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.
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.
Empire, Status, and the Law Ando, Clifford
The American journal of legal history,
11/2023, Letnik:
63, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
One phase in the long history of Roman citizenship ended in 212 ce, when the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free-born residents of the empire. This moment subsequently came to ...be understood as inevitable, as though the juridical unification of the world had been the project of empire all along—and virtually all subsequent European empires have been implicated in the legacy of that tradition. But the history of Roman citizenship is neither unitary nor continuous. This article interrogates processes of juridification in the relationship between citizenship and empire. Some of these concern the Roman citizen body itself, which on one reading was gradually transformed from a collective of self-ruling agents to a community of economic actors. Others concern the effects on alien political and religious communities of the appearance of Roman tribunals as courts of the second instance. The legacies of Roman citizenship in modern forms of subjectivity should be understood against this complex history.
Aim of the volume is the analysis of the entanglement of religious communication and city life during an arc of time that is characterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments. Bringing ...together textual analyses and archaelogical case studies in a comparative perspective, the volume zooms in on the historical context of the advanced imperial and late antique Mediterranean space (2nd–8th centuries CE).
