https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-dynamics-of-roman-imperial-imagery/67AB598E98DDA5F16A... more https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-dynamics-of-roman-imperial-imagery/67AB598E98DDA5F16AEE25C7A27DA3FE https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108891714 In the Roman Empire, images relating to imperial power were produced all over the empire at every social level, and even images created at the centre were constantly remade as they were reproduced, reappropriated, and reinterpreted across the empire. We use the language of social dynamics, drawn from economics, sociology, and psychology, to see how imperial imagery was embedded in local contexts. Patrons and artists often made use of the universal visual language of empire to navigate their own local hierarchies and relationships, rather than as part of direct communication with the central authorities, and these local interactions were vital to the formation and functioning of a unified visual language of empire.
Individual chapters range from large-scale monuments adorned with sculpture and epigraphy to quotidian oil lamps and lead tokens; they stretch across the entire empire from Hispania to Egypt, and from Augustus to the third century CE.
Taking public space as her starting point, Amy Russell offers a fresh analysis of the ever-fluid public/private divide in Republican Rome. Built on the 'spatial turn' in Roman studies and incorporating textual and archaeological evidence, this book uncovers a rich variety of urban spaces. No space in Rome was solely or fully public. Some spaces were public but also political, sacred, or foreign; many apparently public spaces were saturated by the private, leaving grey areas and room for manipulation. Women, slaves, and non-citizens were broadly excluded from politics: how did they experience and help to shape its spaces? How did the building projects of Republican dynasts relate to the communal realm? From the Forum to the victory temples of the Campus Martius, culminating in Pompey's great theatre-portico-temple-garden-house complex, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome explores how space was marked, experienced, and defined by multiple actors and audiences.
Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.
El volumen ha sido financiado por el grupo de investigación PAIDI HUM 545 («Religión y pensamient... more El volumen ha sido financiado por el grupo de investigación PAIDI HUM 545 («Religión y pensamiento en el mundo antiguo»).
Version of record at https://www.steiner-verlag.de/en/A-Culture-of-Civil-War/9783515134040.
Version of record at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119673675.ch19
Each year... more Version of record at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119673675.ch19 Each year the concilium plebis, the tribal assembly open only to plebeians, elected 10 tribunes of the plebs . Many of our ancient sources, particularly for the late Republic, focus overwhelmingly on individual, ‘revolutionary’ tribunes of the plebs . The tribunate of the plebs , Romans believed, was a desperate and unilateral expedient invented by the plebs alone during the Struggle of the Orders. This chapter lays the groundwork, treating the practical implications of the tribunate's (extra-)legal status, its history and development over time and its reputation as an ideologically ‘popular’ magistracy. It then moves to explore political culture in action in more detail, asking how the tribunes' traditional role as the people's champions affected how individual tribunes behaved during their year in office. The chapter considers how the tribunate fits in to larger debates about Roman political culture, ideology and the role of the people.
In Chinese. An analysis of the Ara Pacis Augustae and its commissioning byt he Senate. Museum Sin... more In Chinese. An analysis of the Ara Pacis Augustae and its commissioning byt he Senate. Museum Sinicum 4 (2022) 287-305.
The introductory chapter explores the methodology of approaching imperial imagery, from definitions and categorisations to modes of analysis. Defining imperial imagery as imagery that relates to imperial power, the authors reject universal models that purport to encompass all aspects of the production and use of such images in favour of context-based approaches which focus on the ways in which they became embedded in local image systems. The authors single out social dynamics, a term borrowed from economics, sociology, and psychology indicating how large-scale phenomena are the sum of many individual interactions. Social dynamics gives a way to understand how and why imperial imagery was created and used in Roman society at all levels. Imperial imagery had roles to play beyond the emperor’s own sphere, and he was often neither its author nor its audience; instead, individuals used imperial images to communicate with their immediate neighbours, geographically and socially. Multiple users and viewers across the spatial and social spectrums of the empire (and beyond) brought their own experiences to imperial images, and to understand them, we must analyse them in their local contexts.
A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.
I analyse the senatorial SC coins under Augustus as visual objects in their own right, with particular emphasis on how ordinary Romans might have understand the ordinary, worn coins that passed through their hands. One of the largest contributions these coins can make comes from their ubiquity and their legibility. They form the most abundant evidence for the Senate’s very existence during this period. They make a claim for the role of the Senate as a group on a medium previously reserved for individual competition, and they make that claim to a wide audience.
Built space structures everyday life in the city, and people build spaces that suit their conceptions of what their society is, or should be. The connection is both material and symbolic. In this chapter I aim to tackle the question of how Romans related two of the city’s most important political spaces at two different historical moments: the Forum Romanum during the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire. By drawing on the French theorist Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and a more recent set of concepts devised by organisational theorists Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, I propose a vocabulary that might allow us to discuss the relationship between an individual and an urban space in their societal context. Once we have a consistent mechanism for putting that relationship into words, we can begin to compare it with other relationships at other times and in other places described in the same terms. The Forum Romanum of the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire both have a claim to be their city’s primary political space. There is so much more to be said about each example: these are rich and multivalent spaces, which allow for many different interpretations, and Althusser’s critics must be right that alternative interpretations, misrecognitions, resistance, and more were possible even for their original Roman visitors. But it should be no surprise to find that, on the whole, their architecture reflected the power relations that structured society at these two different historical moments.
Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This paper examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one we know from Cicero. It became one of the pillars of the regime, allowing Augustus to lay claim to a rhetoric of continuity and legitimacy he could not have achieved in any other way. But there was a fundamental change in the way senators themselves saw their role, and the relationship Rome's political, economic, and social elite had to senatorhood more broadly. The Senate itself became largely cooperative rather than competitive, and developed a new corporate personality. This shift fed into many of Augustus' own goals, but it also represented a rational response by the senators to their new reality.
The Fasti Capitolini, set up by the Senate, refuse to accept the destruction of history. The arrangement of the inscriptions on the monument focused the viewer’s attention in particular on the Middle Republic, highlighted in the central archway. This collective Golden Age, rather than any individual’s successes, was proposed as an exemplum for the res publica. And unlike Augustus and his own Golden Age, balanced precariously on the intersection between present, future, and mythical past, the Senate claimed historical and epistemological validity for the period they set up as a model. The paradigm of history they offered, not just to Augustus but to any viewer, was both innovative and strikingly different to the dominant Augustan model as displayed in the nearby gallery of exceptional, exemplary summi viri. This was an inclusive, collective version of Roman history and memory, watched over by and indeed metonymous with the Senate themselves.
For Romans, the group of people constituting ‘the public’ were clearly and narrowly defined: they were the members of the populus Romanus, the institution from which the concept of publicness itself was derived. When they positioned the populus Romanus as the sole political public audience, Roman political discourse and the politicians who used it also defined the populus Romanus as the sole and indivisible source of legitimate public opinion. The conceptual indivisibility of the populus Romanus, when confronted with the ease with which a politician could draw a partisan crowd, generated a range of problems around public opinion which were subtly different from those we find today.
The annual election of magistrates was the most visible element of the competition that structured Roman Republican politicians' entire lives. Even a man born into the most exclusive social position had to win the approval of the comitia in competition with other men who may well have had many of the same advantages. Elections were personal: the ultimate test of virtus. The men who lost these contests, contests for which they had been preparing all their lives, faced distress and embarrassment. A defeat struck at the very roots of their selfhood. When Republican politicians attempted to find accounts of defeat that both salvaged their identity as elite men and preserved the integrity of the system, they allowed themselves to discuss openly norms and values that were usually implicit. Sometimes, however, the result was a parallel political discourse about norms and values that was entirely tendentious: just as politicians could lie about the facts of why they lost, they could also appeal to invented or exaggerated norms.
Historical Studies of Women and Gender (Shanghai) 2 (2018) 115-30. Translation of TRAC 2015 164-7... more Historical Studies of Women and Gender (Shanghai) 2 (2018) 115-30. Translation of TRAC 2015 164-76.
In the ancient Republican city of Rome, there were few spaces segregated by gender. Nor were women always conceptually tied to ‘private’ space. Yet the public/private divide was still used to police gender. This paper considers feminist approaches to spatial analysis, and uses gender as a lens to help us understand Roman urban space. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
A note from me, 2021: In the first few pages of this article I make an argument that the shift fr... more A note from me, 2021: In the first few pages of this article I make an argument that the shift from women's history to gender history in the twenty years or so leading up to its publication risked leaving behind some important unfinished work on women's lives. I was mostly worried about what I saw as a trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s towards masculinity studies, which in the wrong hands meant using the terminology of gender studies to recentre men and masculinity: I got a sense in some venues that 'just' researching women was seen as passé.
When I read this article now, I am horrified at how close my argument gets to the kind of rhetoric used in recent years by TERFs or 'gender-critical' writers to deny trans women's rights and position their existence as some kind of attack on cis women. I hadn't come across that rhetoric at the time; now that I have, I think that if I were reading the piece for the first time I would suspect that the author was making an anti-trans dogwhistle. And I worry that trans scholars and others who love and support them may have read it and been hurt, or felt less welcome in the research community.
I believed then and believe now that trans women are women, and that all women's (all people's!) liberation is bound together. I am sorry.
Abstract
Feminist approaches to gendered space, including the second wave theories of the 70s (Ardener, Pateman), the Marxist-inflected geographies (Soja and Hooper) and urban theories of the 90s (Spain, Wilson), and more recent work (Puwar), often rest on assumptions situated in their own time and place which are not easy to apply to the ancient world. For example, some such models claim that gender stratification is often reinforced by spatial segregation, that women are not given access to places where power is exercised or knowledge is kept, and that ‘the greater the distance between women and sources of valued knowledge, the greater the gender stratification in the society’ (Spain, 27). In Republican Rome, sources of valued knowledge were spatially located in places like the elite house – seen at least in part as women’s domain – while the topography and archaeology of the political space of the Forum suggests an open and accessible multipurpose square which was not defined by architectural barriers and was available to all.
Other contemporary theoretical work considers the relationship between the public/private divide and gender: in this model, while women are not physically confined to ‘private’ space or men to ‘public’ space, the public/private divide is a tool used to police gender. Women are conceptually tied to the private sphere, and when they are in public space they are either constrained and marked or smothered and denied. Our imperfect understanding of Roman concepts analogous to ‘public’ and ‘private’ make it hard to apply this model directly, but by heeding Soja and Hooper’s call to look not for ‘the difference that space makes’ but ‘the spaces that difference makes’, we can in fact turn the question on its head and use Roman gender policing to understand the public/private divide itself. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries.
Many of Republican Rome’s civic buildings and monuments sent a clear message to that same ideal viewer: they testified to a patron’s glory, military success, and the unbroken tradition of Roman virtus – ‘manliness’ – stretching down the centuries. But what of those who could not vote for the patron or serve in the army, and were biologically incapable of ‘manliness’? In a world where the elite house was hardly less ‘public’ than the Forum and elite patrons used architectural style and decoration to construct the buildings they donated as civic benefactions almost as an extension of their own private property, we cannot unthinkingly rely on the unstated equivalences between the dichotomies public/private and masculine/feminine which characterize much work on gendered space in our own culture. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
When Publius Clodius ordered Rome’s tabernae to be shut for one of his meetings in 58 BC, he was not only trying to gather a crowd by forcing tabernarii onto the street. Shutting the shops was a symbolic move alluding to the archaic iustitium and to the actions of Tiberius Gracchus. It allowed Clodius to claim both that his meeting was vital to the safety of the res publica and that he (and not Cicero) had the support of the entire Roman people, including the lowliest.
View preprint here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/18760/
Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer... more View preprint here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/18760/ Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer to spaces in both ‘public’ and ‘private’ contexts. Vitruvius mentions basilicae among the ‘public’ areas of an elite house (6.5.2), drawing explicit parallels with non-residential architecture. The overlap highlights the lack of a strict distinction between public and private in domestic space, but consideration of the relationship between the civic form and its domestic equivalent demonstrates even closer links between public and private space. Domestic and civic architectural typologies at Rome developed in tandem, with relationships of influence working in both directions. A fuller investigation of the influences flowing in both directions can help us understand better the operation of the private/public divide and spatial experience both within and beyond the house.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-dynamics-of-roman-imperial-imagery/67AB598E98DDA5F16A... more https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-dynamics-of-roman-imperial-imagery/67AB598E98DDA5F16AEE25C7A27DA3FE https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108891714 In the Roman Empire, images relating to imperial power were produced all over the empire at every social level, and even images created at the centre were constantly remade as they were reproduced, reappropriated, and reinterpreted across the empire. We use the language of social dynamics, drawn from economics, sociology, and psychology, to see how imperial imagery was embedded in local contexts. Patrons and artists often made use of the universal visual language of empire to navigate their own local hierarchies and relationships, rather than as part of direct communication with the central authorities, and these local interactions were vital to the formation and functioning of a unified visual language of empire.
Individual chapters range from large-scale monuments adorned with sculpture and epigraphy to quotidian oil lamps and lead tokens; they stretch across the entire empire from Hispania to Egypt, and from Augustus to the third century CE.
Taking public space as her starting point, Amy Russell offers a fresh analysis of the ever-fluid public/private divide in Republican Rome. Built on the 'spatial turn' in Roman studies and incorporating textual and archaeological evidence, this book uncovers a rich variety of urban spaces. No space in Rome was solely or fully public. Some spaces were public but also political, sacred, or foreign; many apparently public spaces were saturated by the private, leaving grey areas and room for manipulation. Women, slaves, and non-citizens were broadly excluded from politics: how did they experience and help to shape its spaces? How did the building projects of Republican dynasts relate to the communal realm? From the Forum to the victory temples of the Campus Martius, culminating in Pompey's great theatre-portico-temple-garden-house complex, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome explores how space was marked, experienced, and defined by multiple actors and audiences.
Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.
El volumen ha sido financiado por el grupo de investigación PAIDI HUM 545 («Religión y pensamient... more El volumen ha sido financiado por el grupo de investigación PAIDI HUM 545 («Religión y pensamiento en el mundo antiguo»).
Version of record at https://www.steiner-verlag.de/en/A-Culture-of-Civil-War/9783515134040.
Version of record at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119673675.ch19
Each year... more Version of record at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119673675.ch19 Each year the concilium plebis, the tribal assembly open only to plebeians, elected 10 tribunes of the plebs . Many of our ancient sources, particularly for the late Republic, focus overwhelmingly on individual, ‘revolutionary’ tribunes of the plebs . The tribunate of the plebs , Romans believed, was a desperate and unilateral expedient invented by the plebs alone during the Struggle of the Orders. This chapter lays the groundwork, treating the practical implications of the tribunate's (extra-)legal status, its history and development over time and its reputation as an ideologically ‘popular’ magistracy. It then moves to explore political culture in action in more detail, asking how the tribunes' traditional role as the people's champions affected how individual tribunes behaved during their year in office. The chapter considers how the tribunate fits in to larger debates about Roman political culture, ideology and the role of the people.
In Chinese. An analysis of the Ara Pacis Augustae and its commissioning byt he Senate. Museum Sin... more In Chinese. An analysis of the Ara Pacis Augustae and its commissioning byt he Senate. Museum Sinicum 4 (2022) 287-305.
The introductory chapter explores the methodology of approaching imperial imagery, from definitions and categorisations to modes of analysis. Defining imperial imagery as imagery that relates to imperial power, the authors reject universal models that purport to encompass all aspects of the production and use of such images in favour of context-based approaches which focus on the ways in which they became embedded in local image systems. The authors single out social dynamics, a term borrowed from economics, sociology, and psychology indicating how large-scale phenomena are the sum of many individual interactions. Social dynamics gives a way to understand how and why imperial imagery was created and used in Roman society at all levels. Imperial imagery had roles to play beyond the emperor’s own sphere, and he was often neither its author nor its audience; instead, individuals used imperial images to communicate with their immediate neighbours, geographically and socially. Multiple users and viewers across the spatial and social spectrums of the empire (and beyond) brought their own experiences to imperial images, and to understand them, we must analyse them in their local contexts.
A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.
