The project

“Discourses of the Roman Empire: Processions and the construction of the imperial community”.

Our research project makes part of a bigger project called “Discourses of the Roman Empire: Words and Rituals that Built the Empire” that aims to explore how different discourses on the Empire contributed, with enormous power, to the creation of a new kind of community. The empire emerging from the first and the second centuries AD could be defined not only as an act of Roman domination over the subjugated peoples, but rather as a community capable of integrating the provincials, with full rights and obligations, and safeguarding the diversity of cultures, beliefs and rites. Among those discourses, processions devoted to the emperors and to the imperial house, normally together with other gods, contributed to conceptualise the very idea of the empire and of belonging into a wide imperial community.

Surprisingly enough, the processional rite has not aroused too much interest among scholars of the Roman Empire. This probably has to do, among other things, with the character of the sources, which often allude to processions only tangentially, while preferring to focus on other moments of the rite, as for example sacrifice. The performative aspects of processions have received more attention in the case of the Greek processions of the Classical period and their civic implications. Notwithstanding this difficulty, our sources allow to see how the ritual particularities of processions actively contributed to shape the relationship between the emperors and their subjects, or the way the inhabitants of the Roman Empire imagined the empire.

Processions are performative not only because they consist in a performance, but also because they construct reality. They are not mere reflections or images of communities: they are the community itself, the group in action. Borrowing Catherine Bell’s words, “it is by participating in rituals that people identify with larger political forces that can only be seen in symbolic form”. Imperial processions were ideal occasions for sharing emotions and for consolidating a collective way of understanding imperial power and reacting to it.