Tales of the Seres and Silk: Roman Perceptions of the Far East and Silk Within the Empire
Any present-day mention of both Rome and China is synonymous with the Silk Road, a former network of international trade routes linking the two empires as early as the second century BCE. So-called “Silk Road Studies” examining the social, economic, and political impacts of these trade routes have proliferated since the late nineteenth century. Among the most important cultural interchanges that resulted was the eponymous trade of silk. As silk was ushered en masse into the Roman Empire and the greater Ancient Mediterranean, the steep price of this non-native fabric allowed certain Romans to opulently display their wealth and encouraged the exoticization of the East and its peoples. There is a wealth of scholarship discussing the history of silk trade and its effect on select aspects of Roman civilization. However, there is a lack of discussion concerning the sociocultural intersection resulting from this trade; no modern examination comprehensively catalogs Roman attitudes toward the people who produced silk or Roman attitudes toward silk itself. In a modern and rapidly globalizing world, it is exponentially relevant to examine historical intersections such as this one. As a classics student and a Chinese American, I was both surprised and disappointed by its absence in current scholarship, and I felt immediately driven to examine this critically relevant historical question.
My research aimed to analyze Roman perceptions of the Seres—the Latin-language name for the people of the Far East most famous for their silk production, tentatively equated with the people of Imperial Han China—and the role that silk played within the broader culture of the Roman Empire. In doing so, I also conducted a survey of ethnography—the study of individual cultures—in Greco-Roman culture. I had two goals: first, to determine the reasons why the Romans portrayed the Seres as a peaceful and unwarlike people, despite this being historically untrue based on modern evidence; and second, to examine the connotations Romans ascribed to silk clothing and its wearers. I adopted a cross-cultural approach in doing so, intending not to study the Romans alone, but to examine the ways in which the Romans interacted with the broader Eastern world in their attempts to understand it.
I conducted this research in two separate phases. First, I completed an exploratory study in January 2024 under a January Research Opportunity (JROP) grant offered by the Global Racial and Social Inequality Lab (GRSIL) in the University of New Hampshire College of Liberal Arts. Then, across ten weeks in summer 2024, I undertook a project greater in scope through the Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program (REAP) offered by the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research. Dr. Tejas S. Aralere, assistant professor of classics and humanities at UNH, mentored both projects, and my research benefited from his scholarly work in the intersection of the Ancient Mediterranean and Ancient Asia.
A Note on Terminology
Over the course of my research, I delimited certain parts of my terminology to reflect the Roman ideas that I was exploring. Instead of calling the silk producers “the Chinese” as we would in the modern day, I opted for the Latin-language demonym the Seres, a term that can loosely be translated into English as meaning “silk people.” I made this decision in accordance with the Roman understanding of the Seres as a faraway, idyllic people, rather than portraying the historical peoples and practices of Imperial China as we know them today. I also used the terms Near East and Far East instead of their modern counterparts Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, and so on to describe the geographical regions east of the Roman Empire. Although these two terms are dated and unquestionably problematic in modern conversational usage, they are the best descriptors for Roman geography, which separated the “East”—any region east of Greece—into the Near East (Persia, Scythia, and so on) and the Far East (any region farther east, which the Romans did not directly interact with beyond trade). Introducing modern terminology into ancient concepts would be anachronistic and evoke ideas that do not necessarily align with Roman thought.
Methodology
To examine Roman ethnography of the Seres and the social function of silk in the Roman Empire, I worked closely with seven different Latin passages. Each passage originated from a different text, and the texts spanned diverse ancient literary genres and various time frames ranging from the early to late Empire (first century BCE to the fourth century CE). This allowed me to witness how Roman ideas of silk and the Seres shifted, depending on the literary context in which they are mentioned and the historical events the author witnessed.
