Academic literature on the topic 'Roman autocracy'
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Journal articles on the topic "Roman autocracy"
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Pawlak, Marcin N. "Theophanes, Potamon and Mytilene’s Freedom." Electrum 27 (2020): 173–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/20800909el.20.009.12799.
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Theophanes and Potamon of Mytilene, two Greek euergetes who sought to serve their home polis in a rapidly changing political landscape of the late Roman Republic and early Principate, took an active interest in the politics of the day and sought to lobby Roman elites on Mytilene’s behalf. Theophanes befriended and advised Pompey, contributing to Pompey’s decision to pardon and liberate Mytilene after the city’s ignominious participation in the Asiatic Vespers, whereas Potamon served as Mytilene’s ambassador in Rome, adroitly championing its city’s interests. Two politicians bettered Mytilene’s political status in the tumultuous period of transformation from a republic to an autocracy and ensured that the city maintained its freedom until the times of the Flavians.
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Wardle, D. "Unimpeachable Sponsors of Imperial Autocracy, or Augustus' Dream Team (Suetonius Divus Augustus 94.8-9 and Dio Cassius 45.2.2-4)." Antichthon 39 (2005): 29–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0066477400001544.
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Of all the extant sources, Suetonius' Life of Augustus contains the fullest, and certainly the most systematic, treatment of the supernatural indications of the future Augustus' greatness. Suetonius deploys the full range of divinatory techniques – both those administered by the institutions of the Roman state religion (augurs and haruspices) and those excluded from its ambit (astrology and dreams) – to underline divine approval for the dominance of Augustus. Scholars have readily explained the appearance of this unparalleled congeries of supernatural support by adducing the personal belief in supernatural phenomena of Suetonius and Dio, the two principal mediators of this material.
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Milinović, Dino. "Kasna antika: dekadencija ili „demokratizacija“ kulture?" Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne, no. 17 (November 6, 2019): 145–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/pss.2019.17.10.
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In our age “without the emperor”, fascination with empires and with the emperor mystique continues. Take for witness Tolkien and his Return of the King, the third sequel of The Lord of the Rings, or the television serial Game of Thrones. In the background, of course, is the lingering memory of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, “a revolution which is still felt by all nations of the world”, to quote Edward Gibbon. It comes as a surprise that in this dramatic moment of its history, in times marked by political, economic and spiritual crisis that shook the very foundations of the Empire during the 3rd century, historians and art historians have recognized the revival of plebeian culture (arte plebea, kleinbürgerliche Kultur). It was the Italian historian Santo Mazzarino, talking at the XI International Congress of the Historical Sciences in Stockholm in 1960, who introduced a new paradigm: the “democratization of culture”. In the light of the historical process in the late Roman Empire, when growing autocracy, bureaucracy, militarization and social tensions leave no doubt as to the real political character of the government, the new paradigm opened up fresh approaches to the phenomenon of decadence and decline of the Roman world. As such, it stands against traditional scenario of the “triumph of barbarism and Christianity”, which was made responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire and the eclipse of the classical civilization of ancient Greece and Rome. It is not by accident that the new paradigm appeared around the middle of the 20th century, at the time when European society itself underwent a kind of “democratization of culture”, faced with the phenomenon of mass culture and the need to find new ways of evaluating popular art. Today, more than anything else, the notion of “democratization of culture” in late Roman Empire forces us to acknowledge a disturbing correspondence between autocratic and populist forms of government. It may come as a shock to learn that the very emperors who went down in Roman history as villains and culprits (such as Caligula, Nero or Commodus), were sometimes considered the most “democratic” among Roman rulers. Do we need to feel certain unease at this historical parallel?
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Newlands, Carole. "The Ending of Ovid's Fasti." Ramus 23, no. 1-2 (1994): 129–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00002423.
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When applied to the Augustan age, the term ‘ideology’ has frequently carried the same negative associations that it often bears in general use. Sir Ronald Syme was influential in creating a picture of Augustus as the deliberate founder of a monarchy who manipulated traditional sources of power for his personal ends. In his chapter ‘The Organisation of Opinion’ in The Roman Revolution, Syme argued that Augustus appropriated literature, coinage, festivals and monuments in a calculated attempt to create an impregnable system of autocracy. Although Paul Zanker in his The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus provided a more positive view of Augustus as an astute and benevolent monarch, the instigator of a great flowering of the arts, he followed Syme in seeing Augustus as the mastermind of a system of ideas and imagery specifically calculated to promote his personal power and ideals.
