Social Status and Prestige in the Graeco-Roman World

Abstract

Social status and the prestige associated with it played a crucial role in Graeco-Roman society, constituting the basis for social stratification and shaping a complex web of social, political, economic and cultural relations. The sixteen papers assembled in this volume take a fresh look at the study of social status and prestige in antiquity and discuss a variety of key aspects and issues of the topic, including the formation and legal definition of status categories and hierarchies, the dynamic interrelationship between status and prestige, manifestations of status dissonance and social nonconformity, the role of prestige as a resource of political power, and the representation and display of status through the media of honorific inscriptions, funerary monuments, status symbols and prestige goods. The volume covers a broad geographical and chronological scope which stretches from Roman Italy to the Greek East over the period from the early principate to late antiquity.