Fetishizing the Romans

Abstract

Miguel John Versluys offers a richly textured essay in an attempt to resuscitate the concept of Romanization, which he has found to have been nearly flogged to death, to paraphrase an oft-quoted characterization of the Romanization debate in recent years. To be more precise, he argues that certain quarters of Romanist academia have ‘ganged up’ on the concept over the last decade or so and that others – the implicitly silent majority – have begun to stage a comeback in recent years. Versluys's self-imposed mission is to shore up the Roman resurgence with freshly cut intellectual joists.