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

Roman literature is inherently political in the varied contexts of its production and the abiding concerns of its subject matter. This collection examines the strategies and techniques of political writing at Rome in a broad range of literature spanning almost two centuries, differing political systems, climates, and contexts. It applies a definition of politics that is more in keeping with modern critical approaches than has often been the case in studies of the political literature of classical antiquity. By applying a wide variety of critically informed viewpoints, this volume offers the reader not only a long view of the abiding techniques, strategies, and concerns of political expression at Rome but also many new perspectives on individual authors of the early empire and their republican precursors.

This history of ancient Rome is an interesting one. As they read how society grows and develops students will learn how this changed the way Romans governed themselves. From citizens to senators to famous emperors of Rome, students get a unique look into the politics and government of ancient Rome through exciting primary source imagery.

The book is aimed at the general reader, as well as to the special student of Roman life and literature. It includes articles which discuss social, political and literary questions, with the majority of which are in some measure comparative studies of certain phases of life at Rome and in modern contemporary life.

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.

The decadence and depravity of the ancient Romans are a commonplace of serious history, popular novels and spectacular films. This book is concerned not with the question of how immoral the ancient Romans were but why the literature they produced is so preoccupied with immorality. The modern image of immoral Rome derives from ancient accounts which are largely critical rather than celebratory. Upper-class Romans habitually accused one another of the most lurid sexual and sumptuary improprieties. Historians and moralists lamented the vices of their contemporaries and mourned for the virtues of a vanished age. Far from being empty commonplaces these assertions constituted a powerful discourse through which Romans negotiated conflicts and tensions in their social and political order. This study proceeds by a detailed examination of a wide range of ancient texts (all of which are translated) exploring the dynamics of their rhetoric, as well as the ends to which they were deployed. Roman moralising discourse, the author suggests, may be seen as especially concerned with the articulation of anxieties about gender, social status and political power. Individual chapters focus on adultery, effeminacy, the immorality of the Roman theatre, luxurious buildings and the dangers of pleasure. This book should appeal to students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history. It will also attract anthropologists and social and cultural historians.