Reading the Signs: Hierarchy, Ambiguity, and Cosmopolitanism in the Roman Empire and Early India

Karsten Johanning

Reading the Signs: Hierarchy, Ambiguity, and Cosmopolitanism in the Roman Empire and Early India

SAXO-Institute - Archaeology, Ethnology, Greek & Latin, History

Abstract

This thesis confronts the issue of cultural elite integration in the early and high Roman empire (c. first three centuries AD) in a new way. Attempting to bypass earlier and present discussions about Romanization, identity, and globalization, the approach chosen here – inspired by the Indologist Sheldon Pollock – uses the literary properties of three ancient prestige languages (Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin) as a model for elite interaction. This is because the fixity of writing, combined with the stable grammatical and aesthetic properties of prestige languages, made them learnable and movable media, connecting imperial elites across long distances in cosmopolitan, or translocal, communities. In my comparative analyses of literature from ancient Rome and India, I argue that a central ability of these respective elites was to read signs in courtly, civic, and religious settings – and in ways that integrated both hierarchy and ambiguity.

Original language	English

Publisher	Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet
Number of pages	277
Publication status	Published - 2018

Cite this

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title = "Reading the Signs: Hierarchy, Ambiguity, and Cosmopolitanism in the Roman Empire and Early India",

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