Describes and integrates the contrasting histories of different parts of the empire. The Roman empire during the period framed by the accession of Septimus Severus in 193 and the rise of Diocletian ...in 284 has conventionally been regarded as one of 'crisis'. Between 235 and 284, at least eighteen men held the throne of the empire, for an average of less than three years, a reckoning which does not take into account all the relatives and lieutenants with whom those men shared power. Compared to the century between the accession of Nerva and the death of Commodus, this appears to be a period of near unintelligibility. The middle of the century also witnessed catastrophic, if temporary, ruptures in the territorial integrity of the empire.
Numerous Roman grants to local communities of the right to use local law survive in contemporaneous copies starting in the second century BCE. Contemporaneous with these grants of autonomy, Rome ...urged institutional changes that reconstituted local elites as aristocracies of office. By contrast, evidence that individuals identified themselves as experts in local law survives in bulk only starting in the second century CE. The paper urges that the superimposition of Roman courts as courts of the second instance created a role in local polities for expertise in local law in mediation with these Roman courts, and that local elites sought to monopolize this role and the technocratic prestige that it brought.
Roman religion has long presented a number of challenges to historians approaching the subject from a perspective framed by the three Abrahamic religions. The Romans had no sacred text that espoused ...its creed or offered a portrait of its foundational myth. They described relations with the divine using technical terms widely employed to describe relations with other humans. Indeed, there was not even a word in classical Latin that corresponds to the English wordreligion.
InThe Gods, the State, and the Individual, John Scheid confronts these and other challenges directly. If Roman religious practice has long been dismissed as a cynical or naïve system of borrowed structures unmarked by any true piety, Scheid contends that this is the result of a misplaced expectation that the basis of religion lies in an individual's personal and revelatory relationship with his or her god. He argues that when viewed in the light of secular history as opposed to Christian theology, Roman religion emerges as a legitimate phenomenon in which rituals, both public and private, enforced a sense of communal, civic, and state identity.
Since the 1970s, Scheid has been one of the most influential figures reshaping scholarly understanding of ancient Roman religion.The Gods, the State, and the Individualpresents a translation of Scheid's work that chronicles the development of his field-changing scholarship.
While ancient states are often characterized in terms of the powers that they claimed to possess, the contributors to this book argue that they were in fact fundamentally weak, both in the exercise ...of force outside of war and in the infrastructural and regulatory powers that such force would, in theory, defend. InAncient States and Infrastructural Powera distinguished group of scholars examines the ways in which early states built their territorial, legal, and political powers before they had the capabilities to enforce them.
The volume brings Greek and Roman historians together with specialists on early Mesopotamia, late antique Persia, ancient China, Visigothic Iberia, and the Inca empire to compare various models of state power across regional and disciplinary divisions. How did the polis become the body that regulates property rights? Why did Chinese and Persian states maintain aristocracies that sometimes challenged their autocracies? How did Babylon and Rome promote the state as the custodian of moral goods? In worlds without clear borders, how did societies from Rome to Byzantium come to share legal and social identities rooted in concepts of territory? From the Inca empire to Visigothic Iberia, why did tributary practices reinforce territorial ideas about membership?
Contributors address how states first claimed and developed the ability to delineate territory, promote laws, and establish political identity; and they investigate how the powers that states appropriated came to be seen as their natural and normal domain.
Contributors: Clifford Ando, R. Alan Covey, Damián Fernández, Anthony Kaldellis, Emily Mackil, Richard Payne, Seth Richardson, Wang Haicheng, John Weisweiler.
The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates inLaw, Language, and Empire in the ...Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield.
Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools-most prominently analogy and fiction-used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.
In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.
What did the Romans know about their gods? Why did they perform the rituals of their religion, and what motivated them to change those rituals? To these questions Clifford Ando proposes simple ...answers: In contrast to ancient Christians, who had faith, Romans had knowledge, and their knowledge was empirical in orientation. In other words, the Romans acquired knowledge of the gods through observation of the world, and their rituals were maintained or modified in light of what they learned. After a preface and opening chapters that lay out this argument about knowledge and place it in context,The Matter of the Godspursues a variety of themes essential to the study of religion in history.
Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
In 212 CE, the emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to nearly all free-born residents of the Roman Empire. In doing so, he transformed not only his own, but the very ideal of empire and statehood ...in Europe. This volume first inquires into the contexts of Caracalla's act in his own day. Rome was an ancient empire: it had traditionally ruled over populations that were conceived and governed as distinct units, a practice that was both strategic and ideological. What were the practical and political effects of a universalizing ideology in this context? Was there a reorientation of private social and legal practice in response? And what politics of exclusion came to apply, now that citizenship no longer served to distinguish persons of higher and lower status? The volume subsequently traces the history of citizenship in universalizing ideologies and legal practice from late antiquity to the codification of law in Europe in the nineteenth century. Caracalla's act was then repeatedly cited as the ideal toward which sovereign polities should strive, be they states or empires. Citizenship and law were thereby made preeminent among the universalisms of European statecraft.
