Thinking through Recent German Scholarship on the Roman Republic

Political Culture revolves around interaction and exchange – words, gestures, consent and obedience – and recent scholarship out of Germany has made great headway in exploring the cognitive and communicative aspects of such transactions. Missing from this research, however, has been an economic focus.

The recent knowledge advancement in Roman Republican studies has been due to a vivid, vibrant international scholarly debate. Yet despite the close exchange between scholars and students from both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere, there are noticeable fracture zones. Indeed, since the days of Gelzer and Syme, one such ridge runs through the exchange between scholars in the Anglophone world and those in German speaking academia. It does not emerge from ill intend or ignorance, but largely from the different trajectories of divergent university cultures.

The Roman Republican ‘ideology of publicity’, Millar’s suggestion that important decisions and procedures had to be performed in public with the populus Romanus as witnesses, has made the public contio central to our understanding of Republican politics. But Millar’s further claim that the ideology of publicity is evidence of popular political power has been challenged. In German, Hölkeskamp and Flaig argued that public politics consisted of ritualized performance which reproduced existing power structures.

Scholars across all scientific disciplines forge their vision of the world both according to their own individual perspectives and in the larger context of their national academic discourses. National scientific cultures have a significant influence on the activities (and research results) of the individual scholar, based on specific epistemological traditions, academic institutions, and their hierarchies.

This paper is focused on the particular interaction between German, English and American scholars working on the field of politics and political structures of the Roman Republic ever since Matthias Gelzer and Friedrich Münzer published their classic books in 1912 and 1920 respectively.