I analyse the senatorial SC coins under Augustus as visual objects in their own right, with particular emphasis on how ordinary Romans might have understand the ordinary, worn coins that passed through their hands. One of the largest contributions these coins can make comes from their ubiquity and their legibility. They form the most abundant evidence for the Senate’s very existence during this period. They make a claim for the role of the Senate as a group on a medium previously reserved for individual competition, and they make that claim to a wide audience.
Built space structures everyday life in the city, and people build spaces that suit their conceptions of what their society is, or should be. The connection is both material and symbolic. In this chapter I aim to tackle the question of how Romans related two of the city’s most important political spaces at two different historical moments: the Forum Romanum during the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire. By drawing on the French theorist Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and a more recent set of concepts devised by organisational theorists Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, I propose a vocabulary that might allow us to discuss the relationship between an individual and an urban space in their societal context. Once we have a consistent mechanism for putting that relationship into words, we can begin to compare it with other relationships at other times and in other places described in the same terms. The Forum Romanum of the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire both have a claim to be their city’s primary political space. There is so much more to be said about each example: these are rich and multivalent spaces, which allow for many different interpretations, and Althusser’s critics must be right that alternative interpretations, misrecognitions, resistance, and more were possible even for their original Roman visitors. But it should be no surprise to find that, on the whole, their architecture reflected the power relations that structured society at these two different historical moments.
Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This paper examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one we know from Cicero. It became one of the pillars of the regime, allowing Augustus to lay claim to a rhetoric of continuity and legitimacy he could not have achieved in any other way. But there was a fundamental change in the way senators themselves saw their role, and the relationship Rome's political, economic, and social elite had to senatorhood more broadly. The Senate itself became largely cooperative rather than competitive, and developed a new corporate personality. This shift fed into many of Augustus' own goals, but it also represented a rational response by the senators to their new reality.
The Fasti Capitolini, set up by the Senate, refuse to accept the destruction of history. The arrangement of the inscriptions on the monument focused the viewer’s attention in particular on the Middle Republic, highlighted in the central archway. This collective Golden Age, rather than any individual’s successes, was proposed as an exemplum for the res publica. And unlike Augustus and his own Golden Age, balanced precariously on the intersection between present, future, and mythical past, the Senate claimed historical and epistemological validity for the period they set up as a model. The paradigm of history they offered, not just to Augustus but to any viewer, was both innovative and strikingly different to the dominant Augustan model as displayed in the nearby gallery of exceptional, exemplary summi viri. This was an inclusive, collective version of Roman history and memory, watched over by and indeed metonymous with the Senate themselves.
For Romans, the group of people constituting ‘the public’ were clearly and narrowly defined: they were the members of the populus Romanus, the institution from which the concept of publicness itself was derived. When they positioned the populus Romanus as the sole political public audience, Roman political discourse and the politicians who used it also defined the populus Romanus as the sole and indivisible source of legitimate public opinion. The conceptual indivisibility of the populus Romanus, when confronted with the ease with which a politician could draw a partisan crowd, generated a range of problems around public opinion which were subtly different from those we find today.
The annual election of magistrates was the most visible element of the competition that structured Roman Republican politicians' entire lives. Even a man born into the most exclusive social position had to win the approval of the comitia in competition with other men who may well have had many of the same advantages. Elections were personal: the ultimate test of virtus. The men who lost these contests, contests for which they had been preparing all their lives, faced distress and embarrassment. A defeat struck at the very roots of their selfhood. When Republican politicians attempted to find accounts of defeat that both salvaged their identity as elite men and preserved the integrity of the system, they allowed themselves to discuss openly norms and values that were usually implicit. Sometimes, however, the result was a parallel political discourse about norms and values that was entirely tendentious: just as politicians could lie about the facts of why they lost, they could also appeal to invented or exaggerated norms.
Historical Studies of Women and Gender (Shanghai) 2 (2018) 115-30. Translation of TRAC 2015 164-7... more Historical Studies of Women and Gender (Shanghai) 2 (2018) 115-30. Translation of TRAC 2015 164-76.
In the ancient Republican city of Rome, there were few spaces segregated by gender. Nor were women always conceptually tied to ‘private’ space. Yet the public/private divide was still used to police gender. This paper considers feminist approaches to spatial analysis, and uses gender as a lens to help us understand Roman urban space. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
A note from me, 2021: In the first few pages of this article I make an argument that the shift fr... more A note from me, 2021: In the first few pages of this article I make an argument that the shift from women's history to gender history in the twenty years or so leading up to its publication risked leaving behind some important unfinished work on women's lives. I was mostly worried about what I saw as a trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s towards masculinity studies, which in the wrong hands meant using the terminology of gender studies to recentre men and masculinity: I got a sense in some venues that 'just' researching women was seen as passé.
When I read this article now, I am horrified at how close my argument gets to the kind of rhetoric used in recent years by TERFs or 'gender-critical' writers to deny trans women's rights and position their existence as some kind of attack on cis women. I hadn't come across that rhetoric at the time; now that I have, I think that if I were reading the piece for the first time I would suspect that the author was making an anti-trans dogwhistle. And I worry that trans scholars and others who love and support them may have read it and been hurt, or felt less welcome in the research community.
I believed then and believe now that trans women are women, and that all women's (all people's!) liberation is bound together. I am sorry.
