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11 results

Freed Persons in the Roman World
  • Status, Diversity, and Representation
  • Edited by Sinclair W. Bell, Dorian Borbonus, Rose MacLean
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • How were freed people represented in the Roman world? This volume presents new research about the integration of freed persons into Roman society. It addresses the challenge of studying Roman freed persons on the basis of highly fragmentary sources whose contents have been fundamentally shaped by the forces of domination. Even though freed persons were defined through a common legal status and shared the experience of enslavement and manumission, many different interactions could derive from these commonalities in different periods and localities across the empire. Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, this book provides cases studies that test the various ways in which juridical categories and normative discourses shaped the social and cultural landscape in which freed people lived. By approaching the literary and epigraphic representations of freed persons in new ways, it nuances the impact of power asymmetries and social strategies on the cultural practices and lived experiences of freed persons.

  • 27 - Roman Violence: Attitudes and Practice

  • from Part V - Violence, Crime and the State
  • Edited by Garrett G. Fagan, Pennsylvania State University, Linda Fibiger, University of Edinburgh, Mark Hudson, Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte, Germany, Matthew Trundle, University of Auckland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Violence
    Published online:
    13 March 2020
    Print publication:
    26 March 2020, pp 550-571

  • Summary

    The chapter examines the broad contours of violence in the Roman world, from the private, personal plane of violence in social relations (where self-help was the order of the day) to criminality and the law, to the ideological underpinnings of applying violence to those perceived as threats to the community. Various facets of the Romans’ socio-political landscape had an impact on how they viewed and practised violence. Romans had an ideology of dominance inherent in empire. They accepted the brutalities of mass slavery, a hierarchical social system that ranked people according to group membership and assigned personal worth (or lack of it) based on that membership. Violence reflected and enforced these systems. What emerges is a picture of a world where violence was, in no small measure, the language of rank and status.

  • 12 - Heresiology: The invention of ‘heresy’ and ‘schism’

  • from Part II - Christianity Contested
  • Edited by Augustine Casiday, University of Wales, Lampeter, Frederick W. Norris
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    30 August 2007, pp 296-314

  • Summary

    Heresiology was the combative theological genre for asserting true Christian doctrine. Rhetorical techniques such as labeling, and literary genres such as intellectual catalogues can be examined in historical context to reveal not only social or religious attempts at expulsion, but also theological negotiation with contemporary cultural problems of multiplicity and difference in Roman society. The increasing classification of error reflected the dynamism of the theological tradition as well as the general codification of Roman life and thought during the later empire. Like many products of late antiquity, heresiology was a hybrid of various local cultural and religious traditions that had been placed in dialogue by the unified Roman empire. The development of handbooks of heresies or the diptychs of holy ancestors were the expansion and public codification of early individual polemical techniques. The demonisation and exaggeration of the teaching of Pelagius theology was part of a means of excluding not only actual teaching, but theological possibilities, from orthodoxy.

  • 12 - Coinage, society and economy

  • from PART IV - THE ECONOMY OF THE EMPIRE
  • Edited by Alan Bowman, Brasenose College, Oxford, Averil Cameron, Keble College, Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    08 September 2005, pp 393-439

  • Summary

    From the last decades of the second century to the first decades of the fourth, the economy of the Roman world without doubt suffered the aftershocks of the violent tremors that shook the empire, most of them of a military and political nature. The Roman economy has left behind a large body of material evidence which it has become possible to study more systematically in recent decades thanks to advances in archaeology and epigraphy. This evidence consists of artefacts that have resisted the passage of time: coins; pottery and what can be deduced from it, such as the products transported and sometimes stored in the amphorae-wine, oil and garum. The prosperity of the towns often also has a sumptuary dimension, and bears witness to the structural imbalances in the Roman economy and society. For an economy in which building has always been one of the most prosperous activities, investments in cities are always considered to be a positive sign.

  • 17 - Social and historical setting: Christianity as culture critique

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 179-199

  • Summary

    A more adequate way of understanding Christianity is as a process of culture critique within Roman society. Christianity originated within the matrix of Roman society and, as Roman society spawned Christianity, it was also changed by it. Christianity, in turn, was continuously shaped and constrained by the values, world-view and institutions of Roman society. The imperial bureaucracy, civic institutions, public values, patronage, and Roman notions of honor, mos maiorum, pietas, disciplina and Romanitasmoulded Christianity as much as its ecclesiastical crises and doctrinal disputes. The penetration of Christianity into the public classes made Christianity appear more threatening to the romanitas of those classes so essential for Roman hegemony. The politics of the African churches were dominated by Carthage, the city at the heart of Romanized Africa with direct lines to imperial power. Family religion in Christian homes honoured God with rituals of prayer recited three times a day.

  • 37 - Social and historical setting

  • from B - CONTEXT AND INTERPRETATION
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 397-413

  • Summary

    The main directions in the Church's development had been established in the first three centuries of its existence. The Church entered the fourth century with a set of beliefs and an organizational structure which gave it a recognizable identity. The Constantinian revolution gave a huge new impetus to the Church's spread and to the growth of its public importance. Christianity was becoming a way to prestige; conformity could pay. Christians came gradually to occupy public office and to achieve prominence at the imperial courts. Until the end of the century, however, Roman society remained very mixed. The new social relations of the fourth-century Empire brought greater mobility and provided opportunities for the advancement of new men. Political, cultural and religious exclusiveness merged to give rise to a new sense of Romania which was synonymous with civilization and Christianity. By the middle of the fourth century Christianity had gone a very long way in assimilating the dominant culture of pagan Romans.

  • 11 - Rebels and outsiders

  • from PART III - THE EMPIRE
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge, Dominic Rathbone, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    12 October 2000, pp 361-404

  • Summary

    Formal status, more precisely the degrees of generosity in the dispensation of citizenship to the various peoples of the empire, offers only one measurement of membership in that larger city, the patria communis, that the empire pretended to be. The spread of citizenship, and of Roman-style urban communities with which citizenship was correlated, was an uneven process. The extension of citizenship and urban developments of Roman-type in the western Mediterranean was marked by considerable successes in the plains regions of the general geographic area. As with all historical portraits of the 'barbarian', the negative side of the Roman image of the foreigner was rooted in the proven inferiority of the external society. Surrounded by the twin worlds of ethnicity and rusticity were the urban centres that constituted the core of Roman society. Each town and village, depending on the wider regional and ethnic context in which it was embedded, had its own spectrum of unacceptable persons, of social outcasts.

  • 11 - Late Roman social relations

  • from PART III - THE EMPIRE: ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
  • Edited by Averil Cameron, University of Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    11 December 1997, pp 338-370

  • Summary

    The most obvious characteristic of Roman society, its verticality, became more accentuated in late antiquity. The history of social relations in late antiquity certainly benefits from being illuminated by sources notable for their quantity and quality. The sources issue, as always in antiquity, from the upper classes of society, and the silence of the lower classes is almost total. Christian charity undoubtedly represented a significant departure from the typical forms of munificence of the pagan empire, precisely because of the universalistic ideology which directed it towards groups which were normally neglected. In the second half of the fourth century, a way of advancement opened up for Christian women in the form of an ascetic lifestyle. The increased verticalization of the society of late antiquity is most apparent in the emphasis on the figure of the emperor. At Constantinople between the fourth and the fifth century the arbiters of the political struggle are the barbarians in the army and the bishops.

  • 18 - Social status and social legislation

  • from PART IV - ROMAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE UNDER THE JULIO-CLAUDIANS
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Edward Champlin, Princeton University, New Jersey, Andrew Lintott, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    08 February 1996, pp 873-904

  • Summary

    Roman social patterns and life must be seen against the mosaic of the empire. Economic distinctions modify the pattern imposed by constitutional function or legal status. The most striking fact about society is the gap between rich and poor. The two themes of Romans who reflected on the twenty years after the murder of Caesar were social disruption and moral decay. Contemporary analysis of social problems focused on morality. Imperial liberti provide a striking illustration of the difference the Principate made to Roman society. The Principate brought improved roads, made safer from brigands, sea-lanes at risk from weather rather than pirates. Society changed between 44 BC and AD 69. Some developments, such as the improved right of succession given to women, seem to have happened because views of the family continued to move further away from patriarchy and emphasis on agnatic relationships. The social structure of the ruling elite survived the Julio-Claudian period, but its membership and tone were transformed.

  • 19 - Literature and society

  • from PART IV - ROMAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE UNDER THE JULIO-CLAUDIANS
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Edward Champlin, Princeton University, New Jersey, Andrew Lintott, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    08 February 1996, pp 905-929

  • Summary

    The 'Roman revolution' of Augustus owed much of its success to the extent to which change was concealed under the cover of 'restoration of the Republic', and insistence on precedent was emphasized at almost every stage under the early Principate. The social position of literature at Rome, never as fully integrated into the life of the city as it had been at Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries, changed markedly after Actium, when oratory lost its preeminence with its divorce from a genuine political function. Literature became more the property of an elite, as Horace repeatedly emphasizes. Of the major writers of the last generation of the Republic, Cicero, Varro and Catallus had no need of literary patronage; the position of Lucretius and his possible dependence on C. Memmius remains mysterious. In a world where political comment was perilous and profitless and speech-making had no real political function, the development of rhetoric was at once natural and paradoxical.