Roman Republic Research Articles

Symposium on Scientia Iuris

In this reply, I express my gratitude to Amicus Curiae for hosting a symposium on my new book—Scientia Iuris: Knowledge and Experience in Legal Education and Practice from the Late Roman Republic to Artificial Intelligence (Springer, 2024)—as well as to the symposium’s guest authors for their insightful contributions. In so doing, I also engage with their comments on my analysis and argument. Keywords: scientia iuris; knowledge; experience; legal education; legal practice.

The Sabinus Code: A Contribution to the Discussion on Political Agitation on Roman Republican Coins

The article analyses the iconography of the denarii bearing the scene of the Punishment of Tarpeia, issued by L. Titurius Sabinus during the Social War, re-examines its previous interpretations and offers a new one, linking it with the internal political struggle between the Optimate faction related to the tribune of the plebs M. Livius Drusus and their opponents. The author suggests that the figure of the notorious traitress was used intentionally, in terms of the political struggle against Drusus himself or his former partisans who had been found guilty of parricide and exiled under the Lex Varia, in order to prevent them from returning to Rome.

Colleagues with rules. Censorship and the principles of holding office in Republican Rome

The article discusses the principles of holding office of censor. Even though it seems that such principles were respected, there were some deviations from the general rules due to the peculiarities of this magistracy. Particularly strong was the principle of collegiality, allowing colleagues in office to block each other and preventing them from acting alone against the will of the other censor.

Analyzing the impact of anti-corruption reforms on wealth and power distribution in Roman Iberia: a historical and statistical perspective

Using historical analysis and statistical data, this study examines the impact of anti-corruption reforms on the distribution of wealth and power in Iberian Rome. Corruption in the Roman Republic posed serious challenges to just governance, and this led to reform initiatives to restore public trust and reduce the influence of corruption. This research examines the historical context of corruption and emphasizes its negative effects on wealth distribution and social equality. Important reforms implemented in the early imperial period, especially under Augustus, aimed to address these issues and temporarily improve economic conditions, especially in urban centers such as Taraco and Córdoba. However, the effectiveness of these reforms varied considerably across regions, with rural areas typically benefiting less due to the influence of elite interests. Statistical analyzes show that there is a complex relationship between anti-corruption measures and wealth concentration, such that despite initial successes, many regions have returned to pre-reform levels of inequality over time. The findings emphasize the need for continued political commitment and systemic change to ensure the sustainability of anti-corruption initiatives. By examining the Roman experience, this study provides valuable insights for contemporary anti-corruption efforts and emphasizes the importance of paying attention to power dynamics and strengthening social participation to promote equity and long-term transparency in governance.

Between coercion and protection. Locationes censoriae in the times of the Roman Republic

AbstractThe censors had wide-ranging powers related to the performance of public tasks. They concluded contracts (locationes censoriae) for the erection and repair of public buildings, as well as the collection of public revenues. The position of the contractors was weaker, but they were able to obtain assistance from the senate and sometimes from the plebeian tribunes. The tasks of the censors required the acquisition of land. This was done by purchase (emptio in publicum). It is not known whether the censors used coercive measures, but it seems that they rather conducted negotiations. They then carried out a publicatio, i.e. the granting of public status to the property.

Vater – Land – Liebe

Abstract The article discusses in which ways Catherine Bernard reflects in her tragedy Brutus the aporias of the Roman-Republican usus as well as its habitus by staging the famous episode of the roman history in which Brutus sacrifices his two sons – Titus and Tibérinus – for the sake of the Roman Republic. Bernard introduces in her play the character of Valérie, the sister of the consul Valérius, in order to present a moral counterpart to the masculine Roman ethics. By doing this, Bernard’s tragedy constitutes a turning part in the history of the French classicist theatre: her Brutus sets an end to a specific classicist poetics that focusses on state affairs and introduces at the same time a new poetical concept: a civil classicism.

NOMINA OF MARRIED WOMEN IN CUM MANU MARRIAGES IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC AND PRINCIPATE ERAS

Generally, a daughter in parental power in Roman family in the Republic and the Principate did not have personal name, but bore her father’s name in the feminine. A woman kept her father’s family name in marriage, but if she came under her husband’s lawful authority and became a member of his clan, her father’s family name became her personal name and her husband’s family name was added in the nominative or genitive case. In modern historical and legal science is traditionally considered that this custom was strictly observed in Republican Rome. But in the 2nd – 1st centuries BC this custom disappeared with the gradual withering away of cum manu marriage (confarreatio, coemptio, usus). The author, basing on the position of Theodor Mommsen about the family name of married women, analyses the sources of classical Roman law of the 1st – 3rd centuries AD and concludes that the marriages confarreatio and coemtio and the husband’s power over the wife continued throughout the Principate. In addition, the author hypotheses that the tradition of attaching the husband’s name to the father’s family name of the married woman also continued throughout the classical period of Roman law.

John Adams – the American Cicero? From the Genealogy of Res Publica Americana

When creating a new republic, the Foundings Fathers deemed it necessary to become well versed in the lessons of history, in order to avoid the fates of previous republics. Above all other historical corollaries, Americans evoked the example of the republican Rome that had upheld a system of government that aspired to ordered liberty as supported by a mixture of public civic virtue and effective institutional design for nearly five centuries. The comparisons were possible because the American colonies had kept the grammar school system of education then common in England, giving all educated Americans a basic grasp of Cicero’s reputation and writings, who represented eloquence, moral virtue and hostility towards tyranny. He thus became a source of inspiration for the Founders, and John Adams directly considered himself an American Cicero. In the article, the authors try to answer the question about the legitimacy of such a position of the 2nd President of the US. To do this, they compare the basic political categories of Cicero and Adams, pointing out their similarities and differences. They also examine to what extent Cicero’s thought could be applied to the reality of the young American republic.

The scripted audience in Roman comedy

Abstract Despite the prevalence of audience-centred drama criticism, very little is actually known about the composition or nature of theatre audiences in antiquity. Metatheatrical passages in Plautus’ and Terence’s comedies in which the audience is described or addressed are usually treated as historical evidence for real-life theatre audiences in Republican Rome. This article argues that it is preferable to treat the comic audience as a fictional character. The scripted audience is recurrently portrayed by the comedians in a far-fetched and anti-realistic manner: it can be treated as a stereotype, along the other ‘stock’ characters of Roman comedy.

Reception of Ambassadors in the Roman Senate during the Period of the Republic as Documented by Titus Livius

This article considers the status of ambassadors in the Roman Republic, focusing on the relations between foreign embassies and the Senate from the 6th to the 1st centuries BC, as described by Titus Livius (Livy) in «The History of Rome from the Founding of the City». Livy addresses many aspects, including the arrival of ambassadors and their reports to public officials, which the Senate deemed necessary for recognizing them as legitimate representatives. Additionally, he details their claims in the Senate and the subsequent discussions held by the Senators, as well as the process of making decisions and responding to ambassadors. Livy’s narrative offers an insight into the entire process of how ambassadors were received, from their arrival in Rome and registration with magistrates until their departure from Rome or Italy in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Special attention is paid to the Senate’s debates over the problems raised by ambassadors. Overall, Livy outlines the general procedure used by the Senate to settle foreign policy matters.

The Stripes of Coriolanus: A Democratic Appropriation of Roman Republicanism

Inspired by the scholarly work of Paul Cantor and David Lowenthal, this paper argues that the 1981 war-comedy, Stripes, constitutes a democratic appropriation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Drawing on what is arguably Shakespeare’s most political drama, Cantor and Lowenthal argue, respectively, that both Rome and its martial warrior tragically aspire to a wholeness that will always elude them; Rome’s republic depends on a mixing of political classes that presume to be distinct from and independent of the other while the work’s eponymous figure believes he can exist above and apart from the city he alternately seeks to save and to destroy. Because tragedies show the self-defeating flaws that plague their protagonists, they allow us to see the impossibilities such characters represent as absurd. But, in seeing them as absurd, they should also appear as the proper subjects of comedy. Viewed as a democratic reworking of this Elizabethan tragedy, Stripes shows us how the wisdom that allows us to appreciate both the need for and the shortcomings of republican politics, as the scholarship of Cantor and Lowenthal reveal them, may yet be made available without leading us to despair of the possibility a genuinely free and healthy civic life.