Abstract
Feminist approaches to gendered space, including the second wave theories of the 70s (Ardener, Pateman), the Marxist-inflected geographies (Soja and Hooper) and urban theories of the 90s (Spain, Wilson), and more recent work (Puwar), often rest on assumptions situated in their own time and place which are not easy to apply to the ancient world. For example, some such models claim that gender stratification is often reinforced by spatial segregation, that women are not given access to places where power is exercised or knowledge is kept, and that ‘the greater the distance between women and sources of valued knowledge, the greater the gender stratification in the society’ (Spain, 27). In Republican Rome, sources of valued knowledge were spatially located in places like the elite house – seen at least in part as women’s domain – while the topography and archaeology of the political space of the Forum suggests an open and accessible multipurpose square which was not defined by architectural barriers and was available to all.
Other contemporary theoretical work considers the relationship between the public/private divide and gender: in this model, while women are not physically confined to ‘private’ space or men to ‘public’ space, the public/private divide is a tool used to police gender. Women are conceptually tied to the private sphere, and when they are in public space they are either constrained and marked or smothered and denied. Our imperfect understanding of Roman concepts analogous to ‘public’ and ‘private’ make it hard to apply this model directly, but by heeding Soja and Hooper’s call to look not for ‘the difference that space makes’ but ‘the spaces that difference makes’, we can in fact turn the question on its head and use Roman gender policing to understand the public/private divide itself. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries.
Many of Republican Rome’s civic buildings and monuments sent a clear message to that same ideal viewer: they testified to a patron’s glory, military success, and the unbroken tradition of Roman virtus – ‘manliness’ – stretching down the centuries. But what of those who could not vote for the patron or serve in the army, and were biologically incapable of ‘manliness’? In a world where the elite house was hardly less ‘public’ than the Forum and elite patrons used architectural style and decoration to construct the buildings they donated as civic benefactions almost as an extension of their own private property, we cannot unthinkingly rely on the unstated equivalences between the dichotomies public/private and masculine/feminine which characterize much work on gendered space in our own culture. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
When Publius Clodius ordered Rome’s tabernae to be shut for one of his meetings in 58 BC, he was not only trying to gather a crowd by forcing tabernarii onto the street. Shutting the shops was a symbolic move alluding to the archaic iustitium and to the actions of Tiberius Gracchus. It allowed Clodius to claim both that his meeting was vital to the safety of the res publica and that he (and not Cicero) had the support of the entire Roman people, including the lowliest.
View preprint here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/18760/
Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer... more View preprint here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/18760/ Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer to spaces in both ‘public’ and ‘private’ contexts. Vitruvius mentions basilicae among the ‘public’ areas of an elite house (6.5.2), drawing explicit parallels with non-residential architecture. The overlap highlights the lack of a strict distinction between public and private in domestic space, but consideration of the relationship between the civic form and its domestic equivalent demonstrates even closer links between public and private space. Domestic and civic architectural typologies at Rome developed in tandem, with relationships of influence working in both directions. A fuller investigation of the influences flowing in both directions can help us understand better the operation of the private/public divide and spatial experience both within and beyond the house.
Appian’s Bella Civilia, the most extensive continuous narrative of the end of the Roman Republic ... more Appian’s Bella Civilia, the most extensive continuous narrative of the end of the Roman Republic which has survived from the ancient world, depicts the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE as the beginning of the end. In the next fifty years, a string of successive crises caused by tribunes in the Gracchan mould prove the undoing of the Republican system. Appian’s version of events is corroborated by Cicero, who also sees the tribunate as intrinsically linked to crisis. Yet there were plenty of tribunes of the plebs whose terms in office did not end with constitutional crisis and violent death. In this paper, I explore how and why our sources construct the tribunate of the plebs as the key to the Republic’s fall, and how this understanding has become embedded in modern approaches to the “crisis of the Roman Republic”.
Movement, particularly repeated or ritualized movement, can play an important role in the practic... more Movement, particularly repeated or ritualized movement, can play an important role in the practices of cultural memory. Using Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural and communicative memory to explore the creation and reproduction of cultural memory through movement, Memory and Movement in the Roman Fora from Antiquity to Metro C illuminates the enduring influence of ancient street networks on the modern cityscape of Rome. The Forum Romanum and the neighboring Imperial Fora were places of memory in antiquity and are major tourist sites today, but they have had different relationships to urban movement networks. Amy Russell argues that the pattern of long-term continuity and recent change in each area’s relationship to the wider city and its movement patterns are direct consequences of the way cultural heritage has been consumed and cultural memory constructed through movement. This is a low-res b/w copy to protect the holders of image copyrights. See http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2014.73.4.478 for the full version.
