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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - The Ambitions of Government

  • from Part I - Empire
  • Edited by Harriet I. Flower, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Empire and Religion in the Roman World
    Published online:
    26 August 2021
    Print publication:
    19 August 2021, pp 71-93

  • Summary

    The chapter sketches an approach to a great challenge of contemporary ancient history, namely, the history whereby state power was extended into the ancient countryside. It commences with consideration of the operations that produced Roman taxonomies of city-states and villages: far from a simple consequence of recognition, the statuses of city-state and village alike were ascribed. The chapter directs attention to the decades when Rome ceased to treat with regions via networks of bilateral alliances and instead instrumentalized select city-states to dominate territories and peoples that were henceforth deemed non-political. On this basis, the chapter challenges the interpretive truisms that Rome “governed through city-states” or that it relied on preexisting institutions. What we should seek to bring into view is the political economics of republican empire: the related forms of fiscal domination and monopolies over law-making and law-applying institutions that the democratically constituted oligarchies of the ancient city exercised over others on behalf of Rome.