Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include Republican oratory, including Cicero’s, and the political history of the late Roman Republic. She is the author of The End of the Roman Republic, 146–44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh University Press 2013), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge University Press 2013); she is co-editor of Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions (Oxford University Press 2018) and Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome: Speech, Audience and Decision (Cambridge University Press 2018).
W. Jeffrey Tatum is Professor of Classics at the Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). His interests focus on the history and literature of the Roman Republic. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (1999), Always I am Caesar (2008), Plutarch: The Rise of Rome, with Chris Pelling (2013), Athens to Aotearoa: Greece and Rome in New Zealand Literature and Society, with Diana Burton and Simon Perris (2017), and Quintus Cicero: A Brief Handbook on Canvassing for Office (2018). He is currently working on a biography of Mark Antony and, with Laurel Fulkerson, a history of republican literature.
Jerry Toner is Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is author of Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (2009) and Leisure and Ancient Rome (1995) as well as various articles on aspects of non-elite life in ancient Rome.
Uwe Walter has been Professor of Ancient History at Bielefeld University since 2004. His Roman studies include Die Frühen Römischen Historiker (FRH), 2 vols. (text, trans., commentary, with Hans Beck, 2001/2004) and Memoria und res publica: Zur Geschichtskultur im republikanischen Rom (2004), as well as several papers, most recently ‘Mehr als Mythos und Konstruktion? Die römische Königszeit’ (Historische Zeitschrift 302, 2016). His overview of the political order of the Roman Republic (Politische Ordnung in der römischen Republik (Enzyklopädie der griechisch-römischen Antike, 6), Berlin), appeared in 2017.
Alexander Yakobson is Associate Professor of Ancient History, Hebrew University. His main fields of research are democracy, popular politics, public opinion and elections in the ancient world, the political culture of the Roman Republic and early Principate and the status of the imperial family. In addition to numerous papers, he is the author of Elections and Electioneering in Rome: A Study in the Political System of the Late Republic (Stuttgart 1999). Research other than ancient history includes the topics of democracy, national identity, nation-state and the rights of national minorities, religion and state in Israel and in Western democracies.
Abbreviations
| CIL | 1862– . Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin. |
| ILS | Dessau, H. 1892-1916. Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. Berlin. |
| FRHist | Cornell, T.J. ed. 2013. The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols. Oxford. |
| IG | 1873– . Inscriptiones Graecae consilio et auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Berolinensis et Brandenburgensis editae. Berlin. |
| ILLRP | Degrassi, A. 1965. Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae. 2nd ed. Florence. |
| LTUR | Steinby, E. M., ed. 1993–2001. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. Rome. |
| RE | 1890–1980. Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart. |
| Syll.3 | Dittenberger, W. 1915–1924. Sylloge inscriptionum graecarum. 3rd ed. Leipzig. |
References to ancient authors and their works follow the style of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, Oxford, 2012).
Abbreviations of classical journals follow the style of L’Année philologique (Paris, 1912–).
Introduction
Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag
The decision to dedicate an entire volume to the study of the political culture of the Roman Republic reflects what is currently the most comprehensive approach to the subject traditionally labelled as Roman Republican politics (for a definition of the concept of ‘political culture’ and its history in the field of Roman studies, see Chapter 1). This volume analyses the Roman political world through the wider lenses of ‘Roman political culture’, in full recognition that, alongside the working of the political and religious institutions and their related officers, a system of shared values, traditions and communicative strategies played a fundamental role in the social and political life of Rome throughout the Republic
The subject has been at the centre of an intensely contested debate for centuries and Part I (supplemented by Chapter 1) traces the modern history of this. Needless to say, the subject goes right back to contemporary discourse, beginning for us with Polybius, whose account perhaps already foreshadows some of the wider approaches now being advocated – and it is to the ancient accounts that Part II is dedicated. More recently, modern historians have broadly approached the study of the Republican political life of Rome following three main strands: first, the study of its legal system, its institutions and rules and regulations; second, the investigation of the social interactions amongst the members of the elite (which, under the impetus of neo-Marxist approaches of the later twentieth century, extended to a growing interest in their interactions with the wider Roman people and the latter’s socioeconomic demands); and finally, the analysis of the ‘political grammar’, as Meier (1980 [1966]) called it, which put an emphasis on shared beliefs, values, myths, traditions and symbolic communication of the political system. Each of these approaches has yielded important results, which, however, taken separately, provide a somewhat fragmented view of Roman political world.
By bringing together an analysis of the fundamental components of Roman political culture (ideas and values in Chapters 28 and 30; civic and religious rituals in Chapters 1, 33 and 34; myths, imaginary and space in Chapters 34 and 35; communicative strategy in Chapter 32, the idea and practice of justice in Chapter 31 and the role of violence and bribery in Chapter 29) with the study of institutions, including magistracies and priesthoods (Part III) and the investigation of the political actors in Roman Republican society (Part IV), we aim to provide the first integrated view of the political life of the Roman Republic, although without superimposing one uniform reading on the volume or on individual chapters.
For the first time, this volume gathers what is new in the study of Roman political culture in one place and includes studies of Roman Republican institutions analysed in their formal rules and prescriptions (Part III) and in their shared ritual practices, informing values, foundation myths and stories (Part V). Joined with considerations of the social dimension of this political system (Part IV), this approach sheds light on the cultural, ethical and symbolic network of opinions and beliefs, and integrates it with its institutional contexts and actions in specific historical contexts (Part VI). It follows that, to a certain extent, it is appropriate to say that one of the ambitions of the collection as a whole is to explore further the heuristic potential of the model that Martin Jehne (2005) has labelled Institutionalität. This approach moves away from