TRAC 2017 will be held in Durham University, UK, 28-31 March 2017
Proposals for sessions should ... more TRAC 2017 will be held in Durham University, UK, 28-31 March 2017
The plebeian Aventine is a commonplace. We know it as the hill of the plebeian secessions, of Ici... more The plebeian Aventine is a commonplace. We know it as the hill of the plebeian secessions, of Icilius' land distributions, of Gaius Gracchus' flight, of the plebeian Aventine Triad: the spiritual home of Rome's plebs and the literal home to many of them. Except that, as M. demonstrates, these are all fictions. Our sources report various destinations for the secessions; Icilius' law is a conundrum at best; Gracchus made his final stand elsewhere; and the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all. The plebeian Aventine is a modern scholarly fiction, and M.'s superb demolition job puts us on notice: how many of our other treasured dogmas are equally unfounded? In some ways, M.'s target is an easy one. The idea of a 'plebeian' hill makes no sense. In the historical period, rich and poor plebeians had little in common: a distinctive 'plebeian' identity would have been hard to maintain. With so few patricians, all of Rome's hills were primarily occupied by plebeians. Or do we mean a hill primarily occupied by the poor? Hardly: such a convenient, salubrious spot was presumably dominated by the rich or by a mixed population. The plebeian Aventine cannot correspond to reality. One might object that even if the plebeian Aventine was an implausible myth, myths mattered to the Romans. And yet M. shows we cannot even reclaim the plebeian Aventine on the level of discourse. It is simply not there in the ancient sources: not in Plutarch's account of Gracchus' flight, not in Livy's telling of the secessions. The plebeian symbolic value of the Aventine has long gone unfootnoted, apparently because it has been universally accepted, but in fact because there is no evidence to cite. M. systematically unpicks an assumption entirely created by modern readers. Much of the heavy demolition work is done in the introduction, and the casual reader may be convinced of the primary argument by page 13 or so. The first four chapters that follow expand on individual facets of the argument: the secession narratives, the Lex Icilia, and literary, then archaeological evidence for patterns of occupation. Chapter 1 is particularly strong: M. makes a conclusive case that Romans did not associate the Aventine with secessions before Gracchus happened to flee there, and probably not afterwards either. The Lex Icilia de Aventino publicando is a harder nut to crack. Much of M.'s discussion focuses on the technical meaning of publicare, which she argues should be translated 'confiscate into public ownership' rather than 'make available for public use' before Augustus. Her logic is sound, but the argument sometimes blurs the circumstances of 456 B.C. with the mindset of later authors: can we even trust that Livy reported the law's original name? Still, the overall point stands: Dionysius might see this law as presaging late Republican land distributions, but he does not use it to connect agrarian reform or popularis politics, much less the plebs as a whole, with the Aventine. As we might expect, the literary and archaeological evidence for the hill's inhabitants mostly concerns the elite. It was well supplied with cult sites, though M. argues that the 'Aventine triad' of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all (and those topographers who do place it there tend to build their arguments precisely, and eventually circularly, on the plebeian nature of the hill). This vital part of the argument is oddly relegated to an appendix. For M., the evidence better supports a location at the foot of the Clivus Publicius in the Forum Boarium.
Table of contents of fascicule 2 Review articles and long reviews N. Rafel Fontanals The elusive ... more Table of contents of fascicule 2 Review articles and long reviews N. Rafel Fontanals The elusive state of the 'Tartessos question' in the Iberian peninsula P. van Dommelen Il sacro e il profano: cultural entanglements and ritual practices in the classical world I. E. M. Edlund-Berry Etruria, Rome and Latium: influences on early podium temples M. Gualtieri Landscape changes and the rural economy of the Metaponto region F. Colivicchi The Italic settlement of Civita di Tricarico in Lucania S. Angiolillo La cultura della Sardegna repubblicana S. Bernard A conference on fortification walls in Italy and elsewhere E. L. Wheeler Aelianus Tacticus: a phalanx of problems A. Thein The urban image of the Campus Martius J. A. Latham Movement, experience, and urbanism in ancient Rome P. Gros Le mausolée du "grand bâtisseur" M. Squire Ignotum per ignotius? Pompeii, Vergil and the "Museum of Augustus" L. A. Mazurek Writing a postmodern art history of classical Italy P. Herz Vergöttlichte Kaiser und Kultstatuen R. Ling Recent workshops on ancient surface decoration C. Lightfoot A splendid and well-merited Festschrift on glass M. Vickers True luxury in antiquity E. Bartman Musei Capitolini and Dresden: two state-of-the-art portrait catalogues, including portraits of children S. Treggiari Training for marriage E. Jewell Another social history of Roman "youth", with questions about its restlessness M. George Putting slaves back into the picture E. E. Mayer Was there a culture of the Roman plebs? L. M. Stirling Textiles and children in ancient cemeteries K. M. Coleman A mixed border au naturel E. Cova To each his own? Intimacy in the Roman house A. Russell From public to private, and back again D. S. Potter The organization of the Roman games N. Morley A Festschrift honouring Jean Andreau M. S. Hobson Needs, wants, and unwelcome disciples: neoclassical economics and the ancient Mediterranean R. Laurence Connectivity, roads and transport: essays on Roman roads to speak to other disciplines? P. Faure Histoire et archéologie d'un lieu de pouvoir J. C. Fant A milestone in the history of the Roman trade in stones A. Marzano A workshop on fish-salting V. H. Pennanen New perspectives on Roman funerary art and culture R. Gordon On the problems of initiation A. Gavini Il potere e i culti isiaci o il potere dei culti isiaci? F. S. Kleiner Architectura numismatica in context A. Alexandridis A close study of the emissions of an imperial spouse Table of contents of fascicule 2 (continued) W. E. Metcalf Analyzing the silver coinage from Nero to Trajan E. Marlowe Back to the Age of Anxiety / Età dell'Angoscia M. Junkelmann The army of the Caesars: a compendium on the relationship between archaeology and history J. P. Bodel The diaspora of ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions M. Beckmann New old photographs of the Column of Trajan J. A. Pinto A long-awaited collection on the Pantheon D. C. Keenan-Jones Fountains, lead pipes and water systems in Pompeii, Rome and the Roman West in their cultural and architectural contexts A. Emmerson A synthesis in English on the tombs of Pompeii I. Miliaresis The final report on the structure of the Terme del Nuotatore at Ostia C. Bruun Religion and Christianization at Ostia, c.250-c.800: a complicated story D. Gorostidi Pi A propósito de un estado de la cuestión de la epigrafía de Benevento romana J. V. S. Megaw A conquest-period ritual site at Hallaton (Leics.) J. Lundock Small finds and urbanism in Roman Britain G. Sauron L'art à la péripherie de l'empire: romanisation ou identité? K. Cassibry Enameled "souvenirs" from Roman Britain F. Baratte Le trésor de Berthouville Ph. Leveau & R. Royet Archéologie des campagnes lyonnaises en Val de Saône le long de la voie de l'Océan J. Ruiz de Arbulo Leyendo estatuas, interpretando epígrafes, definiendo espacios de representación en la Galia meridional B. Díaz Ariño Nuevas perspectivas en el estudio de la actividad militar romana en Hispania durante época republicana A. Roth Congès Le temple de la Grange-des-Dîmes à Avenches J. Lund A meticulous study of N African pottery from Augsburg (Raetia) D. R. Hernandez The decorative architecture of Hellenistic and Roman Epirus J. L. Rife Surveying Sikyon from the State to the Land K. W. Slane Pottery from an intensive survey at Sikyon M. Bonifay Afrique(s) romaine(s): une économie socialement imbriquée W. E. Metcalf North Africa's largest known gold hoard J. Freed A Dutch take on Carthage G. Mazzilli La decorazione architettonica di Lepcis Magna in pietra locale G. Claytor Roman taxation in the Hermopolite nome of Egypt M. Parca Petitions written on papyrus: glimpses of non-élite Egyptians in the Roman imperial enterprise J. Elsner The Tetrarchic cult room in the temple at Luxor S. E. Sidebotham A conference on Indo-Mediterranean commerce S. T. Parker The material culture and mission of the Late Roman army on the southeastern imperial frontier T. Kaizer The future of Palmyrene studies C. P. Jones The records of delegations to the oracle at Claros W. Slater The "explosion" and "implosion" of agones G. Kron Palladius and the achievements of Roman agronomy in late antiquity R. Van Dam Rome and imperial barbarism in A.D. 410 A. H. Merrills Yves Modéran's posthumous book on the Vandals A. H. Merrills Confiscation, appropriation and barbarian settlement 30+ years after Goffart
The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one known from Cicero. ... more The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one known from Cicero. It became one of the pillars of the regime, allowing Augustus to lay claim to a rhetoric of continuity and legitimacy he could not have achieved in any other way. But there was a fundamental change in the way senators themselves saw their role, and the relationship Rome’s political, economic, and social elite had to senatorhood more broadly. This chapter explores how the Senate itself became largely cooperative rather than competitive, and developed a new corporate personality. This shift fed into many of Augustus’ own goals, but it also represented a rational response by the senators to their new reality.
Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d’histoire du droit international
Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth... more Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This article examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
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Books by Amy Russell
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In the Roman Empire, images relating to imperial power were produced all over the empire at every social level, and even images created at the centre were constantly remade as they were reproduced, reappropriated, and reinterpreted across the empire. We use the language of social dynamics, drawn from economics, sociology, and psychology, to see how imperial imagery was embedded in local contexts. Patrons and artists often made use of the universal visual language of empire to navigate their own local hierarchies and relationships, rather than as part of direct communication with the central authorities, and these local interactions were vital to the formation and functioning of a unified visual language of empire.
Individual chapters range from large-scale monuments adorned with sculpture and epigraphy to quotidian oil lamps and lead tokens; they stretch across the entire empire from Hispania to Egypt, and from Augustus to the third century CE.
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Taking public space as her starting point, Amy Russell offers a fresh analysis of the ever-fluid public/private divide in Republican Rome. Built on the 'spatial turn' in Roman studies and incorporating textual and archaeological evidence, this book uncovers a rich variety of urban spaces. No space in Rome was solely or fully public. Some spaces were public but also political, sacred, or foreign; many apparently public spaces were saturated by the private, leaving grey areas and room for manipulation. Women, slaves, and non-citizens were broadly excluded from politics: how did they experience and help to shape its spaces? How did the building projects of Republican dynasts relate to the communal realm? From the Forum to the victory temples of the Campus Martius, culminating in Pompey's great theatre-portico-temple-garden-house complex, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome explores how space was marked, experienced, and defined by multiple actors and audiences.
Papers by Amy Russell
Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.
Each year the concilium plebis, the tribal assembly open only to plebeians, elected 10 tribunes of the plebs . Many of our ancient sources, particularly for the late Republic, focus overwhelmingly on individual, ‘revolutionary’ tribunes of the plebs . The tribunate of the plebs , Romans believed, was a desperate and unilateral expedient invented by the plebs alone during the Struggle of the Orders. This chapter lays the groundwork, treating the practical implications of the tribunate's (extra-)legal status, its history and development over time and its reputation as an ideologically ‘popular’ magistracy. It then moves to explore political culture in action in more detail, asking how the tribunes' traditional role as the people's champions affected how individual tribunes behaved during their year in office. The chapter considers how the tribunate fits in to larger debates about Roman political culture, ideology and the role of the people.
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The introductory chapter explores the methodology of approaching imperial imagery, from definitions and categorisations to modes of analysis. Defining imperial imagery as imagery that relates to imperial power, the authors reject universal models that purport to encompass all aspects of the production and use of such images in favour of context-based approaches which focus on the ways in which they became embedded in local image systems. The authors single out social dynamics, a term borrowed from economics, sociology, and psychology indicating how large-scale phenomena are the sum of many individual interactions. Social dynamics gives a way to understand how and why imperial imagery was created and used in Roman society at all levels. Imperial imagery had roles to play beyond the emperor’s own sphere, and he was often neither its author nor its audience; instead, individuals used imperial images to communicate with their immediate neighbours, geographically and socially. Multiple users and viewers across the spatial and social spectrums of the empire (and beyond) brought their own experiences to imperial images, and to understand them, we must analyse them in their local contexts.
