This volume aims to address the question of political communication in the Roman world. What constitutes political communication in the Roman world? In what ways could information be transmitted and represented? What mechanisms made political communication successful or unsuccessful?

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

This title brings together contributions which rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. With careful attention to a range of evidence, it shines a light on orators and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the familiar genres of forensic and political speech.

A very readable introduction exploring much-contested issues and debates, and providing an original synthesis of this important topic.

From assemblies to courts of justice, from the Senate to the battlefield, from Rome to the provinces: public opinion could vary and take many guises. Roman politicians were aware of its existence and influence, and engaged with it. This book offers a study of public opinion in the Roman Republic, with an emphasis from the 3rd to 1st centuries BC. It focusses on four main issues: nature and components of public opinion; public opinion in relation to military and administrative questions; the interaction between public opinion and public dialogue and, finally, the transmission of public opinion. It furthermore asks the following question: Who was the populus Romanus? How did public opinion influence specific political or military decisions? Can Habermas' view of public opinion be applied to the Roman Republic? How was the rhetoric of fear applied to public opinion? Drawing on the more recent interpretations of Roman Republic, this volume studies the mechanisms that make public opinion and politics work at many different levels. It provides an engaging view on political communication and the interaction between the elite and the people.