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Woolf, Greg. "Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early Empire." Journal of Roman Studies 86 (November 1996): 22–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/300421.
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The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.
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Van Tricht, Filip. "Claiming the Basileia ton Rhomaion." Medieval History Journal 20, no. 2 (September 25, 2017): 248–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0971945817718651.
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In April 1204, the army of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople. For the leading princes, it was self-evident that they would install an imperator of their own in the Queen of Cities. Their choice fell on Baldwin IX/VI, count of Flanders/Hainault. In this contribution, we aim to analyse how Baldwin and his successors saw their emperorship, and how they and their empire were seen by others in Byzantium and the West. The current historiographical term, ‘Latin Empire of Constantinople’, reflects the prevailing view that an entirely new political construct had been set up replacing the former Byzantine Empire. However, contemporaries, both the emperors themselves as well as outsiders, consistently referred to the empire using both Latin and Greek terms that, prior to 1204, had been commonly employed to refer to the Byzantine Empire. Yet eastern and western conceptions of the nature of the empire before 1204 differed greatly: it was ‘Greek’ in Latin eyes, ‘Roman’ in Byzantine eyes. The Constantinopolitan imperial crown having been placed on his head, Baldwin became heir to these conflicting traditions. Moreover, rival imperial claims soon arose within the Byzantine space in neighbouring Byzantine successor states. In the face of these challenges, the Latin emperors strove to formulate a political ideology legitimising their claim to imperial rule. We will argue that in essence the successive Latin emperors adopted, up to a point, the key tenets of Byzantine imperial theory (Roman character, universalism, emperors as vicars of Christ and autocracy). Their western background and their different relationship with the West led to certain changes, but whether these should be seen as fundamentally un-Byzantine is not self-evident. Conversely, the presence of the now Latin rulers on the Constantinopolitan throne also led to changes in the western perception of the eastern empire.
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Stevenson, T. R. "The Ideal Benefactor and the Father Analogy in Greek and Roman Thought." Classical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (December 1992): 421–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800016049.
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When Cicero uncovered and suppressed the Catilinarian Conspiracy as consul in 63 B.c., supporters hailed him ‘father of his country’ (pater patriae) and proposed that he be awarded the oak crown normally given to a soldier who had saved the life of a comrade in battle (corona civica). Our sources connect these honours with earlier heroes such as Romulus, Camillus and Marius, but the Elder Pliny writes as if Cicero was the first before Caesar and the Emperors to be given the title pater patriae. Pliny's point may revolve around Senatorial initiative, and assuming this to be the case he really should have stressed that Cicero received the informal support of a limited number of Senators only, whereas Caesar and the Emperors were honoured by formal vote of the entire Senate. Perhaps Pliny was fooled by the prominence of those who spoke on Cicero's behalf, such as Cato, Catulus and Gellius Publicola. Opponents, on the other hand, angrily rejected calls that Cicero be recognised as the saviour of the state. In their eyes his execution of the Catilinarians marked him as a cruel tyrant. Metellus Nepos proposed Pompey's recall from the East in order to free Rome from Cicero's tyranny. Aside from echoes of patria potestas, it seems obvious that the Romans were thinking in terms of the conventional Greek antithesis between the good king who is like a father to his people and the selfish tyrant who treats his subjects as slaves. The Younger Pliny employs the same basic ideas in his Panegyricus: the cruel tyrant Domitian suppressed freedom (libertas) and desired honour as a god (deus, numen); the gentle Trajan is a citizen and father not a tyrant and master (dominus). Tacitus has this basic distinction in mind too. Nevertheless, as is well known, Pliny regularly addresses Trajan not as ‘father’ but as ‘master’ (domine) in Book 10 of his Letters. This was plainly an acceptable practice on the social plane, if not quite yet on the political. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius indicated their opposition to dominus as a title for themselves, evidently for its connotations of autocracy and servitude. Domitian, damned as a tyrant, was accused of demanding to be addressed as dominus et deus. The title dominus existed from at least the first century A.d. as a common form of polite address between inferiors and superiors of free birth, not only between masters and slaves. It gradually gained acceptance as an official title of the Emperor through the second century and was advertised widely by the Severi. And yet its tone throughout this period could also be critical when understood in terms of the good king/tyrant antithesis.
