The King Who Would Be Prefect: Authority and Identity in the Cottian Alps

Abstract

This paper examines the language of power and authority in the Italian Alps, after the Roman pacification of the area in 14 b.c. The focus of the examination is an arch set up at Segusio to Augustus by a local dynast named Cottius, which allows us to consider how the incorporation of the region into the Roman Empire was perceived and presented from a ‘local’ point of view, and how we might use our interpretations to construct ideas of identity and power relationships integral to early imperial provincial administration.

Breaching the Alps

“…12 The dramatic visuality of the scene conjured up by Polybius' words has been commented on by Katherine Clarke, while the literary topos of "looking from the mountain" or oroskopia has been recently studied by Irene de Jong, who notes the way in which Livy used the same scene when narrating Hannibal' s crossing. 13 The perception of the Alps being Italy' s bulwark seems to have been articulated very literally even slightly earlier than Polybius' time, if we are to give credence to a reference that Servius' Late-Antique commentary on Vergil' s Aeneid attributes to Cato the Elder and which would probably come from his Origines:…”