Cross-cultural interaction between Rome and Sassanid
It is useful to look at the problem of the cross-cultural interaction between Rome and Sassanid Iran from one final perspective and consider which types of objects and spaces enticed the kings to appropriate them and which proved to be the most popular venues for the two realms’ debate.
Overall, those architectural features, urban spaces, or sites of performance that defined royal identity within one of the two empires consistently show evidence of visual or ritual expressions that have to do with the two rulers’ and realms’ relational identity.
Sites where the sovereigns showed themselves to their own people and to envoys, such as hippodromes, banqueting and audience halls, urban spaces that hosted processions, regal iconographies (such as nimbuses), ornamental motifs, games, luxury items (like silk shoes and robes), and audience-hall technologies, were the privileged venues for the two courts’ debates. The objects and activities that defined each emperor’s identity, and ensured his dominance of the social hierarchy, tended to carry polemical messages about the place and identity of the other king.
On the other hand, these same visual, urban, and spatial environments were also the prime targets of appropriation by their rival.
In a similar sense, the emperors’ physical bodies could be simultaneously objects of appropriation and places of debate. The imperial body, and thus identity, were constantly manipulated and adjusted in pictorial spaces, ranging from sculpture to icons to numismatic representations. One can find statements on the two sovereigns’ relational identity on their clothing and regalia, and even the ornamental designs that embellished them. This was the case occasionally in real life, too — most glaringly in the case of the captured Roman emperor Valerian, whose identity was manipulated by the ritual humiliation he was forced to endure, but also, vicariously in the treatment of the other emperor’s envoy.
Although the two empires’ courts and urban centers, under the auspices of diplomacy, were the commonest locations of symbolic display and identity manipulation, similar events took place far afield and by proxy. The consolidation of symbolic capital took place on an international level, too, and it was a tool that the emperors utilized to gain control over client states, as well as to negotiate their relationship with each other.
Within cultural systems as globally minded as the Roman and Sassanid empires these symbolic trappings became very important, because they were unifying elements that facilitated the functioning of socially and culturally diverse societies.
Both empires subsumed many sociopolitical systems and thus systems of conferring honors. The Romans and Sassanids, with their compulsory rites of investiture and robing ceremonies, conflated these various systems of symbolic capital into a single system.
The two powers codified, delegated, and guaranteed, even bureaucratized, this system of symbolic capital.
When a client king traveled to the court of the Roman or Sassanid king, he received insignia of office that marked at once his relationship to the Roman court and his membership in the Roman or Sassanid cultural sphere.
The above is a lightly edited version of part of a chapter entitled, ‘The Art and Ritual of Kingship Within and Between Rome and Sassanid Iran’, from a book entitled, ‘The Two Eyes of the Earth’, written by Matthew P. Vanepa, published by University of California Press.