Political and Social Relations

This paper argues that a case study of the Asculum Bronze (ILS 8888 = ILLRP 515 = CIL VI.37045 = CIL 1.2.709) provides evidence that political alliances in the late Republic were of short duration and depended on immediate personal interest rather than on enduring personal or familial connections. Its conclusions contribute directly to the ongoing scholarly debate over the nature of political life and of aristocratic political maneuvering in the late Republic.

In this paper, I argue that Livy’s narrative of the second decemvirate and its fall (AUC 3.36-55) advances the idea that the plebeians as a social group are more capable of restoring libertas to the state as a whole due to such qualities as unity of sentiment and the power inherent in sheer numbers. By contrast, the character of the patricians as a class that displays a marked tendency to internal factionalism renders them incapable of taking action to restore even their own libertas.

Where have all the fabri tign(u)arii gone?

CIL XIV 4365 & 4382, a reassessment of the fabri tign(u)arii in Rome and Ostia in the early 4th century CE

In this paper, I will reconstruct the three groups of citizens who were eligible for selection into the Senate at the time of the Hannibalic War. In the face of catastrophic senatorial casualties during the war’s opening years, so Livy tell us at 23.22.1, the surviving patres reflected upon the ‘solitudinem curiae’ which had enveloped the Senate House, and deliberated the potential solutions to this urgent political crisis. Eventually, the patres empowered M. Fabius Buteo in 216 BC to hold an emergency adlection.

Age roles were fixtures both on the stage of Roman comedy and in the hierarchies of Roman society after the Second Punic War. The comic plot frequently turned upon tensions between the age roles of the adulescens and senex. Scholars have long recognized the “stock” quality of the adulescens in Roman comedy, among a host of other roles (Duckworth 1994). Metatheatrical commentary within the comedies themselves reveals that Roman audiences could expect to see certain types of characters appear in a comic plot (Plaut. Capt.

Although handbooks on Roman freedmen deny that libertini could hold a political magistracy except in Caesarian colonies (e.g. Mouritsen 2011), freedmen outside of such colonies occasionally achieved civic office through the High Empire. This paper argues that these extraordinary individual achievements demonstrate that imperial laws were not uniformly enforced everywhere and in perpetuity after they were enacted.