I selected these passages using the PHI Latin Word Search of the Packard Humanities Institute (latin.packhum.org/search) to search for certain vocabulary and word forms across a far-reaching internal collection of Latin texts and fragments. This allowed me to locate instances of the words Seres (the people), Serica and Sinae (names for the land of the Seres), sericum and bombyx (silk), and more. After determining which of these instances seemed meaningful in the Latin texts—portraying a definite idea about silk or Seres, rather than a mere passing mention—I skimmed English translations to determine which ones I would focus on. I accessed these English translations in the (Digital) Loeb Classical Library (www.loebclassics.com) and, less frequently, ToposText (http://topostext.org). This allowed me to easily determine the context and relevance of each passage. After selecting the passages that appeared most fruitful for my research, I also picked one recent academic commentary—a supplementary text that offers comments on lines or words to provide context and explain the original text—for each passage, which I would use to deepen my understanding of the source material for these passages.
I worked on one passage at a time, taking on average a week and a half for each one. First, I created an original English translation of the passage. These translations were critical to my thinking, allowing me to best understand the text’s original meaning by closely reading it myself; such practice is standard when performing close readings in the field. In keeping with my intent to analyze the content of these passages, my translations remained comparatively literal and direct in both syntax and vocabulary, with minimal interpretative changes.
I then moved on to writing an original commentary for the passage. As was necessary, I consulted recent scholarship to contextualize and interpret the authors and their texts (aforementioned modern commentaries, standalone articles, academic books, and so on). Additionally, I explored adjacent Latin and Greek texts that related intertextually (allusion, shared vocabulary, and so on) but were not necessarily a focus of my research. When looking at these other primary sources in my commentary writing, I often referred to published English translations. My commentaries alone were typically three to five pages and focused on the grammatical, historical, literary, and ethnographic content of the text. That is to say, I clarified how the passage and author portrayed silk and/or the Seres while also contextualizing the portrayal itself. This often took the form of consolidating recent scholarship, tracing the origin of an idea and its subsequent iterations, and studying the use of vocabulary across authors. My later commentaries became increasingly complex and referenced one another more frequently. My research capabilities also developed across the course of the project, which led to increasingly long commentaries that considered content in greater depth.
Finally, I drafted an introduction to the text and commentary. The introduction situated each passage by discussing the author’s life and historical period, the text’s genre and purpose, and the appearance of the silk and/or Seres in the text. The introductions were typically two to three pages long.
To view an example of a completed translation and commentary, see my finished examination of Ammianus Marcellinus.
Textual Sources
All the following passages are ones I translated and commented on, and are listed in chronological order of completion:
- Res Gestae 23.6.67–68, Ammianus Marcellinus, fourth century CE historical account; chronicles, in surviving books, the history of the Roman Empire from 353 to 378 CE
- Georgics 2.109–135, Virgil, first century BCE didactic poetry; illustrates a range of agricultural processes and animal husbandry
- Satires 6.246–268, Juvenal, second century CE satire; offers scathing criticisms of contemporary times and societal norms in Rome
- De Beneficiis 7.9, Seneca the Younger, first century CE moral essay; discusses the politics of exchanging favors
- Silvae 3.4.78–99, Statius, first century CE occasional poetry; presents unconnected descriptions of varying places and moments
- De Bello Civile 1.8–32, Lucan, first century CE epic poetry; dramatizes the Roman Civil War between Caesar and Pompey
- Cynegetica 150–210, Grattius, first century BCE didactic poetry; explores hunting methods and game
Roman Perceptions of the Seres
Figure 1. A 1898 reconstruction of first-century CE Roman geographer Pomponius Mela’s world map. Italy lies in the center, while the Seres and India are on the top edge. (Konrad Miller, World Map of Pomponius Mela, 1898, map, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Pomponius_Mela.jpg.
To understand the Roman portrayal of the Seres, I primarily referred to Ammianus Marcellinus, Virgil, Lucan, and Grattius, through which I found a clear image of who the Romans believed the Seres to be. Before delving into my findings, I must first establish that the Romans and the Chinese never directly interacted. All their interactions were indirect and occurred only through trade before the Byzantine Empire because of the vast geographical distance between the two empires. (See Figure 1.) As such, the two empires’ perceptions of each other are speculative, failing to represent historical details of the empires as modern history understands them. The lack of direct contact intensified fantastical ideas about the Seres, and it explains why the Romans appear so “inaccurate” to us in their descriptions.
