| Following military victory, the Romans employed one of several strategies for dealing with defeated peoples. Displacement, utilized throughout Roman history, was employed in order to remove a resistant population from its homeland. The author draws on ancient sources to understand the Roman motivation for displacing indigenous peoples in the middle Republic. Four case studies of the displacement of the Faliscans from Falerii, the Picentes, the Gauls of northern Italy, and the Ligurians are explored. This paper argues that one, among the many motives for displacing indigenous societies, was displacement's capacity to deconstruct identity on a societal level. In an attempt to understand why displacement has this destructive capacity, modern ethnographic research is drawn upon. In the conclusion, the author looks at all of the Roman motivations for displacing resistant populations in light of the ethnographic and historical evidence. |
