Louis Robert and the Greek World of the Roman Empire

Our ability to understand the dynamic nature of imperial culture owes a great deal not only to Momigliano, but also to the work of a great French epigraphist, Louis Robert. In many ways, Robert's ability to integrate realia of all sorts to recreate the social imagination of residents of Roman Asia Minor has done more than anything to lay the foundation for contemporary work on Rome’s relationship with its subjects. Robert inherited traditions of epigraphic analysis from scholars such as Adolph Wilhelm and his own teacher, Maurice Holleaux, but he took it to new heights. It was largely thanks to Robert's work that it became possible for scholars to see how the careful study of groups of inscriptions could transform their knowledge of social relationships within the ancient city. Robert showed how seemingly mundane events like athletic contests, gladiatorial combats, or the establishment of a festival could illuminate the concerns of ancient society as a whole. He showed how the evidence of different media could be combined to recreate the experience of ancient life. His studies of civic cult rewrote not only the religious history of the empire, but also our understanding of how different groups within the empire interacted with each other. His examination of decrees for governors enabled scholars to think in new ways about the impact of imperial government, while his analysis of cities revealed the real impact of the Roman peace, as ever more people came to participate in and define for themselves the culture of the elite. In terms of the history of religion, Robert made it absolutely clear that the traditional view that new religious movements arose when civic cult ceased to answer the basic needs of its practitioners is simply false. In this volume, Fredriksen, Eliav, and David Frankfurter allow us to gain a sense of how traditional cult continued to flourish and how it shaped other traditions. Robert also showed how the study of literature could benefit from detailed understanding of the civic society that supported its authors. In the English-speaking world, understanding of this point was vastly enhanced by the work of Glen Bowersock, whose wide ranging intellectual interests, extending from Classical Greece to the Islamic world, have helped shape debate on topics as diverse as the nature of Greek literature under Roman rule, the relationship between Hellenism and the Semitic world, and the interaction between paganism and Christianity. It is a corpus of work that shows the creative integration of many trends that have broadened the scope of Roman history.