An experienced scholar explains why the legendary early Republic, rather than the historical Republic of Cicero, has most influenced later political thought.

A thematic introduction to Roman political thought that shows the Romans' enduring contribution to key political ideas.

The crisis and fall of the Roman Republic spawned a tradition of political thought that sought to evade the Republic's fate--despotism. Thinkers from Cicero to Bodin, Montesquieu, and the American Founders saw constitutionalism, not virtue, as the remedy. This study traces Roman constitutional thought from antiquity to the Revolutionary Era.

An insightful and original exploration of Roman Republic politics In A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, editors Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag deliver an incisive and original collection of forty contributions from leading academics representing various intellectual and academic traditions. The collected works represent some of the best scholarship in recent decades and adopt a variety of approaches, each of which confronts major problems in the field and contributes to ongoing research. The book represents a new, updated, and comprehensive view of the political world of Republican Rome and some of the included essays are available in English for the first time. Divided into six parts, the discussions consider the institutionalized loci, political actors, and values, rituals, and discourse that characterized Republican Rome. The Companion also offers several case studies and sections on the history of the interpretation of political life in the Roman Republic. Key features include: A thorough introduction to the Roman political world as seen through the wider lenses of Roman political culture Comprehensive explorations of the fundamental components of Roman political culture, including ideas and values, civic and religious rituals, myths, and communicative strategies Practical discussions of Roman Republic institutions, both with reference to their formal rules and prescriptions, and as patterns of social organization In depth examinations of the 'afterlife' of the Roman Republic, both in ancient authors and in early modern and modern times Perfect for students of all levels of the ancient world, A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars and students of politics, political history, and the history of ideas.

This volume explores the political implications of the first five books of Livy's celebrated history of Rome, challenging the common perception of the author as an apolitical moralist. Ann Vasaly argues that Livy intended to convey through the narration of particular events crucial lessons about the interaction of power and personality, including the personality of the Roman people as a whole. These lessons demonstrate the means by which the Roman republic flourished in the distant past and by which it might be revived in Livy's own corrupt time. Written at the precise moment when Augustus' imperial autocracy was replacing the republican system that had existed in Rome for almost 500 years, the stories of the first pentad offer invaluable insight into how republics and monarchies work. Vasaly's innovative study furthers the integration in recent scholarship of the literary brilliance of Livy's text and the seriousness of its purpose.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of Roman political thought, arguing that Romans engaged in wide-ranging reflections on politics.

An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic—and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil war In The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion. It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unrest—and the agents of each were very often the same people. Members of the senatorial class, including Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Cato, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus, contributed greatly to the development of Roman scholarship and engaged in a lively and often polemical exchange with one another. These men were also crucially involved in the tumultuous events that brought about the collapse of the Republic, and they ended up on opposite sides in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in the early 40s. Volk treats the intellectual and political activities of these “senator scholars” as two sides of the same coin, exploring how scholarship and statesmanship mutually informed one another—and how the acquisition, organization, and diffusion of knowledge was bound up with the question of what it meant to be a Roman in a time of crisis. By revealing how first-century Rome’s remarkable “republic of letters” was connected to the fight over the actual res publica, Volk’s riveting account captures the complexity of this pivotal period.

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.

Rhetorical theory, the core of Roman education, taught rules of public speaking that are still influential today. But Roman rhetoric has long been regarded as having little important to say about political ideas. The State of Speech presents a forceful challenge to this view. The first book to read Roman rhetorical writing as a mode of political thought, it focuses on Rome's greatest practitioner and theorist of public speech, Cicero. Through new readings of his dialogues and treatises, Joy Connolly shows how Cicero's treatment of the Greek rhetorical tradition's central questions is shaped by his ideal of the republic and the citizen. Rhetoric, Connolly argues, sheds new light on Cicero's deepest political preoccupations: the formation of individual and communal identity, the communicative role of the body, and the "unmanly" aspects of politics, especially civility and compromise. Transcending traditional lines between rhetorical and political theory, The State of Speech is a major contribution to the current debate over the role of public speech in Roman politics. Instead of a conventional, top-down model of power, it sketches a dynamic model of authority and consent enacted through oratorical performance and examines how oratory modeled an ethics of citizenship for the masses as well as the elite. It explains how imperial Roman rhetoricians reshaped Cicero's ideal republican citizen to meet the new political conditions of autocracy, and defends Ciceronian thought as a resource for contemporary democracy.