Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper outlines a new framework for the historical study of Rome and Italy during the middle republican period. We argue that traditional approaches centred upon social struggles at home and battles abroad, res domi militiaeque, do not sufficiently capture the dynamism of Roman society during the early stages of imperial expansion. Recent scholarship has been rightly critical of the appropriateness of applying concepts of Hellenisation to the period, as Rome's interactions with Magna Graecia and the Greek East in the fourth and third centuries look very different than they would in subsequent centuries. Moving in a new direction, we sketch the contours of an approach that foregrounds the many connectivities (temporal, geographical, methodological, historical) apparent from the interdisciplinary study of middle republican Rome and Italy. The result encourages a new mode of historical inquiry into the development of middle republican Rome and Italy, one which sees Rome already in this moment as both expansively interconnected with and actively involved in wider Mediterranean and Eurasian history.

This paper analyzes the distinctive association enslaved communities in peninsular Italy made with the goddess Feronia. In particular, the paper collects and focuses on all known votive inscriptions to Feronia found in Roman Italy. The analysis of the inscriptions shows that many dedicators were freed or enslaved individuals. Literary evidence also supports that the enslaved community had a connection to Feronia; in particular, a passage from Servius speaks of a now lost inscription which alludes to an ‘extra-legal’ manumission ceremony taking place in Feronia’s temple. This hypothesis is explored and weighed against similar stories of manumission without legal sanction.

This paper analyzes the distinctive association enslaved communities in peninsular Italy made with the goddess Feronia. In particular, the paper collects and focuses on all known votive inscriptions to Feronia found in Roman Italy. The analysis of the inscriptions shows that many dedicators were freed or enslaved individuals. Literary evidence also supports that the enslaved community had a connection to Feronia; in particular, a passage from Servius speaks of a now lost inscription which alludes to an ‘extra-legal’ manumission ceremony taking place in Feronia’s temple. This hypothesis is explored and weighed against similar stories of manumission without legal sanction.

Fiscal explanations often given for Rome's first coins fail to account for the shape of monetary development. Nothing in the mid-republican budget matches the small scale and sporadic production of Roman coins during the early third century, or coinage's rapid expansion in the lead-up to the Second Punic War. Instead, I locate early Roman coinage within a broader reconfiguration of wealth and political power during the early phases of imperial expansion. Coins facilitated the exchange of wealth in the absence of strong social ties; conquest opened up Roman society to vast wealth of this order while also sparking debate about wealth's integration into the political community. Archaeological and textual evidence permits us to trace the contested and uneven development of elite accommodation to impersonal wealth during the third century. This context, I argue, offers the best explanation for Rome's initial coins.

This article challenges and reevaluates the model of the domesticated, invisible Roman woman, and seeks out the relationships between female visibility, religion, and urban spaces in Republican Rome. I adopt an intersectional approach to female visibility, focusing especially on religious rites, temporality, and on status symbols. I argue that women of various backgrounds used and were visible in numerous urban spaces, drawing on instances of their regular and episodic female religious activity, and on matronal vehicles and mobility privileges. At times, the Urbs was visibly female.

There is considerable literary evidence that gives us some insight into the Jewish culture in the city of Rome from different perspectives after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Yet, there are few primary accounts of Jews in the city of Rome during the 1st century BCE. In this article it is argued that there was already a significant Jewish population in Rome during the middle of the 1st century BCE and it already had a noted influence on daily life in the capital city. In the wake of the Roman Republic’s imperialistic successes, the city saw an influx of foreign peoples and cultures, including Jews, and they were mentioned in the literature of the time. The little that was written about Jews during this time pertain to those aspects of their culture and religion that appeared peculiar to the Romans, especially in the so-called higher genres of philosophical treatises or history. Yet, we also have texts describing everyday live in Republican Rome – lyric and elegiac poetry. These, too, feature references to Jewish culture. Although Roman poetry is never explicitly interested in Jews or Jewish people, it did paint a picture of Rome at street-level, so to speak, through the eyes of a literate citizen and this picture sometimes included Jews. In this article this type of evidence available to us will be reconsidered to fill in the gap in our historical knowledge. Contribution: This article presents an interpretation of Jews and Jewish practices mentioned during the 1st century BCE in Roman poetry. The poetry of Tibullus, Horace and Ovid, written from a Roman perspective, have been contextualised in their literary traditions and informed by the established philosophical opinions of the time from Cicero, Varro and Lucretius. The result is a useful discussion of how extensive and how reliable these sources are for the understanding of Jewish culture in Rome during the 1st century BCE.

Abstract It has long been suspected that Roman moralizing and the slander of political enemies lay behind the story of Sulla's horrific death by vermin. This study traces the evocative logic of Sulla's affliction to a constellation of Roman attitudes about corruption, self-mastery, and the body politic. It also argues that Sulla's own rhetoric about the health of the state played a formative role in shaping narratives about his gruesome end.

This article discusses how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of Roman hegemony, by examining Samnite responses to the early Roman expansion in view of Jervis’s concept of misperception in international politics. While Rome was arguably the hegemonic power in Italy by 272 BC, Samnite polities continued treating Rome as just another player, not as an overwhelming game-changer, until the Hannibalic war. This apparent gap between perceived and de facto international order may be understood in view of the Samnites’ potential misperception of the international environment, since they continued behaving as if they were still independent players in an international anarchy. These conclusions affect how we conceptualize the Roman conquest.

El presente trabajo pretende analizar conjuntamente las campañas desarrolladas por tres magistrados (L. Emilio Paulo, Q. Fulvio Flaco y Ti. Sempronio Graco) que intervinieron en Hispania como pretores y, posteriormente, desarrollaron sus consulados en territorios diferentes, centrándonos específicamente en las cláusulas impuestas a los enemigos rendidos. El objetivo que se persigue es determinar la existencia de una evolución del modus operandi de los imperatores a lo largo de su carrera militar, teniendo en cuenta la actitud que presentaron hacia los enemigos rendidos y enlazando esta evolución en un marco general de rivalidad aristocrática.

Livy is indisputably the major source on diplomatic and military history regarding the conquest of Italy, at least till 292, after the battle of Sentinum. Through his testimony, we have access to the annalistic tradition on the ill‐known mid‐republican period, to the information it gave about Rome's growth of power in the peninsula, and the moral vision it conveyed. Livy's point of view on Roman imperialism is certainly more personal, as it insists on the means by which Rome imposed its hegemony, its respect for divine will, and the help due to the allies, as the main motor to imperialism. His analysis' relevance yet stops here because of his Romanocentrist point of view: ignoring the pre‐Roman peoples and their institutions, as well as the Mediterranean challenges during the 4th century, he cuts the Roman diplomatic and military actions from their context.