ROMAN SPOLIA , APPROPRIATION AND CULTURAL MEMORY

Abstract

The twenty-first century has seen prolonged, diverse interest in the nature and influence of Roman appropriation.This interest has been prompted in part by a shift away from Romanisation models to a more postcolonial framework, in which scholars have paid greater attention to the networks of appropriation and the cultural and economic impact beyond the initial acquisition of war booty.Central to the question of Rome's 'cargo culture' (M.Loar et al. [edd.],Rome, Empire of Plunder [2018]) is the question of spolia.Drawing primarily on literary accounts, scholars have analysed every facet of spoliation, from acquisition to triumphal parade, to auction, to use in public construction, to private collections and to consumer goods.Since spolia represented a nexus between war, politics, religion and aesthetics in the Republic (C.Pieper, 'Spolia as Exempla/Exempla as Spolia', in: de Jong and Versluys, p. 46), studies focused on spolia have been necessarily interdisciplinary, making it hard to pinpoint a particular catalyst or even a specific, linear historiography.In one of the works under review, Versluys ('Triumphus and the Taming of Objects', in: de Jong and Versluys, pp.30-1), adapting categories from anthropologist H.P. Hahn, organises appropriation into four stages: material appropriation, objectification, incorporation and transformation.These stages are beneficial for any analysis of spolia and their impact, but they can also function as an organising principle for the various historiographical and methodological approaches to Roman appropriation.Doing so allows us to situate these three works within the wider historiographical context and to survey the many different avenues according to which scholars have analysed spolia in recent decades.Versluys' first stage is the one with which readers are likely to be most familiar: 'material appropriation'.This stage was characteristic of Roman territorial expansion, as is