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A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.
I analyse the senatorial SC coins under Augustus as visual objects in their own right, with particular emphasis on how ordinary Romans might have understand the ordinary, worn coins that passed through their hands. One of the largest contributions these coins can make comes from their ubiquity and their legibility. They form the most abundant evidence for the Senate’s very existence during this period. They make a claim for the role of the Senate as a group on a medium previously reserved for individual competition, and they make that claim to a wide audience.
Built space structures everyday life in the city, and people build spaces that suit their conceptions of what their society is, or should be. The connection is both material and symbolic. In this chapter I aim to tackle the question of how Romans related two of the city’s most important political spaces at two different historical moments: the Forum Romanum during the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire. By drawing on the French theorist Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and a more recent set of concepts devised by organisational theorists Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, I propose a vocabulary that might allow us to discuss the relationship between an individual and an urban space in their societal context. Once we have a consistent mechanism for putting that relationship into words, we can begin to compare it with other relationships at other times and in other places described in the same terms.
The Forum Romanum of the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire both have a claim to be their city’s primary political space. There is so much more to be said about each example: these are rich and multivalent spaces, which allow for many different interpretations, and Althusser’s critics must be right that alternative interpretations, misrecognitions, resistance, and more were possible even for their original Roman visitors. But it should be no surprise to find that, on the whole, their architecture reflected the power relations that structured society at these two different historical moments.
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Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This paper examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one we know from Cicero. It became one of the pillars of the regime, allowing Augustus to lay claim to a rhetoric of continuity and legitimacy he could not have achieved in any other way. But there was a fundamental change in the way senators themselves saw their role, and the relationship Rome's political, economic, and social elite had to senatorhood more broadly. The Senate itself became largely cooperative rather than competitive, and developed a new corporate personality. This shift fed into many of Augustus' own goals, but it also represented a rational response by the senators to their new reality.
The Fasti Capitolini, set up by the Senate, refuse to accept the destruction of history. The arrangement of the inscriptions on the monument focused the viewer’s attention in particular on the Middle Republic, highlighted in the central archway. This collective Golden Age, rather than any individual’s successes, was proposed as an exemplum for the res publica. And unlike Augustus and his own Golden Age, balanced precariously on the intersection between present, future, and mythical past, the Senate claimed historical and epistemological validity for the period they set up as a model. The paradigm of history they offered, not just to Augustus but to any viewer, was both innovative and strikingly different to the dominant Augustan model as displayed in the nearby gallery of exceptional, exemplary summi viri. This was an inclusive, collective version of Roman history and memory, watched over by and indeed metonymous with the Senate themselves.
For Romans, the group of people constituting ‘the public’ were clearly and narrowly defined: they were the members of the populus Romanus, the institution from which the concept of publicness itself was derived. When they positioned the populus Romanus as the sole political public audience, Roman political discourse and the politicians who used it also defined the populus Romanus as the sole and indivisible source of legitimate public opinion. The conceptual indivisibility of the populus Romanus, when confronted with the ease with which a politician could draw a partisan crowd, generated a range of problems around public opinion which were subtly different from those we find today.
The annual election of magistrates was the most visible element of the competition that structured Roman Republican politicians' entire lives. Even a man born into the most exclusive social position had to win the approval of the comitia in competition with other men who may well have had many of the same advantages. Elections were personal: the ultimate test of virtus. The men who lost these contests, contests for which they had been preparing all their lives, faced distress and embarrassment. A defeat struck at the very roots of their selfhood.
When Republican politicians attempted to find accounts of defeat that both salvaged their identity as elite men and preserved the integrity of the system, they allowed themselves to discuss openly norms and values that were usually implicit. Sometimes, however, the result was a parallel political discourse about norms and values that was entirely tendentious: just as politicians could lie about the facts of why they lost, they could also appeal to invented or exaggerated norms.
In the ancient Republican city of Rome, there were few spaces segregated by gender. Nor were women always conceptually tied to ‘private’ space. Yet the public/private divide was still used to police gender. This paper considers feminist approaches to spatial analysis, and uses gender as a lens to help us understand Roman urban space. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
When I read this article now, I am horrified at how close my argument gets to the kind of rhetoric used in recent years by TERFs or 'gender-critical' writers to deny trans women's rights and position their existence as some kind of attack on cis women. I hadn't come across that rhetoric at the time; now that I have, I think that if I were reading the piece for the first time I would suspect that the author was making an anti-trans dogwhistle. And I worry that trans scholars and others who love and support them may have read it and been hurt, or felt less welcome in the research community.
I believed then and believe now that trans women are women, and that all women's (all people's!) liberation is bound together. I am sorry.
Abstract
Feminist approaches to gendered space, including the second wave theories of the 70s (Ardener, Pateman), the Marxist-inflected geographies (Soja and Hooper) and urban theories of the 90s (Spain, Wilson), and more recent work (Puwar), often rest on assumptions situated in their own time and place which are not easy to apply to the ancient world. For example, some such models claim that gender stratification is often reinforced by spatial segregation, that women are not given access to places where power is exercised or knowledge is kept, and that ