This volume breaks new ground by exploring how the political actors of different formal statuses, age, and gender were able to “take the lead” in ancient Rome through initiating communication, proposing new solutions, and prompting others to act.

The second century BCE was a time of prolonged debate at Rome about the changing nature of warfare. From the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 to Rome’s first civil war in 88 BCE, warfare shifted from the struggle against a great external enemy to a conflict against internal parties. This book argues that Rome’s Italian subjects were central to this development: having rebelled and defected to Hannibal at the end of the third century, the allies again rebelled in 91 BCE, with significant consequences for Roman thought about warfare as such. These "rebellions" constituted an Italian renewal of the war against their old conqueror, Rome, and an internal war within the polity. Accordingly, we need to add 'internal war' to the already well-established dichotomy of foreign and civil war. This fresh analysis of the second century demonstrates that the Roman experience of internal war during this period provided the natural stepping-stone in the invention of civil war as such. It conceives of the period from the Second Punic War onward as an 'antebellum' period to the later civil war(s) of the Late Republic, during which contemporary observers looked back at the last 'great war' against Hannibal in preparation for the next conflict.

This volume focuses on the interface between tradition and the shifting configuration of power structures in the Roman Empire. By examining various time periods and locales, its contributions show the Empire as a world filed with a wide variety of cultural, political, social, and religious traditions. These traditions were constantly played upon in the processes of negotiation and (re)definition that made the empire into a superstructure whose coherence was embedded in its diversity.

In the Roman world, landscapes became legal and institutional constructions, being the core of social, political, religious, and economic life. The Romans developed ambitious urban transformations, seeking to equate civic monumentality and legal status. The built environment becomes the axis of the legal, administrative, sacred, and economic system and the main element of dissemination of imperial ideology. This volume follows the modern trend of a multifaceted, composite, multi-layered Roman world, but at the same time reduces its complexity. It views ‘Roman’ not only in the sense of power politics, but also in a cultural context. It highlights ‘landscapes’ and puts into the shadow important administrative and legal structures, i.e., individuals viz. local and imperial members of the elites living in cities, which ran the Roman world.

State, Society, and Popular Leaders profiles the incorporation of the lower classes into the governing system of ancient Rome. In 287, the Hortensian law made the decisions of the plebs binding on the whole people. This event is often referred to as the great plebeian victory, a landmark in Roman history. In this original study, Rachel Feig Vishnia maintains that the real turning point in the relations between the plebs and the patricians can be found eighty years earlier. Based on the works of Livy and most recent scholarships, this book provides a new and controversial view of one of the most exciting periods in Roman history.

Politics and Society in Imperial Rome offers fresh new interpretations of the politics, society, and culture Rome's imperial era. Argues that the early principate was fundamentally incompatible with the persisting structures of the Roman Republic Demonstrates how these contradictory systems affected the development of Roman society Includes case studies on the imperial court and the emperor Caligula, as well as chapters on the scholarship of Theodor Mommsen and Christian Meier