Le Sénat romain d’André Chastagnol

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André Chastagnol worked on the Roman Senate for forty years. In his book published in 1992, that was the fruit of this extended reflection, he shows that the evolution of the senatorial institution under the Empire can only be understood by looking at its history over the long term. For him, the history of the Senate is less a political history than it is the social and institutional history of the remodeling and recomposition of the highest level of the Roman elite — and of its constitution as an organized group. The fundamental ambition remains to identify the stages that mark the passage from a group defined by the fact that they had been magistrates to the formation of a veritable social group, including women and children in the same system of statutory privilege. The detailed study of the widening of the notion of the senatorial order poses a fundamental problem, namely, the status, personal or otherwise, of the nobility.