Late Republican Period Research Articles

Integrated GPR and archaeological investigations to characterise the Palatino’s area and Coliseum Valley (Forum, Roma, Italy)

From 2001 to 2008 a series of archaeological investigations made side-by-side with geophysical surveys at the Palatino Hill and the Coliseum Valley, nearest Elagabalo’s Thermae (Forum, Roma), a sequence of complex buildings related to the Roman period between the late republican and Severo’s age have been detected. The oldest building is a domus of the late Republican period which is located nearest a tabernae, in front of a line connecting the Coliseum Valley and the Roman Forum. The fire-ra...

Roman Republican Imperialism in Italy and the West

Over the last two decades, archaeologists and historians have undertaken a substantial reevaluation of the Roman republic's expansion in Italy and the West. The emerging picture is of an imperial experience that was complex and nuanced yet also quite uneven in its impact and consequences than that illuminated by an earlier generation. The domi nant descriptive vocabulary in these volumes?integration, identity, continuity, and innovation?and the less-frequent use of the term Romanization reflects this change in per spective. In many ways, this evolution in thought is indicative of our expanding knowledge of events and developments in the Late Republican period and of a greater understand ing of the difficulties and risks of advancing overly simplis tic explanations of human agency and intent. I applaud the editors and authors of these volumes for the care and thought they put into their papers; there is good value in most all of them.

Robert Coates-Stephens: Porta Maggiore, monument and landscape. Archaeology and topography of the southern Esquiline from the late Republican period to the present. With an appendix edited by Antonella Parisi. Axonometric reconstructions by Eamon Canniffe. Survey drawings by Nicola Macchia, Luca Cevenini, Marco Campolucci and Simone Quilici

Robert Coates-Stephens: Porta Maggiore, monument and landscape. Archaeology and topography of the southern Esquiline from the late Republican period to the present. With an appendix edited by Antonella Parisi. Axonometric reconstructions by Eamon Canniffe. Survey drawings by Nicola Macchia, Luca Cevenini, Marco Campolucci and Simone Quilici. Roma: ’L’Erma‘ di Bretschneider 2004. 202 S. 135 Abb. 4°. (Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma. Supplementi. 12).

:The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942

The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village 1857-1942, by Henrietta Harrison. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005. xii + 207 pp. US$40.00 (hardcover), US$16.95 (paperback). This is a wonderful book, which I recommend highly for use in a variety of academic courses on Chinese history and culture as well as for general reading pleasure. By concentrating on the life of a single individual, Henrietta Harrison has significantly enhanced our understanding of Chinese history and culture in general during a critical period of transition. Her book is a splendid example of the value of studying particular individuals, areas and events to expand, refine and enliven the relatively abstract generalizations of more broadly based studies. The "man awakened from dreams" in the title is Liu Dapeng, an impoverished scholar living in a small village in Shanxi Province in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We learn about him principally from his voluminous writings-more than 400 handwritten volumes, including a diary, an autobiography, a local gazetteer, travel observations, a plan for local flood defenses, a collection of local superstitions, a family genealogy, family regulations, essays on various topics and many volumes of poetry. Harrison has judiciously used these materials, as well as interviews with Liu's descendents, local records and numerous other sources, to draw us into Liu's world. Liu Dapeng was not a typical example of his time or place ("Real people are never typical" p. 7); rather, he provides a striking example of idealized Confucian rectitude and propriety. He thought of himself as an exemplar of Confucian values and earned the respect of his neighbors for his honesty and sense of justice. But his Confucian thought and behavior were not sufficient qualifications for the appointment to government office to which he aspired; he considered himself a failure for never having passed the national civil service examinations, though he was one of a very select few who succeeded in county and provincial examinations, becoming a member of the lower gentry class. In his determination to lead a Confucian life, adherence to traditional expectations of filial behavior was Liu's foremost concern. He continually chided himself for caring insufficiently for his parents and ancestors, to the unrealistic (and unwittingly egotistical) extent that he was convinced that natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and personal tragedies like the death of a child were Heaven's retribution for his personal moral failings. As a Confucian exemplar, Liu had enormous respect for tradition and great distrust for the "modernization" efforts that characterized the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period in which he lived. He felt increasingly isolated after the revolution of 1911, writing in his journal: "Everyone is for the reforms, and I alone hold to the old ways. Everyone is destroying the bonds of relationships, and I alone hold to principles" (p. 93). He felt that concepts of democracy and progress then in vogue threatened the essential moral foundation of society, though ineluctably he was forced to make concessions to the times and participate, albeit peripherally, in the process of change he abhorred. …

