Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems or the aspirations of the present: ‘race-mixture’ has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire. More recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as ‘multicultural’. Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, this book focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. It explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.
Toward a Roman Dialect of Empire Anatomies of Roman Imperial Government This, then, is the lay of the different parts of our inhabited world; but since the Romans occupy the best and the best-known portions of it, having surpassed all former rulers of whom we have record, it is worthwhile, even though briefly, to add the following account of them. .. Of this whole country that is subject to the Romans, some is indeed ruled by kings, but the Romans retain the other part, calling it "provincial" (eparchian), and send governors (hēgemonas) and collectors of tribute (phorologous). But there are also some free cities, some of which came over to the Romans at the outset as friends, whereas others were set free by them as a mark of honour. There are also some potentates and phylarchs and priests subject to them. Now these live in accordance with certain ancestral laws. But the provinces have been divided in different ways at different times, though at the present time they are as Augustus Caesar (Kaisar ho Sebastos) arranged them; for when his native land committed to him the foremost place of authority and he became established as lord for life of war and peace, he divided the whole land into two parts, and assigned one portion to himself and one to the people. Strabo, Geography , , -, Loeb tr. H. L. Jones with minor adaptations There are many ways of starting a conversation about empire and political cultures in the Roman world. Modern accounts of the Roman empire have traditionally begun where the early Imperial geographer, Strabo, writing between the s and the s with a perspective that zooms impressively between the global and the highly particular, ends his panoramic account of a Roman world newly centered on monarchy. Modern usage makes the fact that the Romans possessed an empire before they had emperors seem counter-intuitive. As a compromise, I capitalize Empire and Imperial when referring specifically to the period from January , when Augustus was granted this honorific name by the Roman senate. When referring either to the empire of the Republican period and its condition ("imperial"), or to empire spanning the Republican period and the world of emperors, I do not capitalize these terms.
For the historian of the Roman period, the archaeology of Central and Southern Italy raises (and sometimes provides answers to) a fascinating variety of questions. The Pontine plain and the valleys of the Liri and Sacco were the areas first affected by Roman expansion beyond the Latial plain, and it was here that the Romans tested and perfected the techniques of organization and control of territory that were to be used with such success elsewhere in Italy and eventually throughout the Mediterranean: in particular, colonization, municipalization, and the transformation of the rural landscape which accompanied them. This area too saw the development of the villa system of agriculture, which came to be predominant in Central Italy during the first century B.C., and was imitated throughout the Empire; but there were also striking differences between agricultural practices in the plains and in the mountains above. This geographical diversity was paralleled by a complex cultural mix, as aspects of both Greek and Roman culture were adopted by the local populations, who themselves moved around an increasingly unified Italy with greater ease, leading to further cultural transformations.
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