Writing Wednesday: Some Fragments

This was supposed to be an easy post today that I drew from some of the stuff that I’ve been writing this week, but I became fascinated by the idea of “securityscapes” (particularly as discussed in Setha Low and Mark Maguire in the introduction to their edited volume Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control [2019]). In particular, I want to apply it to Hexamilion Wall across the Isthmus of Corinth which has become a recent research interest. As readers of the blog know, I’m giving a paper at Michigan State on our work at Isthmia which has so far focused on a 2nd century AD Roman bath that was built into the Late Roman Hexamilion wall. (For more on this go here and here).

I’m struggling a bit to produce a concise definition of a securityscape and Low and Maguire help me understand that this partly because of the range of definitions present across the disciplines that have found this term useful. The definitions range from the manifestations of interstate security found around the post-Cold War world to the infrastructures deployed at sites such as national borders, airports, and ports or even the pervasive reach of surveillance culture developed by the emergent security-state. As the subtitle of their edited collection suggests, securityscapes almost always exist along side spaces of control and surveillance. While the contributors to Low and Maguire’s volume focus main on modern examples, the concepts that they explore may well shed light on the relationship between ancient walls and modern ones—a relationship that modern commentators have explored albeit in rather hamfisted ways.

These are fragments and not full formed ideas, but they represent my prodding and probing of these topics:

1.  The key notion of securityscapes is that they do not necessarily protect individuals from a proximate threat, but instead suggest security from future threats. Thus the continuous performance of various security rituals conveys not only the immediacy of possible danger, but also the promise of security offered by authority. The Hexamilion would not have protected the citizens of the Peloponnesus from an imminent invasion by Visigoths, but the possibility of future invasions.

2. As much as the Hexamilion represented a promise of future security, it also drew upon a rich vein of past history of Roman intervention in the region and an even longer history of the region as part of a landscape of security in Greece.

3. In its promise of future security that the inscriptions of ships on the wall — so cleverly noted by Prof. Frey — makes (pardon the pun) its most incisive critique. The inscriptions of ships mark the potential futility of the wall and offer a salient critique of state’s promised security.

4. It is striking how the Justinianic inscriptions associate the securityscape not only with imperial power — present in the naming of the emperor himself — but also in an early example of the professionalization of security through the naming of Viktorinos who D. Feissel argued may have been an architect, but was likely the Praetorian Prefect or other high ranking imperial official. Thus, much like the modern securityscape the Hexamilion and its nearby fortress seems to articulate more than a simple model of authority but rather a professionalization of security (at least in an ancient version of this).

5. If we argue that Justinian’s reconstruction of the Hexamilion, his building or repair of the walls of Corinth, and the construction of the fortress at Isthmia was contemporary with the building of the great basilica at Lechaion, we can perhaps argue that the emperor sought to project security from the walls themselves to religious architecture. The securityscape extended well beyond the realm of the walls as physical artifacts of imperial power and included aspects of religious life. This was alluded to in the famous inscriptions found associated with the walls themselves which I’ve argued made liturgical allusions.