Nation, Empire, Decline by Nancy Shumate;

Author:Nancy Shumate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2006-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hybridity and its dangers

Colonial discourse offers a third model of native representation; there is another way of being a ‘good’ barbarian that further illustrates the zero-sum principles governing this representational system as well as the ‘no-win’ situation in which the colonized found himself trapped in both ancient and modern versions of the discourse. For if one path to approval in the eyes of the imperial power involved an innocence of civilization’s taint, the other required the opposite course: domestication and acceptance of that power’s authority and its ways. The figure of the assimilated, ‘good’ colonial subject who has successfully shaken off his or his people’s barbarian past appears frequently in Tacitus. Often this figure is schematically paired with a rebellious, incorrigibly debased ‘bad’ barbarian (where the lack of civilized constraint is constructed as a liability) so as to allow for no ambiguity about the position each figure is meant to occupy in the moral and cultural calculus.

Such a pair appears in Tacitus’ account of the Batavian revolt in AD 69-70, when a loose confederation of subjugated, semi-subjugated, and free Gallic and Germanic tribes exploited the political chaos that followed the death of Nero to launch (according to Tacitus) a rebellion against Roman hegemony in the region. At a point in the narrative when some of the rebels begin to lose resolve, Tacitus stages a council (H. 4.68-70) in which the main speakers are Gallic exempla of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subaltern in the senses just described. As their names indicate, the families of both had been Romanized in the long course of the occupation and transformation of Gaul; according to the Roman discourse of assimilation, they were no longer barbarians at all. But Tacitus suggests that in these cases the process has penetrated to different depths. Taking the conciliatory position, Julius Auspex calmly explains the benefits of a peace emanating from Rome and urges an attitude of respect and loyalty (reverentia and fides) to earlier agreements. The rebel leader Julius Valentinus on the other hand, his debased alterity breaking through, continues to foment rebellion, furiously hurling invective against the Romans and stirring up unruly passions in the others with his ‘crazy eloquence’ (vaecors facundia).

In the account of the earlier German campaigns during the principate of Tiberius in the Annals, the role of dangerous counter-type to the cooperative native is taken by Arminius, who also sloughs off his much thinner skin of Romanity without a second thought. A troublemaker (turbator) with a naturally violent temper (insita violentia), he kicks against the foils of Segestes (1.55-9) and Flavus (2.9-10), in his view acquiescent collaborators who happen to be his father-in-law and brother respectively. Segestes prides himself in the good faith and steadfastness (fides et constantia) that he has shown in his relations with the Romans and condemns Arminius as a treaty-breaker; the oppositional relationship of the two types is captured in a concise antithesis at 1.55: ‘each of them [was] distinguished, the one for perfidy, the other for loyalty towards us’ (insignem utrumque perfidia in nos aut fide).

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