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Zhitko, Anatolij. "Discriminative Economic Policy of the Russian Government Towards the Catholic Nobility of Belarus (Second Half of the 19th Century – the Beginning of the 20th Century)." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 4. Istorija. Regionovedenie. Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, no. 4 (August 2021): 89–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu4.2021.4.8.
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Introduction. The upper class of Belarus within the Russian Empire attracted the attention of researchers. However, the restrictive economic policy of the Russian government towards the nobility of the Roman Catholic faith has not been the subject of special study. The aim of the article is to identify the main aspects of the discriminative policy of the autocracy against the Catholic nobility of Belarus in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Methodology. The study is based on the fundamental principles of historical knowledge – historicism, objectivity, value-based approach, and traditional general scientific and concrete historical methods were used to implement the research tasks. Results. In 1858 in the Belarusian provinces the hereditary nobility made up one third of the upper class of the European part of Russia. The implementation of the “parsing the shliahta” policy led to a sharp reduction in the Catholic nobility by 1865. The government sought to economically undermine the economic activities of the Catholic nobility and equalize Russian and Catholic land ownership in the Belarusian region. This was reflected in the preferential sale of sequestered and confiscated estates, the prohibition of land purchases by Catholics, all kinds of fines and especially through contribution fee and a tax to support the Orthodox clergy. Conclusion. The government’s discriminative policy towards Catholic nobility was aimed at curbing the economic activity of “the Poles” in Belarus. The main elements of its implementation were the sequestration and confiscation of the estates of Catholics who directly or indirectly participated in the uprising of 1863–1864, various fines, the prohibition of the purchase of land holdings, contribution fee, taxes on maintaining the Orthodox Church, etc. At the same time, this policy did not lead to the expected results. At the beginning of the 20th century the Catholic nobility outnumbered the Russian nobility in land ownership.
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Beard, Mary. "Did the Romans Laugh?" Annales (English ed.) 67, no. 04 (December 2012): 581–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2398568200000388.
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Laughter is one of the most difficult and intriguing historical subjects, one that defies firm conclusion or systematization. Beginning with Dion Cassius’s first-person account of laughter in the Colosseum in 192 CE, this article explores some of the heuristic challenges of writing about the laughter of the past—particularly that of classical antiquity. It attempts to undermine some of the false certainties that surround the idea of a “ classical theory of laughter” (which originated during the Renaissance) and argues that ideas about laughter in ancient Greece and Rome were much more diverse than one usually imagines. Important patterns in the discursive use of laughter in ancient Rome can nonetheless be observed. This article also examines the way laughter was used to mediate political power and autocracy in addition to how laughter operated on the boundary between animals and humans. It concludes with a reflection on the extent to which we can still share in the laughter of the Romans and under what conditions.
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Imrie, Alex. "CARACALLA AND ‘ALEXANDER'S PHALANX’: CAUGHT AT A CROSSROADS OF EVIDENCE." Greece and Rome 68, no. 2 (September 8, 2021): 222–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383521000048.
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It is well known that Alexander the Great offered inspiration to successive monarchs and autocrats. Few of these, however, could claim to match the affection shown by the Roman emperor Caracalla (198–217 ce). Caracalla is said to have been an almost pathological aficionado of Alexander, constantly promoting a public association between himself and his idol. One aspect of Caracalla's imitatio Alexandri was allegedly the levy of a peculiar phalangite formation based on the arms and equipment of Alexander's time. For years it was impossible to gauge whether this was a real development or a hostile literary fabrication, but the discovery of funerary remains at Apamea in Syria, which appear to memorialize phalangites and lanciarii, confirmed to some the historicity of Caracalla's bizarre levy. This article argues, however, that the apparently convincing combination of evidence is illusory, and that Caracalla's ‘phalanx’ was rather a convenient label applied to an inherently Roman formation.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Roman autocracy"
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MacKay, Joshua Stewart. "Livy's Republic: Reconciling Republic and Princeps in Ab Urbe Condita." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2017. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6668.