David Lowenthal and Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

A comparison of David Lowenthal and Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. David Lowenthal’s essay on Julius Caesar seeks to “make Allan Bloom’s brilliant interpretation of Shakespeare’s Caesar more consistent by denying that Caesar, imprudently and in derogation of his own greatness, sought to become king of Rome.” He explains Caesar’s “true ambition,” which he sees as perfectly in keeping with his greatness. Paul Cantor argues that “Julius Caesar provides the lynchpin of a historical trilogy that begins with Coriolanus and ends with Antony and Cleopatra, a trilogy that portrays the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. In that story, Julius Caesar is central.”

SPARTACUS VE III. KÖLE İSYANI

Gladyatör oyunları Romalılar için çok önemliydi. Öyle ki Roma’da bu oyunları düzenlemek için senatus tarafından atanmış memurlar bile bulunmaktaydı. Gladyatör oyunları için Roma sınırları içinde pek çok amfitiyatrolar yapılmıştır ki bunlardan en ünlüsü de bugün bile eski ününü koruyan Colosseum’dur. Gladyatörler bu tiyatrolarda sadece birbirileri ile değil kimi zaman vahşi hayvanlarla da dövüştürülmüşlerdir. Gladyatörlerin geneli kölelerden oluşsa da pek çok özgür insan da arenalarda gladyatörler gibi dövüşmüştür. Genellikle ölüme mahkûm edilen bu kimseler arenalarda ölüm kalım mücadelesi vermişlerdir. Makalenin konusunu oluşturan Spartacus, Roma’daki III. Köle İsyanına önderlik etmiş, Roma’nın başını oldukça ağrıtmıştır. Capua’da bir gladyatör okulunda MÖ 73 yılında başlayan bu isyan kısa sürede hızlıca yayılmıştır. İsyanın Roma Cumhuriyeti tarafından ciddiye alınmaması, kargaşanın büyümesine neden olmuş ve isyan ancak Marcus Licinius Crassus (MÖ 115-53) tarafından bastırılabilmiştir. Crassun’un ordusuna yenilen Spartacus, Lucania bölgesinde olan son savaşta öldürülmüş ve ordusu dağıtılmıştır. Crassus isyana katılan altı binden fazla isyancı köleyi Capua’dan Roma’ya kadar çarmıha gerdirmiştir. Spartacus İsyanı son bulmuş olsa da Roma Cumhuriyeti’nde büyük yankılar uyandırmıştır.

Cicero’s maledicta: the darker side of Cicero’s arguments

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) is widely praised for his brilliant oratorical arguments; in fact, his performance of casuistry is regarded as a model of Roman rhetoric. The accolades that Cicero has received are well deserved but these achievements in rational argumentation do not reveal the spectrum of Cicero’s rhetoric, nor do they fully explain why his orations were so persuasively effective. Explanations of the brilliance of Cicero’s rational arguments do not normally encompass the darker side of the effectiveness Cicero’s suasory strategies. His tactics of denigrating the opposition with ethnic slurs, mockery, ridicule, sarcasm and other forms of ad hominem/ad personam attacks—what is collectively termed here as maledicta—were persuasive weapons that contributed to his success. Cicero was well aware of the persuasive power of his biting ridicule and sarcasm and even tempered its use on occasion (e.g. Pro Sulla 47). This essay examines Cicero’s use of maledicta in his legal rhetoric in order to better understand the range of his rhetorical strategies, the effectiveness of his performance, and the rationale for employing such tactics in the courts of the Roman Republic.

Nighttime Graffiti in the Roman Republic: Populism and the Anti-State

Nighttime Graffiti in the Roman Republic: Populism and the Anti-State

Paradox of Voting: Extra-Urban Voters in the Late Roman Republic

Summary It is almost universally supposed on general principles that Roman citizens who did not live near the city of Rome were effectively disenfranchised by the logistical difficulty of traveling to the capital to vote, and thus that citizen participation in state decision-making was derisively small; this poses a difficulty for the ‘popular’ model of the functioning of the Roman Republic that has won considerable adherence in recent years. However, a systematic review of evidence for voting by citizens who lived around the peninsula and even for non-citizens’ travel to Rome before 90 BC to apply direct pressure on major votes, shows that distance did not present an insurmountable obstacle to meaningful participation in Roman political life by Italians and extra-urban citizens. It also demonstrates the great importance citizens attached to the vote (suffragium) – a guarantee of their freedom, and the key mechanism by which they influenced their political leaders. This in turn helps to clarify why many Italians, including those of modest means, would have desired Roman citizenship in the run-up to the ‘Social War.’

