Abstract
AbstractSince Mommsen, it has been a tenet of Roman history that Augustus transformed the ‘senatorial order’ into a hereditary class, which encompassed senators, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the male line. This paper shows that the idea of a hereditaryordo senatoriusis a myth without foundation in the evidence. Augustus and his successors conferred new rights and duties upon relatives of senators, but did not change their formal rank. Moreover, the new regulations applied not to three generations of descendants, but only to persons who stood under a senator'spatria potestasduring his lifetime. Emperors protected the honour and property of thesefilii familiasof senators, in order to incentivise them to participate in politics and invest their wealth into munificence. The Supplementary Material available online gives all known early imperial holders of the titleclarissimus virin the province of Africa (Supplementary Appendix 1), all known early imperialclarissimi iuuenes(Supplementary Appendix 2) and all known early imperialclarissimi pueri(Supplementary Appendix 3).
Highlights
Since Mommsen, it has been a tenet of Roman history that Augustus transformed the ‘senatorial order’ into a hereditary class, which encompassed senators, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the male line
In the third volume of Römisches Staatsrecht, Mommsen identi ed six rights and duties that separated members of the ‘senatorial order’ from other citizens: they had the right to wear the toga with the broad purple stripe; they bore the status designation clarissimus; they participated in meetings of the Senate; they were prohibited from entering marriages with descendants of slaves; they were banned from engaging in certain forms of commerce; and they were exempt from the duty to nance acts of muni cence in their cities of origin
By describing the ‘senatorial order’ as a hereditary aristocracy, Mommsen offered later generations of scholars a powerful model to understand the legal structure of the Roman elite and the terminology employed in ancient texts
Summary
124; Talbert 1996: 326; Galsterer 2000; Burton 2012: 1347; Santangelo 2012: 6144. 2 Talbert 1984: 39–47, esp. 39; Eck 1998: 67–8; Alföldy 2011: 150–62, esp. 151. 3 Mommsen 1887: 466–75, quoting 466 and 467, ‘erblichen Pairie’ and ‘Erbadel’. 4 Chastagnol 1973; 1992: 31–48; Nicolet 1976: 32–8. 5 Quotations from Nicolet 1976: 35, ‘ambigüité’ and Chastagnol 1973: 585; 1992: 36, ‘confusion’. Hopkins and Burton explicitly endorsed this hypothesis They argued that the existence of the ‘order’ was one of the major reasons why so many descendants of senior of ceholders withdrew from politics: ‘In sum, the sons of senators inherited elements of their fathers’ status, and that alone diminished their need to become full members of the senate in Rome.’[11] But there is a problem with this argument. I trace the ways in which descendants of senators are described in law (I), literature (II) and epigraphy (III), and explore the meaning of the new status designation clarissimus (IV) These different bodies of evidence show that senatorial rank did not become hereditary in the early Empire and that the Romans did not conceive of the ‘senatorial order’ as a group distinct from the ‘Senate’. Augustus and his successors sought to increase political participation amongst of ceholding families both for ideological reasons and because they depended on the wealth of large landowners to nance public services in Rome (VII)
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