A compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans during the middle and later Republic.

An insightful and original exploration of Roman Republic politics In A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, editors Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag deliver an incisive and original collection of forty contributions from leading academics representing various intellectual and academic traditions. The collected works represent some of the best scholarship in recent decades and adopt a variety of approaches, each of which confronts major problems in the field and contributes to ongoing research. The book represents a new, updated, and comprehensive view of the political world of Republican Rome and some of the included essays are available in English for the first time. Divided into six parts, the discussions consider the institutionalized loci, political actors, and values, rituals, and discourse that characterized Republican Rome. The Companion also offers several case studies and sections on the history of the interpretation of political life in the Roman Republic. Key features include: A thorough introduction to the Roman political world as seen through the wider lenses of Roman political culture Comprehensive explorations of the fundamental components of Roman political culture, including ideas and values, civic and religious rituals, myths, and communicative strategies Practical discussions of Roman Republic institutions, both with reference to their formal rules and prescriptions, and as patterns of social organization In depth examinations of the 'afterlife' of the Roman Republic, both in ancient authors and in early modern and modern times Perfect for students of all levels of the ancient world, A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars and students of politics, political history, and the history of ideas.

In this collection of essays, an international team of outstanding scholars engage with the ideas and methods of Professor Peter Wiseman's past and present work. They provide a sustained response to the work of one of the most widely respected Roman historians of this generation. The contributions range over myth (Corialanus and Remus), the interplay between historiography, literature and myth-making (on Cleopatra, for instance), and art and story-telling at Boscoreale. They explore Roman drama (Pacuvius) and links between drama and Virgil's Aeneid; they discuss Catullus in Bithynia and Cicero on Greek and Roman culture. Professor Wiseman has been at the forefront of innovative research in Roman history, historiography, literature in context, drama and myth, for many years. His work is marked by the combination of a powerful historical imagination with an acute sense of the limitations of our knowledge and of the need to negotiate with the complexity of our sources.

"This provocative and controversial volume examines the notions of ethnicity, citizenship and nationhood to determine what constituted cultural identity in the Roman empire. The contributors draw together the most recent research and use diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives from archaeology, classical studies and ancient history to challenge our basic assumptions of Romanization and how parts of Europe became incorporated into a Roman culture." "Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire breaks new ground, negating the idea of a unified and easily defined Roman culture as over-simplistic. The contributors present the development of Roman cultural identity throughout the empire as a complex and two-way process, far removed from the previous dichotomy between the Roman invaders and the conquered Barbarians."--Jacket

This is the first book to describe the intimate relationship between Latin literature and the politics of ancient Rome. Until now, most scholars have viewed classical Latin literature as a product of aesthetic concerns. Thomas Habinek shows, however, that literature was also a cultural practice that emerged from and intervened in the political and social struggles at the heart of the Roman world. Habinek considers major works by such authors as Cato, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca. He shows that, from its beginnings in the late third century b.c. to its eclipse by Christian literature six hundred years later, classical literature served the evolving interests of Roman and, more particularly, aristocratic power. It fostered a prestige dialect, for example; it appropriated the cultural resources of dominated and colonized communities; and it helped to defuse potentially explosive challenges to prevailing values and authority. Literature also drew upon and enhanced other forms of social authority, such as patriarchy, religious ritual, cultural identity, and the aristocratic procedure of self-scrutiny, or existimatio. Habinek's analysis of the relationship between language and power in classical Rome breaks from the long Romantic tradition of viewing Roman authors as world-weary figures, aloof from mundane political concerns--a view, he shows, that usually reflects how scholars have seen themselves. The Politics of Latin Literature will stimulate new interest in the historical context of Latin literature and help to integrate classical studies into ongoing debates about the sociology of writing.

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

Studies the 'Romanization' of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire.