ABSTRACT
Herodian was writing in the late second to early third century AD. His description of the Britons represents stereotypic ‘barbarization’ at its most extreme: every element is the antithesis of sophisticated Classical urbanity, and the passage exhibits the perceived threat posed by ‘the primitive’ (Fincham 2000: 27). Previous chapters in this volume have considered inherent iconographic tensions between the realism of Graeco-Roman image-making and the seemingly deliberately surrealist paradigms of some Gallo-British figural representation. The focus of the current chapter is on issues associated with colonization, domination, attitudes and resistance and the controversial matter of religious and artistic synthesis. The topos of Mediterranean superiority over the foreign, captured so graphically by Herodian, contains resonances with current debates concerning the influence of Classical traditions on the indigenous communities sucked into the slipstream of romanitas and notions of unilinear ‘progression’ from barbaric ignorance towards the telos of conquering enlightenment.
