style that made my brain turn off after two pages every time I picked it up). But, I kept plugging away at it because the author's approach of this subject is so thought-provoking for me.

I am not a historian nor a specialist in European or Roman anything, so this turned out to be quite in the weeds for a relative outsider. I forget what citation led me here but I started out as a "casual" reader who is trying to fill in some knowledge holes. However, I ended up flagging several quotes that I continued to chew on, and used one in an article on my own research area, systems and conceptions of authorship in late 19th-century Japan. I think that does more to communicate how much Woolf's approach of looking at historical systems affected me.

This book is an extensive case study of how we can approach a difficult-to-apprehend past: from a very limited amount of evidence remaining, while maintaining that people at the time may not have had the understanding of what they did/left behind in the way we can explicitly formulate now with that evidence. I hope I am not mischaracterizing Woolf's underlying way of tackling his case of Gaul. But, holding both those ideas simultaneously (that we can make some limited sense of what people were up to, as a system, based on what is still available to us - and that it may be different from what people at that time would have self-described) is, at minimum, really good brain exercise and underappreciated in much scholarship of the past. It feels surprisingly radical. And of course, at the end, we cannot ever know what people were thinking in the past. We can just approximate and show our work. This, Woolf does in abundance and is an exemplar in my opinion.

If you're curious here is the deceptively simple quote that I came back to so much:

"We cannot ever completely enter into the thought world of iron age Gaul, [but] we can at least see how some practices were related to each other in systematic and repetitive ways, even if we do not know how far Gauls were conscious of it." (p. 12)

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly dry read but thoroughly researched. Woolf argues that in the evolution of Gallo-Roman culture in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the distinctions were less Roman vs not Roman (i.e., barbarian), but more elites vs. peasants--distinctions based on wealth and education. Society became more complex and differentiated, with more class markers.

It felt a little challenging to nail down his thesis, but I found this to be the most succinct statement:
P. 127: Romanization may be thought of in terms of the creation of structured systems of differences, rather than in terms of processes of assimilation, acculturation or cultural convergence.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beware! This is an archeology-heavy book about the evolution of MATERIAL culture in Gaul. Readers, like your truly, looking for a study of Roman ethnogenesis / Roman identity will be disappointed. Also, the writing is not just dry but soporific. Words turn into squiggles by the second page of any reading session. A real slog. Only for specialists keenly interested in amphorae, villae and epigraphy.

[McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Becoming Roman is a thoroughly academic exploration of how Gauls became Romans in the centuries after Julius Caesar invaded. Woolf assumes a baseline understanding of Roman history (which I did not always have), but this book was extremely helpful to me in understanding the lives and culture of Gauls in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D.

[Ellis Morning · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more of a thesis than a relaxing armchair read, but it presents a lot of interesting evidence on the spread of Roman culture into Gaul, to varying degrees, and how the region changed from "conquered fringe territory" to "part of the interior" over time.

[Jack O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant showcasing on how archaeological history can be incorporated into a political narrative. The author beautifully weaves the physical with the ideological.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

We know that the Gauls became Roman, they still speak a descendant of Latin. This book looks at the material evidence for this transformation. It appears that there was a huge structural change around the turn of the millennium, roughly during Augustine's reign. After this, there were slower developments differentiating Gaul from the rest of the empire.

A dry read, but interesting.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally a good book, but VERY specialized in terms of Gallo-Roman knowledge, and somewhat theoretically unsophisticated in its presentation of imperial domination and the problems of "identity."