La formula d(ecreto) d(ecurionum) attestata epigraficamente in alcune città della Apulia et Calabria

The formula d(ecreto) d(ecurionum) and her extension, stated in the inscriptions of Aedanum, Brundisium, Compsa, Tarentum and Venusta in the regio secunda Augustea, is examined for drawing a picture of the daily political practice of decuriones. In this context, two brick-stamps of a magistrate are also proposed. The bricks have been found in territorium of Teanum Apulutn, in the North of Apulia, and they are dated in late republican period.

Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in Central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era

How should we understand the ways in which the regions of Italy were affected by Roman imperialism? This book, which is the first full-scale treatment of ancient Umbria in any language, takes a balanced view of the region's history in the first millennium BC, focusing on local actions andmotivations as much as the effect of outside influences and Roman policies. Through a careful reading of all the types of evidence it provides an important challenge to traditional treatments emphasising the 'Romanization' of the region, arguing that this is a poor explanation for the complexity oflocal societies in the late Republican period. Instead it proposes that other trends, particularly the organization of states, help to explain the fascinating plurality of identities that are evident in the imperial period and allow us to appreciate the diversity of local societies that emerged inboth mountain and lowland areas of Umbria.

I decreti decurionali di Brindisi

We have analysed three decrees of the Brundisium decurions, known from epigraphic copies : NSA, 1910, 146-147 ; CIL, IX, 47 e CIL, I2, 3173. The first two texts are decrees for young members of important families of the town. We have collated the manuscript of the 16th century, on which the edition of CIL, IX, 47 is based. In this way we have added to this text two more lines, previously published in CIL as an autonomous epigraph (CIL, IX, 187). The third decree belongs to the late republican period. It is handed down by a composite inscription containing name and cursus honorum of the late magistrate, followed by the honorary decree concerning this personage and another person, both alive when the honour was conferred.

The temple of the imperial cult (Augusteum) at Narona and its statues: interim report

Ancient Narona (the modern village of Vid, near Metković in Croatia; figs, 1a-b) was an important Roman colony in the valley of the river Neretva/Naron (Greek)/Naro (Latin) near the E coast of the Adriatic. The first mention of the place comes from Pseudo-Scylax and Theopompus in the 4th c. B.C. By the mid 2nd c. B.C. there was an emporium located at the top of the river delta, on the same spot where the forum of the colonia would be built in the last decades of the 1st c. B.C. That location was of strategic importance for communication between the Adriatic and the interior as far inland as the Sava and Danube rivers, and from the Late Republican period Narona connected the coast with the interior (the areas of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina) (fig. 2).

The Nomenclature Patterns of the Roman Upper Class in the Early Empire: a Statistical Analysis

From Republican times Romans, unlike any other people known to them, had three names, praenomen, nomen (gentilicium) and cognomen. In the first and second centuries A.D. Roman writers assumed that the possession of tria nomina distinguished the civis Romanus from the peregrinus.Roman practice in the late Republican period was not always in accordance with the above. Cognomina were not adopted in official inscriptions by the Roman state as a constituent of the nomenclature of a senator or an eques until the end of the second century B.C. even though the use of cognomina by patrician families dates from the second half of the fourth century B.C. Despite this official recognition some families such as those of Marius and the Antonii never used cognomina. There were also many individuals who used an additional cognomen (or agnomen) which resulted from a military honour, adoption or the need to mark separate identity from other branches of a family. The practice of employing tria nomina, therefore, was never universal among the upper classes during the late Republic. The aim of this paper is to present a statistical analysis of the nomenclature patterns by which all individuals who can confidently be considered of senatorial or equestrian status are known to us. In the case of women, the study is restricted to those from the senatorial class.