I found that a key aspect of Roman perspectives on the Seres included the conflation of Serica with India. This evidence can be seen in Grattius, who confuses the Tibetan Dog for the Serican Dog in his writing, either because of a mistranslation of Greek concepts into Latin or because of a greater Roman conflation in considering the relationship between India and Serica. Virgil also supports this confusion with his mention of the Seres’ “fleecy silk trees” preceding India’s tall trees in what is otherwise a geographically linear, west-to-east description of tree species, suggesting that the Romans were unsure of the exact geographical boundaries between Serica and India. It is not unfathomable that the Romans projected their governmental structure—provinces as part of a greater empire—upon the Seres, believing Serica to be a province of a greater “Indian Empire,” so to speak. It is certain, though, that the Romans at least conflated the two states.
I also discovered that the peaceful description of the Seres’ character intensified over time, carrying politically charged implications. Ammianus Marcellinus and Lucan illustrate these in two differing ways. Examining Ammianus Marcellinus best helped me understand the ethnography of the Seres; he provides the most extensive and recent description of Roman ethnography, including a lengthy section describing the Seres as harmonious, staunchly refusing to harm one another or neighboring peoples. This description follows a deep-rooted literary tradition, aligning with the oldest extant ethnographical text from the Greco-Roman world, Hippocrates’ fifth-century BCE text On Airs, Waters, and Places. In this text, Hippocrates outlines an early theory of environmental determinism, which assumed that the physical environment directly correlated with the behavior and temperament of a group of people. In classical times, this was the dominant theory in ethnography. Hence, Greco-Roman authors write that the mildly changing seasons of Asia do not invoke change in the body and result in passive, unwarlike people. After Hippocrates, successive generations of geographers and natural philosophers described the peoples of the Far East as increasingly peaceful. Ammianus Marcellinus follows this pattern, while also describing the debauchery and violence of people in the Near East in greater detail than his predecessors.
This dichotomy between the Far East and the Near East manifest in Ammianus Marcellinus is likely a result of the political relationship that the Romans maintained with both geographical areas. Continued expansion of the Later Roman Empire following 284 CE put the Romans in close military conflict with Persia and other states of the Near East, and depicting these peoples as aggressive and immoral allowed the Romans to justify their military campaigns in the area. Thus, Ammianus Marcellinus’ portrayal of a Near East violent by nature is politically charged, while the peaceful portrayal of the Seres invites comparison to further degrade the Persians.
Lucan’s political mention of the Seres appears in the opening of his epic, boldly claiming that with the amount of blood spilled in the Roman Civil War, the Roman Empire could have conquered Serica, Armenia, and the source of the Nile—all significantly distant regions at the time of writing in 61–65 CE. Though the Civil War indeed saw much bloodshed, this is an exaggeration suggesting that Romans did not anticipate direct contact with the Seres. From this, I further concluded that without external motivation stemming from direct contact, there was no reason for the ethnography of the Seres to be reformed; the description of the Seres remained peaceful in line with Hippocrates, while the peoples of the Near East were detailed as increasingly violent over time because of political pressures. In this way, Ammianus Marcellinus and Lucan reveal that the ethnography of the Seres is deeply politicized rather than drawn solely from observation.
To summarize my examination of the Seres, I found that the Romans conflated Serica with India to some extent while also maintaining the description of the Seres as idyllically peaceful, using ethnography as a political tool in military campaigns against the Near East.
Roman Attitudes Toward Silk
To understand the role of silk within Roman society, I primarily referred to Virgil, Seneca the Younger, Juvenal, and Statius. I discovered the specific connotations of silk in the Roman Empire, as well as the origins of those connotations. First, I found that the procedure of silk cultivation, as the Romans believed it to be, is indicative of the associations that silk held. Virgil first reports this method, claiming that the Seres comb fleece from trees to make silk, despite silk actually coming from silkworms. This description of silk trees is preceded by a description of combing cotton trees in Ethiopia; curiously, the classical world often confused India and Ethiopia, so Virgil is likely referring to Indian cotton, another product of the Far East. Two separate generalizations explain Virgil’s bizarre imagery. First, the Romans generalize the combing of fleece from sheep to create wool—the traditional Roman fabric—as the method by which raw material for fabric is acquired, hence the “combing” action. Second, the Romans generalize the cotton-bearing “tree” in assuming that other fabrics grow on similar trees; this idea may be influenced by the previously mentioned conflation of India and Serica. The lack of Roman knowledge in actual processes of silk-making reveals that silk is a fabric consistently foreign to the Romans. Although silk becomes popular in Roman culture over time, its foreignness continually renders it unacceptable according to traditional Roman social norms.
