The Republican Aventine And Rome S Social Order

A new consideration of life on the Republican-era Aventine Hill uncovers a diverse urban landscape

Scholars, military men, and casual observers alike have devoted significant energy to understanding how the armies of the Roman Middle Republic (300 – 100 BCE) were able to function so effectively, examining their organization, hierarchy, recruitment, tactics, and ideology in close detail. But what about the concerns, interests, and goals of the soldiers who powered it? The present study argues that the military forces of the Middle Republic were not simply cogs in the Roman military machine, but rather dynamic and diverse social units that played a key role in shaping an ever-changing Mediterranean world. Indeed, the soldiers in the armies of this period not only developed connections with one another, but also formed bonds with non-military personnel who traveled with as well as inhabitants of the places where they campaigned. The connections soldiers developed while on campaign gave them significant power and agency as a group. Throughout the third and second centuries BCE, soldiers took collective actions, ranging from mutiny to defection to looting, to ensure that their economic, social, and political interests were advanced and protected. Recognizing the communities that Roman soldiers formed and the power that they exerted not only reframes our understanding of the Middle Republic and its armies, but fundamentally alters how we conceptualize the turbulent years of the Late Republic and the massive social, political, and military changes that followed.

This volume has its origin in the 14th University of South Africa Classics Colloquium in which the topic and title of the event were inspired by Josiah Ober’s seminal work Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989). Indeed the influence this work has had on later research in all aspects of the Greek and Roman world is reflected by the diversity of the papers collected here, which take their cue and starting point from the argument that, in Ober’s words (1989, 338): ‘Rhetorical communication between masses and elites... was a primary means by which the strategic ends of social stability and political order were achieved.’ However, the contributors to the volume have also sought to build further on such conclusions and to offer new perceptions about a spread of issues affecting mass and elite interaction in a far wider number of locations around the ancient Mediterranean over a much longer chronological span. Thus the conclusions here suggest that once the concept of mass and elite was established in the minds of Greeks and later Romans it became a universal component of political life and from there was easily transferred to economic activity or religion. In casting the net beyond the confines of Athens (although the city is also represented here) to – amongst others – Syracuse, the cities of Asia Minor, Pompeii and Rome, and to literary and philosophical discourse, in each instance that interplay between the wider body of the community and the hierarchically privileged can be shown to have governed and directed the thoughts and actions of the participants.

Defined by borders both physical and conceptual, the Roman city stood apart as a concentration of life and activity that was legally, economically, and ritually divided from its rural surroundings. Death was a key area of control, and tombs were relegated outside city walls from the Republican period through Late Antiquity. Given this separation, an unexpected phenomenon marked the Augustan and early Imperial periods: Roman cities developed suburbs, built-up areas beyond their boundaries, where the living and the dead came together in densely urban environments. Life and Death in the Roman Suburb examines these districts, drawing on the archaeological remains of cities across Italy to understand the character of Roman suburbs and to illuminate the factors that led to their rise and decline, focusing especially on the tombs of the dead. Whereas work on Roman cities has tended to pass over funerary material, and research on death has concentrated on issues seen as separate from urbanism, Emmerson introduces a new paradigm, considering tombs within their suburban surroundings of shops, houses, workshops, garbage dumps, extramural sanctuaries, and major entertainment buildings, in order to trace the many roles they played within living cities. Her investigations show how tombs were not passive memorials, but active spaces that facilitated and furthered the social and economic life of the city, where relationships between the living and the dead were an enduring aspect of urban life.

Showcases new approaches that reveal the remarkable transformation of Roman and Italian societies during the Middle Republican period.

Often identified as a major cause of the Republic's collapse, the absence of a professional police force in classical Rome was in fact a characteristic shared with other premodern states. The mechanisms of self-regulation that operated as a stabilizing force are examined in this study.

This widely respected study of social conflicts between the patrician elite and the plebeians in the first centuries of the Roman republic has now been enhanced by a new chapter on material culture, updates to individual chapters, an updated bibliography, and a new introduction. Analyzes social conflicts between patricians and plebeians in early republican Rome Includes chapters by leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic illuminating social, economic, legal, religious, military, and political aspects as well as the reliability of historical sources Contributors have written addenda for the new edition, updating their chapters in light of recent scholarship

Libertas and Res Publica examines two key concepts of Western political thinking: freedom and republic. Contributors address important new questions on the principles of, and essential connection between res publica and libertas in Roman thought and Republican history.