This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.
for their comments, and appreciate the opportunity to respond. We are pleased to see that all four commentators stress the importance of archaeological approaches that pay due attention to oppression and violence in the Roman world. We therefore believe that our core argument and its broader significance have been clearly recognised, as summarised in Gardner's (2020: 1640-1642) remark that "the complexity of the Roman world […] is indecipherable without connecting the violence with the grandeur, the frontiers with the capital(s), and the enslaved with the free". At the same time, the respondents also raise a number of important issues and sketch out potential alternative (or complementary) views.
Since its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century, the ‘Ara of Domitius Ahenobarbus’ has become a keystone in the history of Roman republican art. Following the seminal interpretation of Alfred von Domaszewski, the monument is usually understood as commemorating the key stages of the Roman census. This paper offers a fundamental reappraisal of the Ara's imagery, based on an iconographic analysis which takes into account all relevant signs of rank and status such as shoes, clothing and other attributes. From this it becomes clear that none of the three protagonists on the Ara can be identified as a censor. Consequently, the monument neither commemorated a census nor was it a censorial location. Instead, I suggest that the Ara actually shows another important political event, namely the deductio of a Roman colony which I tentatively identify as the colonia Neptunia founded by Gaius Gracchus in 123 b.c.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.