Seneca the Younger provided me with an early view of silk that is conservative and disapproving, given his philosophical distaste for decadence and short-term pleasures. Luxury was the foremost association that he set forth. He portrayed the women wearing silk as Roman matrons—the wives of elite, wealthy men—rather than common folk. Ammianus Marcellinus parallelled this statement, noting that silk was originally worn by nobility. However, this wealth is not inherently positive; morality was tightly linked to concepts such as luxury and wealth by many Romans, and Seneca the Younger viewed the hedonistic consumption of foreign silk as fundamentally un-Roman. He also viewed silk as a signal of sexual immorality because of its semi-transparent property—a stark contrast to the opaque fabrics native to the Mediterranean—claiming that silk-wearing women were not clothing themselves, but rather promiscuously exhibiting their near-naked bodies to the public, a sentiment shared with later authors. In the traditional Roman view, silk was immoral, untraditional, and lusty.
Through my readings, it is clear that the Roman issue with silk later concerned gender dynamics at a great scale. In the century following Seneca the Younger, Juvenal wrote a series of scathing criticisms of contemporary Roman society. In one satire, he spurns the common women who participate in the religious rites of the Floralia festival by chafing their skin with silk wraps and preparing for ceremonial battles. In Juvenal, silk appears as a symbol of female strength rather than functioning merely as a promiscuous fabric; it transforms the sexual woman into a violent figure. It is no surprise that Juvenal, a traditionalist, disavows this subversion of traditional Roman gender norms that demand that men be physically strong and woman be passive.
I found a further gendered element to silk in Statius. Importantly, his text offers insight into the foreignness of silk and its usage in the Near East. He wrote in an ode that the emperor Domitian’s favorite eunuch—a castrated male—wore silk to please him. Importantly, the concept of eunuchs was often associated with the Near East, where they served important political or religious roles; after eunuchs were adopted into Roman culture, they often took on a hypersexualized, exaggerated role. This view of the eunuch is not unlike that of silk itself; both are Eastern in origin, and both take on a sexual role in Rome. Eunuchs, who unwittingly defied the Roman gender binary in their emasculation, further complicated the gendered nature of once-womanly silk by wearing it. Over time, silk became a fabric that did not singularly mark sexual immorality but also signaled gender dynamics that were fundamentally subversive against traditional Roman society.
To conclude my findings on silk, I found that the Romans viewed silk as a bizarrely cultivated fabric that symbolized luxury and sexual immorality, and subverted gender dynamics, with much of its connotations deriving from its foreignness.
Limitations
As ambitious as my findings are, I recognize that they are ultimately limited by the texts themselves. The number of extant primary sources that survive from ancient history is a mere fraction of what originally existed, and it provides a meager glimpse into the Roman world. In the case of my research, very few texts discussed the Seres and silk, and even fewer discussed the topics in a meaningful way. They were written exclusively by men and largely written by elite, educated, native-born Romans. Thus, the texts and my findings reflected the opinions of more traditional, conservative Romans, a fact that corresponds with the overwhelmingly negative connotations of silk. Discussion of silk from a more diverse body of authors—e.g., women, non-elite citizens, people under Roman rule east of Greece—likely would have held silk in a more neutral or even positive light. Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, is believed by some scholars to be a native of Anatolia, a region that presumably had more affordable access to silk as well as a culture distinct from that of Roman Italy, and his comment on silk wearing is starkly neutral in comparison with the negative opinions of other authors. Any perspectives outside of these authors, however, sadly continue to go unknown.
