Fulbright Samples

FULBRIGHT PERSONAL STATEMENT Amanda Coles, Italy, Ancient History/Archaeology In the fall of 1998, I was completing a double major in mathematics and classical studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I knew I wanted to teach at the college level so I could fully share something about which I was passionate with students who had the intellectual development to truly appreciate it. It was time to decide on graduate school in one of my two scholastic loves, ancient Roman history or theoretical mathematics. The decision was especially important since no one in my family had ever earned a graduate degree before. My parents, who earned their B.A.’s in engineering and chemistry, sponsored my undergraduate education as long as I chose a practical career, but they also encouraged my dream of pursuing graduate school and teaching. Furthermore, they urged me to have the self-reliance to fund this portion of my education myself. Thus, it was important not only for my own future success, but also to validate my parents’ earlier support, that I choose wisely. To help my decision, I spent four months at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome in the fall of 1998 so that I could see the artifacts and culture that I might study. This was the most influential period of my life.

When I saw Rome for the first time, I knew that I would spend the rest of my life in love with the city, the people, and the culture there; my passion for Roman history suddenly and dramatically outweighed my penchant for mathematics. I knew without a doubt that, from that moment on, I would do everything in my power to become the best professor of Roman history that I could be. I also knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me before I reached my goals.

Thus, I began to earn my master’s degrees in Classical Studies, with emphasis on Latin and Roman history, and in Ancient History with emphasis on Classical Greek and Greek history. My commitment to teaching Ancient History required that I not only master Roman history, but also classical Greek history because in many ways the two are inextricably intertwined. With this in mind, I spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 2005-2006, where I learned the basic tenets of archaeology and how to look critically at an archaeological site. As fascinating as Greek history was, however, my brain did not supply endless curiosity about the intricacies of Greek religion, as it did for Roman religion. I knew I had to return to the topic of my early graduate work.

I had been reading quite a bit about the religions of Republican Rome, and one of the assertions that had struck me was that Rome controlled its colonies through the imposition of religion. While this seemed logical, I realized that there must be more to the cultural exchange between Rome and the colonies in the Republic than this simplistic view explained. Thus, I shaped my dissertation around a study of Roman religion in the Italian colonies of the middle Republic. I have been researching and writing on this topic for over a year now, but there is one glaring gap in my knowledge: I have not seen the sites of the colonies themselves. I have not experienced the towns as an inhabitant would, have not walked among the remains of the buildings and felt the impact of the religious places. My visits to Rome and Greece have taught me that this visit is vital to the proper understanding of the landscape of a community. I can apply my knowledge of how to interpret ancient texts to the issue, as I was taught in my philology courses; I can employ the logic and analytical reasoning I learned as a math major to the questions raised by the texts. Nevertheless, I will never be able to explain the cultural exchange between Roman colonies and Rome until I have experienced the landscape of the colonies themselves. This need to understand Roman history through experiencing the Roman colonies makes me a perfect candidate for the Fulbright Grant.

FULBRIGHT STATEMENT OF PROPOSED STUDY OR RESEARCH Amanda Coles, Italy, Ancient History/Archaeology Religion and Cult in Roman and Latin Colonies of the Middle Republic My primary objective in applying for the Fulbright Grant is to complete my dissertation research on the influences underlying the religious systems in the Roman and Latin colonies founded in Samnium and Northern Italy between the years 338 and 177 BCE. Aulus Gellius noted in 169 CE that Roman colonies seem as if they are small copies and images of the Roman people (A.N. XVI.13.9). Although E.T. Salmon, one of the seminal historians of Roman colonization, accepted this as a valid observation for Roman colonies of all periods, recent analysis (especially Bispham 2000, 2006; Bradley 2006; Patterson 2006) has begun to find ways in which a model of deliberate likeness between Rome and the middle Republican colonies fails.

In an attempt to nuance the religious analysis of the middle Republican colonies, my dissertation establishes which colonial cults arose through Roman influence and which were adopted from local tradition through analyzing the dedication, location, and function of the cults and temples in their colonial setting. My primary focuses are on the nature of the evidence for middle Republican religion, the role of the individual in establishing colonies and colonial religion, and the specific nature of cult activity in the colonies in Samnium and in Northern Italy specifically.

Thus, I propose to visit the archaeological sites of the Roman and Latin colonies founded during the middle Republic in the ancient regions of Samnium and Northern Italy. This work is essential for the completion of my accepted dissertation proposal; I have completed all other preliminary requirements and examinations as of May of 2005.

