—Karter Mingze Hanley (Mentor: Tejas S. Aralere)
Research into the social, economic, and political impacts of the Silk Road, a former network of international trade routes linking the Roman and Chinese empires, has proliferated since the late nineteenth century. However, there is no comprehensive, modern examination of Roman portrayals of the Seres, the people producing silk in the east, or attitudes towards silk in Roman society. To examine these two topics, I worked closely with seven passages discussing the Seres or silk. These passages, all coming from different Roman authors, spanned diverse ancient genres and various timeframes from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE to determine how stances shifted depending on literary and historical contexts. This effort revealed that the Romans at times conflated the Seres with the Indians, and they employed an idyllically peaceful description of the Seres as a result of ethnographic theory and political motivations. The Romans assumed a strange method underlying silk cultivation, and they viewed it as a foreign fabric symbolizing luxury, sexual immorality, and subverted gender dynamics.