Concluding Thoughts
There are various areas that I could investigate to further my research, but for the time being, I am content with my findings. More importantly, I satisfied my personal curiosity on the topic. As a Chinese American, I found it both curious and upsetting that the exoticization of “the East” and its goods is not a modern invention, but one that has been deeply ingrained in societal attitudes for millennia. However, understanding this is applicable in contextualizing and approaching modern attitudes toward Asia. Seeing the actualization of my work reminded me that ancient history is not the stagnant study of a past long gone; it is fruitful and teeming with life, the bridge between us and the ideas of the past that continue to have modern legacies. And frankly, we yet have much to learn about it and from it.
I would first like to thank my mentor, Tejas Aralere, for being as thrilled about this project as I was from the start and guiding me in the research process. None of this would have been possible without his tutelage. I also would like to thank my donors, the Global Racial and Social Inequality Lab and Mr. Dana Hamel, for their generosity and investment in my research. Last but not least, thank you to my mom, aunt, and dearest friend for putting up with my academic jibber-jabber throughout the whole affair and treating me to brunch nonetheless.
Select Bibliography
All sources listed were used as background information or synthesized during commentary writing.
Ahl, Frederick M. Lucan: An Introduction. Cornell University Press, 1976.
den Boeft, Jan, Jan Willem Drijvers, Daniël den Hengst, and Hans Teitler. Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XXIII. Brill, 1998.
Coffey, Michael. Roman Satire. Bristol Classical Press, 1976.
Courtney, Edward. A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal. Berkeley: California Classical Studies, 2013.
Griffin, Miram T. Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics. Oxford University Press, 1976.
Hildebrandt, Berit. “Silk Production and Trade in the Roman Empire.” In Silk: Trade & Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity, edited by Berit Hildebrandt and Carole Gillis. Oxbow Books, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh1dsv4.8.
Kelly, Gavin. Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian. University of Edinburgh, 2008.
Kennedy, Rebecca F., C. Sydnor Roy, and Max L. Goldman. Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation. Hackett, 2013.
Miller, Konrad. World Map of Pomponius Mela. 1898. Map. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Pomponius_Mela.jpg.
Newlands, Carole E. Statius, Poet Between Rome and Naples. Bristol University Press, 2013.
Roche, Paul. Lucan: De Bello Civili, Book 1. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Russell, Craig M. “The Most Unkindest Cut: Gender, Genre, and Castration in Statius ‘Achilleid” and ‘Silvae’ 3.4.” The American Journal of Philology 135, no. 1 (2014): 87–121. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24559852.
Schneider, Pierre. “The So-called Confusion between India and Ethiopia: The Eastern and Southern Edges of the Inhabited World from the Greco-Roman Perspective.” In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Geography, edited by Serena Bianchetti, Michele R. Cataudella, and Hans-Joachim Gehrke. Brill, 2015.
Thayer, Bill. “Introduction to Grattius.” Last modified December 19, 2009. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Grattius/Introductio….
Thomas, Richard F. Virgil: Georgics. Vol. 1: Books I–II. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Author and Mentor Bios
Karter Mingze Hanley, currently residing in Derry, New Hampshire, will graduate from the University of New Hampshire in spring 2027 with a bachelor of arts in classics. He is a member of the Hamel Honors and Scholars College and an officer for the UNH chapter of the Eta Sigma Phi Classical Honors Society. His curiosity about the relationship between Rome and China originated in middle school, and he was excited to see his research come to fruition with Tejas Aralere. His research was funded by the January Research Opportunity Program, offered through the Global Racial and Social Inequality Lab, and by the Research Experience and Apprenticeship Program, offered through the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research. Karter gained an understanding of the cross-cultural nature of history and strengthened his analytical skills through translation and idea synthesis. He submitted to Inquiry at the encouragement of his mentor in hopes of increasing interest in this underexplored historical niche. After graduation, he aspires to continue his education by pursuing graduate school.
Tejas Aralere is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 2023. His research explores intersections and interactions in the scientific, cultural, and literary traditions of the ancient Mediterranean and India.
Copyright 2025 © Karter Mingze Hanley
