Insignificant Others: Images of Barbarians on Military Art from Roman Britain

Chaining and shaming: images of defeat, from Llyn Cerrig Bach to Sarmitzegetusa

“…Iain Ferris has suggested (1994, 26) that this act of beheading is particularly loaded with contempt, given the veneration accorded to the human head by Gallo‐Britons, although it should be pointed out that such punishment of enemies is exhibited on Roman monuments outside western Europe, most dramatically on Trajan's Column, a piece of flamboyant iconographic propaganda‐narrative celebrating the emperor's triumphal campaigns against the Dacians in the second century AD (Le Bohec 1994; Settis et al 1988; Ferris 2003). Roman Scotland has produced other victory iconography cognate with the Bridgeness slab, in which bound barbarian captives are shown kneeling or seated on the ground (Ferris 1994, 26). Decapitation is symbolically important: heads are essentially linked with identity; despoiling a corpse (and particularly robbing it of its head) may be perceived to prevent ‘proper’ burial and reincorporation in the next world.…”

“…The ‘conquest’ iconography of Gaul (Wiseman and Wiseman 1980, 52), Trajan's Column (Settis et al 1988) and other Roman victory‐imagery (for example, the depiction of the emperor Claudius subduing Britannia from Aphrodisias in Turkey: Ferris 1994, 26) and New Kingdom Egypt (Filer 1997, figs. 2–4) have in common not only degrading somatic treatment – chains, bonds, outlandish clothing and inferior body‐position – but also a grammar of humiliation in the grabbing of captives’ hair by the victors.…”

The Enemy Without, The Enemy Within: More Thoughts on Images of Barbarians in Greek and Roman Art

“…It has been argued elsewhere that while there is a broad chronological trend towards the dehumanisation of the barbarian in Roman art from the time of Marcus Aurelius onwards (Ferris 1995), even before thi s period there is little evidence that the Roman psyche, consciously or subconsciously, harboured the kind of schizophrenic nostalgia for a primitive past, as projected onto the image of the unfettered barbarian, that Hall proposes for the Greeks.…”

“…Natalie Boymel-Kampen has noted how barbarian women in acts of submission are sometimes meant to symbolise a community in defeat, a potential reproductive future that has been curtailed or affected by war (Boymel-Kampen 1991 :245), and I have developed this line of research in one of my previous papers on barbarian imagery (Ferris 1995). The death of the Gaulish woman on the Attalid sculpture represents the extinguishing of potential I ife and thus a barren and sterile future.…”

An Empire in Pieces. Roman Archaeology and the Fragment

“…While Trajan's Column in Rome is perhaps the best known example of this style of narrative, with multiple Trajans adorning the relief spiral scrolls around the column shaft, another interesting example is provided by the legionary distance slab from Bridgeness on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. I have discussed this scene at length elsewhere (Ferris 1994 and and here will only briefly draw attention to the appearance of what is intended to be an image of the same individual barbarian appearing four times in a single scene. His Roman opponent, a cavalryman in this case, appears only once.…”