Download Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in by Matthew B. Roller PDF

By Matthew B. Roller

Rome's transition from a republican approach of presidency to an imperial regime comprised greater than a century of civil upheaval and quick institutional switch. but the institution of a ruling dynasty, based round a unmarried chief, got here as a cultural and political surprise to Rome's aristocracy, who had shared strength within the earlier political order. How did the imperial regime have the capacity to determine itself and the way did the Roman elites from the time of Julius Caesar to Nero make feel of it? during this compelling ebook, Matthew curler finds a "dialogical" procedure at paintings, during which writers and philosophers vigorously negotiated and contested the character and scope of the emperor's authority, regardless of the consensus that he used to be the final word authority determine in Roman society.

Roller seeks proof for this "thinking out" of the recent order in a variety of republican and imperial authors, with an emphasis on Lucan and Seneca the more youthful. He exhibits how elites assessed the influence of the imperial method on conventional aristocratic ethics and examines how a number of longstanding authority relationships in Roman society--those of grasp to slave, father to son, and gift-creditor to gift-debtor--became competing versions for a way the emperor did or should still relate to his aristocratic matters. through revealing this ideological job to be now not only reactive but additionally constitutive of the recent order, curler contributes to ongoing debates in regards to the personality of the Roman imperial process and in regards to the "politics" of literature.

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Additional resources for Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome.

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Traditional Roman Ethical Discourse As a basis for the discussions of Lucan and Seneca to follow, I begin by describing crucial features of an ethical system in which both authors were immersed: the traditional, received ethical system of the late re6 See now Habinek 1998, a collection of new and revised essays that further develop this way of reading; also Roller 1998. T H E E T H I C S O F C I V I L WA R 21 publican and early imperial aristocracy. I call this system “traditional” because aristocrats regarded it as passed down from their ancestors, the maiores, unchanged from time immemorial.

He also pronounces moral judgments in accordance with this view: for these soldiers to kill one another would be nefas, “wicked” (205, cf. 172), while the social bonds they forge are bonds of good faith and trust, fides (204). In lines 212–35, however, the narrator yields the floor to Petreius, who makes a bitter speech to his troops in exactly the opposite sense: he urges his men to kill the Caesarians who have peaceably entered the Pompeian camp. Rhetorically he excludes these visitors from his soldiers’ community of obligation by calling them hostes (228), and insists that the Pompeian troops owe loyalty only to their own faction, which he identifies with the state as a whole: “heedless of your fatherland, forgetful of your own standards .

Earl focuses on Roman society, Adkins and Bryant on Greek; Fustel de Coulanges and Ferguson discuss both. Briefer discussions particularly helpful for the current project are Smith 1976 [1947], Harris 1979: 10–41, and Minyard 1985: 5–32, which examine aspects of this linkage in the middle to late republic. 18 CHAPTER 1 what broader debate that has developed over the past generation within the field of classics proper, as well as in other fields of the humanities. In response to certain midcentury modes of literary criticism that see literature as a highly autonomous realm following its own rules, analyzable on its own terms, and substantially insulated from (or at least transcending) the everyday preoccupations of its producer and the world in which he or she lived, some scholars have sought to bring the social engagement of literary texts into sharper focus; to look at these texts as products of the author’s world that in various ways bring forth his or her concerns and anxieties as a member of a particular society at a particular time.

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