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un bon voyage: Invoking the deities of the roads in the Latin west

AbstractThe control of the Mediterranean and its surroundings by the conquering Roman Republic after the victory over Carthage, and later over the Hellenistic kingdoms throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, notably increased connectivity and the movement of people. This paper focuses on the wide range of ritual instruments, above all the propitiation of the gods through sacrifices, in the face of journeys in general, and on the diverse religious resources documented in the epigraphy of the Latin West.

THEORIES OF THE EARTH AND ‘PLUTONISM’ IN THE INTRODUZIONE ALLA GEOLOGIA BY THE ITALIAN GEOLOGIST SCIPIONE BREISLAK (1811)

ABSTRACT Scipione Breislak may be considered as one of the most renowned Italian ‘Plutonists’ at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In the 1790s, he was a professor of Physics at the Military Academy of Nunziatella in Naples, where he also devoted himself to the study of Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields. Thus, he acquainted himself with volcanic phenomena. Breislak's works about the volcanic fields of Campania (Southern Italy) disclosed how Torbern Olof Bergman's theories and Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier's chemistry had affected his belief in the idea that volcanic eruptions were triggered by ignition of petroleum deposits. After a voluntary exile in France, owing to the downfall of the Roman Republic, Breislak returned to Italy and settled in Milan, where he was appointed as an Inspector of Gunpowder in 1802. Due to his new administrative duties, he had the opportunity to continue studying mineralogy and geology, focusing primarily on the stratigraphy of Lombardy and of the Alps. During the ‘Milanese period’, he published the Introduzione alla geologia (Introduction to geology, 1811), which may be regarded as the first Italian handbook about the ‘new’ science of Geology. In the monograph, he also drew on Huttonian ideas in order to describe the lithostratigraphic features of crystalline rocks. Without neglecting Breislak's volcanological hypotheses, this paper aims to analyze the influence that nineteenth-century Plutonist (Huttonian) geological theories had on the Earth's history that he depicted in the Introduzione alla geologia. The influence of Plutonism—a term that Richard Kirwan introduced to define James Hutton's geological system—may also be recognized in Breislak's rejection of transition rocks. Indeed, according to him: “nature does not make passages or transitions, and each of its products has a specific and particular way to exist” (Breislak 1811, volume 1, pp. 308–309).

Roman Republican Politics: Past, Present, and Futures

Roman Republican Politics: Past, Present, and Futures

Mad about the “Boys”? Desire, Revulsion, and (Mis)Recognition in Varro’s Eumenides

ABSTRACT: In the surviving literature of the Roman Republic, the galli are near-universal objects of repulsion, with their gender presentation being constantly derided. The fragments of Varro’s Eumenides , however, offer an opportunity to consider repulsion alongside desire and how the two are often closer than we think. I begin this essay by contextualizing the galli within Roman society and broader trans history; I then employ a trans narratological reading to consider how the narrator attempts to construct different positive images of the galli and how they in turn refuse his categorizations regardless. As the genre of this text is satire, we might initially understand the galli as targets of mockery for Varro; however, the fragmentation of the text, alongside the narrator’s consciously unstable viewpoint, allow this group the opportunity to step outside of the conventional depiction of them, and even construct themselves beyond the normative bounds expected of them, by the narrator or the audience. Reading the galli through a lens of desire allows us to recognize the multiplicity of emotional responses that they would have elicited in the Roman world and expand our understanding beyond the reductive image usually presented by their authors. As well as opening up new lines of conversation around the galli themselves, this essay also offers a broader opportunity to consider how trans experiences can be narrated, even at the expense of the narrator, the author, or their own wider society.