"The Roman assemblies from their origin to the end of the Republic" by George Willis Botsford. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Draws on archaeological evidence to reconstruct voting procedures in the assemblies

A very readable introduction exploring much-contested issues and debates, and providing an original synthesis of this important topic.

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

For hundreds of years, the Roman people produced laws in popular assemblies attended by tens of thousands of voters to forge resolutions publicly to issues that might otherwise have been unmanageable. Callie Williamson's comprehensive study finds that the key to Rome's survival and growth during the most formative period of empire, roughly 350 to 44 B.C.E., lies in its hitherto enigmatic public law-making assemblies, which helped extend Roman influence and control. Williamson bases her rigorous and innovative work on the entire body of surviving laws preserved in ancient reports of proposed and enacted legislation from these public assemblies.