There were several Latin and Greek terms that roughly correlated with our concept of ‘court’, including aula, palatium, and (from the late third century) comitatus. Roman authors were also capable of making generalizations about their court as an entity, many of them moralizing and negative, but some of them panegyrical. This conceptual framework regarding the court was partly inherited from the Hellenistic world. This chapter presents a selection of literary and epigraphic sources that illustrate the Romans’ conception of their own court as a distinct entity.

The chapter focuses on the pragmatic valence of the parenthetical clause ut mihi (quidem) uidetur, a formulation which, by underscoring the subjective value of a statement, often conveys important interactional functions. A close survey of the use of this expression in Latin authors from Cicero to Augustinus highlights the essentially redressive value of the formula, which mainly acts as a mitigating hedge in stance taking, aimed at avoiding the negative effects of potential face-threatening acts and at managing self-presentation. Special attention is paid to Cicero’s usage of the formula as a refined conversational marker, through which the speaker showing modesty and awareness of others’ value reveals his superior moral and social standing. Hence, the chapter explores the role of speaker-oriented strategies of politeness in Rome, as part of an interactional style aimed at indexing a precise social identity.

This chapter introduces readers to philology, defined as “making sense of texts,” and argues that it is a good way to view how certain thinkers in the Italian Renaissance read, interpreted, and worked their way through texts. It introduces the main themes of the book: that the available technologies of reading and writing – whether these are quills and animal skins or screens and the cloud – have great impact on what thinkers conceive as possible when it comes to their work; that authorship can be conceived as collective; that the use of the Latin language by Renaissance thinkers opened up meaningful possibilities even as it circumscribed their thinking within limits they did not always recognize; and that, especially for Renaissance thinkers, philosophy – defined as the search for wise way of life – and philology were inextricably linked. This chapter also suggests that recent work on history of women in the Renaissance – especially on women’s authorship – opens up new windows onto the intellectual history of the period. Finally, this chapter sets out one of this book’s guiding principles: to relate the episodes under consideration to problems in the humanities that have relevance today.

This chapter examines the cultural impact of warfare in a range of contexts. First, the interchange of military technology and ideas is considered, partly in relation to other states emulating Roman practices, but above all in Roman openness to adopting military practices and equipment from their enemies – an important factor in Roman military success. Secondly, the role of the military in disseminating aspects of Roman culture is discussed, including the debate about the term ‘Romanization', the status of Latin in the military forces, soldiers’ use of religious and social rituals, and dietary patterns. Thirdly, the role of written documentation in the military is assessed, alongside the related subject of the extent of literacy among troops, from officers to the rank-and-file.

This chapter aims to spur reflection on the categories we use to analyse how second-century texts negotiate questions of identity and difference. The first half compares modern and ancient usage of the category ‘Romans’. Modern scholarship often deploys the category ‘Romans’ in a manner that assumes both that its content is self-evident and that a distinction between ‘Romans’ and ‘non-Romans’ was one of the most salient divisions within the population of the empire. Both of these assumptions are problematic, especially (but not only) for the second century. The second half of the essay suggests that our focus on the category ‘Roman’ reflects unexamined assumptions about how contemporaries imagined the imperial order. We tend to approach the topic with a conceptual apparatus based on our own experience in a system of nation states, even though identities were organised differently in a context in which the city-state was the hegemonic form of political organisation and larger aggregations took the form of empires. Imperial society remained riven by horizontal and vertical divisions. The category ‘Romans’ is inadequate both for our own analysis of the structure of imperial society and for our exegesis of the complex gestures of inclusion and exclusion made by contemporary texts.