Corruption and the Public Sphere in Late Republican Rome

Abstract

This article deals with the of whether contemporary concepts of corruption can be usefully applied to the study of Roman society in the late republican period. First , it shows that specific problems arise if we equate modern semantics of ‘private’ and ‘public’ with the dichotomy between ‘privatus’ and ‘publicus’ in the sources. These areas were interconnected and, thus, the Romans did not identify overlaps between the two spheres as deviant in itself. Nevertheless, the article next argues that the Romans did identify illegitimate interferences between the spheres; the identifier was the question of whose interest actors represented. The article concludes by showing that the evaluation of corruption phenomena was subject to the dominant paradigm of social stratification. It explains why these individual evaluations sometimes appear as contradictory to the modern observer, even though they follow the internal logic of Roman society.