One super-cool-awesome thing I did this week was go to the Byzantine and Christian Museum! I didn’t know much about the Byzantine era before going to the museum, so I was going in blind and ready to learn. I knew that the Byzantine era followed as a continuation of the Roman Empire, but that was about it.
One of the biggest things that intrigued me was that the empire started largely as pagan with the main language spoken being Latin and it ended with it being Christian with the main language spoken being Greek. One of the exhibits attributed the shift in language to losing Eastern territories to the Arabs and Slavs which caused a shift in what city and culture would be the center and the standard. The presence of a standard in a diverse society impacts the way that people view themselves and what they consider to be their identity, collectively and individually. This is of particular interest because of the research that I do as a part of my Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF).
My research focuses on the formation and transformation of the culture and identities of people living in the provinces of the Roman Empire. I am currently concentrating on the province of Roman Britain and how the Roman military was involved in cultural exchange between Rome, Britain, and any other province(s). Language and religion are some of the main things that influence the formation of an identity and if these were common and wide-spread amongst all of the different ethnic groups of the Empire, I wonder how people’s original languages and cultures melded together with the standard of an “official” language and religion being pushed across the history of the Empire? How did common people deal with this change that was becoming more and more central to their daily lives, whether they wanted it to or not?
People were practicing Christianity even before the end of the Roman Empire and they were using Greco-Roman imagery, statues, and folklore to convey their Christian beliefs. For example, the image of the shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders was derived from the Greek statue of the calf-bearer (moschophoros) to convey the belief that Christ is the Good Shepherd who gives his life for his sheep. After Christianity was formally recognized by the Emperor, the architectural style of the basilica was used to represent the church. The basilica was inspired by a Roman assembly hall of the same name. In later times, ancient temples were being repurposed to become places of Christian worship, with the Parthenon being a church at one point. The use of Greco-Roman art styles and stories as a loose blueprint for Christian iconography and story-telling is a clear example of transition from one identity to another as well as the existence of two competing identities at the same time.
My visit to the Byzantine and Christian Museum gave me plenty of inspiration for the future of my research on identity formation and transformation throughout the Roman Empire. I may extend my research beyond the time period of the Roman Empire to include the Byzantine as it includes one of the most prolific events of humanity, the spread of Christianity. Most of the evidence that I use for my research are inscriptions (especially tombstone epitaphs), but the exhibit showed that architecture, jewelry, art and coinage could also be great source material as well. Byzantium was a place and time that was constantly changing on account of enemy intruders and religious change that would provide a great case study for my work on the change and continuity of identity in a society that never stands still.