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As early as Tacitus, Livian scholarship has struggled to resolve the "Livian paradox," the conflict between Livy's support of the Roman Republic and his overt approval of Augustus, who brought about the end of the Republic. This paper addresses the paradox by attempting to place Livy's writings within their proper historical and literary context. An examination of Augustus' position during the early years of Livy's writing shows that the princeps cloaked his power within the precedent of Republican autocracy, in which imperium could be unlimited in power so long as it was limited by time. As a result, although Augustus' rule would ultimately prove the end of Rome's republic, nevertheless during Livy's early writings Augustus' reign and the Republic were not antithetical. Livy's preface and early exempla further demonstrate that Livy's writings, while condemnatory of his contemporary Rome, blame Rome's decline on the character of the Roman people rather than a corruption of the Republic's political forms. In his preface Livy blames vitia, not ambitio for the universal destruction of the civil wars, while his exempla from the monarchic period and beyond show praise or condemnation of individuals for their actions, not their political offices. Livy praises most of Rome's monarchs for their individual character and their establishment of mores, while also portraying the early Romans' defense of libertas as injuriously overzealous. Ultimately, Augustus' attempts to legislate conservative, "traditional" morality made him a contemporary exemplum of Livy's ancient mores. Thus, the Livian paradox is answered by understanding that Augustus and the Republic were not antithetical, Livy was not concerned with political forms but morality, and Augustus' morality aligned with that championed by Livy.
Books on the topic "Roman autocracy"
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Burden-Strevens, Christopher, Jesper Majbom Madsen, and Antonio Pistellato. Cassius Dio and the Principate. Venice: Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-472-1.
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In the Imperial books of his Roman History, Cassius Dio focuses on individual emperors and imperial institutions to promote a political framework for the ideal monarchy, and to theorise autocracy’s typical problems and their solutions. The distinctive narrative structure of Dio’s work creates a unique sense of the past and allows us to see Roman history through a specific lens: that of a man who witnessed the Principate from the Antonines to the Severans. When Dio was writing, the Principate was a full-fledged historical fact, having experienced more than two hundred years of history, good and bad emperors, and three major civil wars. This collection of seven essays sets out to address these issues, and to see Dio not as an ‘adherent’ to or ‘advocate’ of monarchy, but rather as a theorist of its development and execution.
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Kelly, Benjamin. Repression, Resistance and Rebellion. Edited by Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198728689.013.29.
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This chapter reconstructs the legal underpinnings of repressive responses to fundamental threats to the Roman political order: sedition, conspiracies, riots and provincial revolts. It outlines the legal and ethical limitations on state power that were invoked in relation to acts of repression. It argues that there was a tension in Roman civilization between ideas about the appropriate limitations on the exercise of state violence against the individual and the need to deal with fundamental political threats. With the growth of autocracy in the later Empire, the ethics of rulers’ responses to fundamental threats to the political order came to be emphasized rather than the legal rights of the rebellious. The chapter argues that attempts were made to downgrade legally or discursively the civic statuses of individuals accused of threatening the political order. Such attempts aimed to reduce concerns about repressive actions that would have been considered illegal or unethical.
Book chapters on the topic "Roman autocracy"
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Noreña, Carlos F. "The Ethics of Autocracy in the Roman World." In A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, 266–79. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444310344.ch17.
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"MILITARY AUTOCRACY." In The Roman World 44 BC-AD 180, 107–12. Routledge, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203146880-17.
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"Autocracy and Bureaucracy." In Ruling the Later Roman Empire, 186–231. Harvard University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1q3z2n4.11.
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"Chapter Two. ETHICS FOR THE PRINCIPATE: SENECA, STOICISM, AND TRADITIONAL ROMAN MORALITY." In Constructing Autocracy, 64–126. Princeton University Press, 2001. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400824090-005.
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Connolly, Joy. "Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony." In The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691162591.003.0006.