The most detrimental assumption for a nuanced analysis of ritual and cult in the colonies is that Rome imposed the Roman ‘state cult’ on the colonies as a matter of deliberate, hegemonic policy (de Cazanove 2000). Proponents of this view, such as Zanker (2000), turn to temples of the Capitoline triad, the patron deities of Rome, to prove the imposition of a Roman ‘state cult,’ using the late Republican landscape of Ostia, Minturnae (Zanker 2000: 27), or Cosa (Brown 1960: 49) to demonstrate their point. Other scholars simply assume that the whole of public religion in Rome formed a transferable ‘state cult’ (e.g. de Cazanove 2000: 71). Ancient cults and rituals throughout Italy, however, revolved around the specific location of a temple or ritual, which means that the gods of Rome could not be relocated without reinterpreting the significance of their cults. This reinterpretation was driven not by the Roman state, but by implicit negotiation between the commissioners, the colonists, and the pre-existing local population.

Thus, one cannot restrict study of colonial religion to a mere examination of colony and mother city (cf. Van Dommelen 1997: 307-308). Instead, I examine the cultural exchange between the colonists and the pre-existing population in order to reach beyond the dualist conception of colonization to attain a triadic comparison of the Roman, colonial, and local religious systems (Smith 1990: 51). Through this change of comparanda, I emphasize the process of cultural and religious exchange between three distinct communities that were negotiating their legal and political relationships to one another. As a secondary objective for my travels in Italy, I particularly would like to explore the modern regional attitudes toward inhabitants of different regions in Italy to determine if there is a similar tension to that held in antiquity between Romans, colonists, and locals.

It is sometimes difficult to identify or attribute the temples in a single colony; thus, I compile the evidence for various cults throughout a region, for example there are cults of Apollo in at least seven of the eleven colonies in Northern Italy (Aquileia, Ariminum, Cremona,

Placentia, Bononia, Luna, and Pisaurum) (Fontana 1997, Harvey, Jr. 2006). It is significant that this imported cult appears in a large percentage of Roman colonies in Northern Italy, especially since Apollo was himself imported into Rome in 433 BCE and was not one of the patron gods of Rome. Where temples and cults do not strictly conform to Roman patterns, comparison to the temple placement patterns of the previous occupants of the colony, especially the Samnites and Greeks in southern Italy and the Etruscans and Gauls in northern Italy, illustrates the way in which colonists adopt or adapt deities to build communal coherence. In the case of Apollo, his cult was popular due to Greek influence prevalent throughout Italy, including among the Etruscans (Turfa 2006), who colonized Northern Italy before the Romans. By using the range of temples and cults throughout a series of colonies founded during the same period, the cultural interchanges between the colonists, the local populations, and Rome form a more meaningful scenario of religious interaction than available through focus on a single colony. On the whole, this study challenges standard models of analysis that presuppose Roman imposition of cult on the colonies or a dyadic cultural exchange, and focuses instead on providing insight into the complex religious interactions between Rome, colonists, and locals in the middle Republic.

While in Italy, I plan to divide my time as follows: in October and November, I will travel to Milan, where I will visit the Biblioteca di Scienze dell’antichità e di Filologia Moderna at the University of Milan in order to study the full archaeological reports on the 11 ancient colonies planted in Northern Italy, which often are not available in American libraries. I have passed a graduate level reading examination in Italian for reading just such historical articles and archaeological reports. I am also in close contact with an alumnus of the University of Milan, Andrea Baudini, who has agreed to introduce me into the archaeological community there. Then, I will devote two to three weeks to examining each archaeological site: Sena Gallica, Ariminum, Placentia, Cremona, Bononia, Pisaurum, Parma, Mutina, Aquileia, Luca, and Luna. While at each archaeological excavation site, I will determine the location and orientation of each attested temple, as well as its relation to the civic structures of the colony based on the archaeological reports. I will substantiate my observations with photographic evidence and distance measurements. Where possible, I will also visit museums to view the inscriptions and artifacts found in relation to the religious structures.

I will spend December, January, and February in Rome, so that I can take advantage of my pending affiliation with the American Academy in Rome to utilize the libraries there, at the Vatican, and at the various archaeological schools in Rome to complete my research of the northern colonies and begin reading the archaeological reports on the colonies planted across the central Apennine region of Italy. In March, I will visit the 18 ancient colonies in the central Apennines: Sora, Fregellae, Interamna Lirinas, Cales, Lucerna, Saticula, Suessa Aurunca, Minturnae, Sinuessa, Paestum, Venusia, Aesernia, Beneventum, Volturnum, Liternum, Puteoli, Salernum, and Sipontum. In addition to the colonies themselves, I will visit local Samnite shrines such as Pietrebbondante. Finally, I will reside in Rome again from April through June in order to visit the colonies around Rome (e.g. Cosa, Ostia, and Pyrgi) as comparanda for my selection of sites. It is vital that I conduct this research in Italy first and foremost because the study of ancient settlements requires visits to the settlements themselves, but also because many of the full archaeological reports, which this study relies upon, are available only or most readily in Italy. Although my spoken Italian is merely basic, it will improve with study and immersion in the culture.