On Death’s Road: Gräberstrassen as Proxy for Globalism in Roman Greece (15 min)

Presenters

Jessica Tilley, Florida State University

Abstract

Roads in the Roman world have been used as both literal and metaphorical indicators of the unprecedented connectivity that developed under the empire. These roads were often densely lined with tombs as they led both locals and travelers in and out of major cities. Known as Gräberstrassen, such roads appear across the empire, with these funerary landscapes in many ways serving as physical markers of new cultural influences. In the case of the Roman colonies of Corinth and Patras and the city of Nikopolis, arguably the most economically important cities in early Roman Greece, the funerary architecture found along the major roads connecting the cities not only to each other but to ports and cities beyond Greece signified the respective regions’ first large-scale monumentalizations of death. As the merits of globalization as a tool for describing the expanding networks of the Roman world have been increasingly accepted by scholars, funerary evidence has been a key material source scholars have applied within the globalization framework to examine provincial relationships across the larger empire. These studies have predominantly focused on frontier regions and Greece has largely been absent from the narrative. This paper demonstrates how the funerary landscape of Roman Greece offers increased nuance to the conversations about empire, colonialism, connectivity, and human mobility central to the globalization discussion. In particular, the cemeteries found along the roads leading out of Corinth, Patras, and Nikopolis help illustrate the degree of multidirectional cultural exchange that occurred in Greece around the first century C.E. This paper examines the evidence for the connectivity of these cities through a preliminary analysis of their Gräberstrassen in comparison with central Italy and Asia Minor and ultimately argues that the funerary topography of Roman Greece is an important contribution to our understanding of the larger Roman Empire.