Romanization then and now. A brief survey of the evolution of interpretations of cultural change in the Roman Empire

Abstract

Romanization is a model that helps understand and explain the cultural changes that were brought about on a newly conquered territory by the Roman Empire. It refers to the process by which the conquered people integrated into the Roman Empire and became ‘Roman’. Although Romanization is more than a hundred-year-old interpretative concept, it is only in the past few decades that its validity as a framework of interpretation has been seriously questioned. While there is an intense discussion about Romanization in Western scholarship, Hungarian research remains mostly unaffected and scholars do not seem willing to engage in the debate.