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With the advent of Julius Caesar came the end times of the republic, and this chapter turns to one of Cicero's Caesarian orations. Several key themes from previous chapters come together: responsibility to the other, the significance of imagination and recognition, the politics of irony, and the limits of self-sovereignty. Interwoven with these themes is an emphasis on the necessity of speech, speech that may retain some element of resistibility even in the face of tyrannical domination. By including in a book about republican political thought a speech that is commonly taken as the starting point of imperial panegyric, the chapter also foregrounds the fact that all the texts under consideration here emerge in conditions of disruptive and disrupted politics. It is the shock of the repeat experience of autocracy (after the “decisive rift” created by Marius' seven consulships in the late second century) that distills the republican vision at the heart of Cicero's speech on behalf of the exile Marcellus.
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Kselman, Thomas. "Family, Nation, and Freedom." In Conscience and Conversion. Yale University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300226133.003.0005.
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This chapter studies the salon of Sophie Swetchine, a Russian émigré and Catholic convert who moved to Paris in 1826, and whose home became a center of religious life that brought together Roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox believers. It focuses on the Russian diplomat Ivan Gagarin, who saw in the Catholicism of the Swetchine circle a path to personal salvation and the political and social regeneration of Russia. Gagarin participated in the debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers about the future of Russia, arguing that Catholicism represented a middle way between Russian autocracy and the corrosive individualism that threatened western Europe. Gagarin concluded his career by joining the Jesuit order, a freely made decision to accept the bonds of religious authority.
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"Homeric Ideals Versus Roman Realities? Civil War, Autocracy, and the Reception of Homer in Silius Italicus’ Punica." In Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond, 199–218. BRILL, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004365858_012.
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Morgan, Llewelyn. "1. Introduction." In Ovid: A Very Short Introduction, 1–17. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198837688.003.0001.
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'Introduction: P. Ovidius Naso' provides a background to the poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, describing the political circumstances of his life, a momentous shift from civil war to autocracy, and his own elevated social origins in the Italian elite. Ovid inherited a rich literary tradition and the conventions of genre and metre of Roman poetry. Contemporary poets such as Propertius, Horace, and Virgil, had a huge influence on Ovid, as did the earlier Greek poet Callimachus. There are many important themes in the story of Ovid’s life and poetry, his restless commitment to innovation, complex relationship with the emperor Augustus, and his irrepressible wit to be studied. In poetry and in life, Ovid courted controversy, which both brought him celebrity and contributed to the banishment from Rome that he suffered at the height of his popularity.
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de Lisle, Christopher. "Telling Tales about the King." In Agathokles of Syracuse, 69–94. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861720.003.0004.
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Αnecdotes about Agathokles in our literary sources were told because they were thought to illuminate his character or a general truth about the world and indicate how he was fitted into the broader dialogue on autocracy and power. There is a clash between the characterization of Agathokles as an effective military leader and as a monstrous tyrant, resulting from the nature of the lost historical narratives and from the way Agathokles was used by subsequent interlocutors: his successors in Sicily, the Romans, and authors looking for exempla. Many of the anecdotes are shared with mythical figures, mainland Greek and Sicilian tyrants, Hellenistic kings, and non-Greek rulers. The distinction between different types of autocrat was less important in ancient Greek and Latin discourse than their common features.
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Shannon-Henderson, Kelly E. "Tiberius the Autocrat." In Religion and Memory in Tacitus' Annals, 25–68. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198832768.003.0002.
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This chapter shows how Tacitus’ treatment of the early principate of Tiberius in Annals books 1–2 lays the foundation for the problems of Roman religion that will shape the rest of his account. The deification of Augustus is an important part of Tiberius’ consolidation of his political position, but also encourages the living emperor’s subjects to treat him in ways that approach worship. Religious flattery of Tiberius and his family becomes a growing problem. The consequences of Augustus’ deification are further tested in early maiestas trials. Tiberius takes an autocratic position when he sets himself up as the sole arbiter of important religious questions (whether the flooding of the Tiber is an omen; in what cases a triumphal ritual can be celebrated), allowing no room for debate even as his interpretations conflict with traditional practice.