Avdaces: A Study in Political Phraseology

‘Audax venali comitatur Curio lingua’ wrote Lucan in a familiar line of his Bellum Civile, at a time when C. Scribonius Curio the younger had been a hundred years in his grave. Lucan was not the first to describe Curio as audax; Velleius Paterculus did so before him: ‘bello autem civili … non alius maiorem flagrantioremque quam C. Curio tribunus plebis subiecit facem, vir nobilis, eloquens, audax,’, 11, 48, 3. It seems, indeed, that the attribute audax was traditional for Curio and, if this is so, the tradition may well have originated in Curio's own time. His title to a place in Roman history rested on the fact that he changed sides at a critical juncture—‘momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum’ (Lucan IV, 819). And what earned him, whether in his lifetime or posthumously, the derogatory attribute audax was, I think, his political career, notably the record of his tribuneship, no less, if not more, than his character. Audax, as originally applied to Curio, was very probably a conventional partisan appellation which classified him more effectively as a political type than it characterized him as an individual. For the derogatory audax, as I shall presently try to show, belongs in the late Republican period to the current phraseology of political backbiting and it carries a distinctly political connotation. It is the purpose of this paper to consider what audax denotes in the vocabulary of Roman political life in the late Republic as well as who are regarded as audaces in Roman politics.

The Via Claudia Valeria

The Via Claudia Valeria was the prolongation of the Via Valeria to its natural termination upon the shores of the Adriatic. During the Republican period the principal lines of communication between Rome and almost every part of Italy were fixed and settled, even if they had not become viae munitae; and so it remained for the Emperors to develop this system and bring it to its logical conclusion. The old Via Valeria linked Rome with Alba Fucens, and, by natural extensions, with the country of the Marsi and the Paeligni. The Emperor Claudius went a step further, and, by connecting the Via Valeria at Cerfennia (Collarmele) with the Mare Superum at the Ostia Aterni (Pescara), not only brought the Paeligni and the Marrucini into direct connection with the capital, but opened up a most important route between the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. With the Paeligni and the Marrucini, through whose territory the Via Claudia Valeria passed, the Romans never had any serious trouble. We first hear of relations between Rome and these people in the middle of the fourth century. No serious hostilities are mentioned and Roman armies appear to have been able to march through their territory without opposition.; In 304 B.C. Rome granted, a treaty to the Marrucini, Marsi, Paeligni and Frentani, all of whom remained generally loyal in aftertimes. The Via Salaria, which, in its mature form, connected Rome with Ausculum and Castrum Truentinum, a point on the Adriatic coast somewhat to the north of the mouth of the Aternus, was of very early origin. To the late Republican period (117 B.C.) belongs the Via Caecilia, which branched off from the Via Salaria in the valley of the Farfa (at the 36th mile) and, after passing through Amiternum, the chief town of the northern Sabini, reached Hadria and the coast.

Architectural terracotta ornamentation in Rome from the sixth to the fourth century B.C.

The interesting constructions of the late republican period, and the great buildings of imperial Rome, loom so large before us that it is difficult to realise the remains of earlier periods when temples and other public edifices were of humble proportions, built of local stone and adorned merely with terracotta. Yet in Rome itself numerous early terracottas have come to light; and their broken fragments can help us to form an idea of the fictile decoration used in the Rome of the early republic, and of the appearance of the city at that date.