5 - An Empire of the Chieftainship over People

Summary

This chapter addresses the nature of Roman imperial rule. Roman historians have often argued that rulership in the Roman Empire was modeled on the household powers of the Roman paterfamilias. In particular, as Myles Lavan and other recent scholars have suggested, Roman rule made heavy use of the ideology of the master/slave relationship; the idiom of power of Roman rulership, on this account, turned on the rhetoric of enslaving the peoples of the world. The chapter surveys these interpretations, with the purpose of highlighting the conceptual connections between Roman ownership and Roman rulership. Just as the modern territorial state is conceptualized in ways that are in close harmony with the modern private ownership of land, the classical Roman understanding of rule was in harmony with the Roman understanding of household domination.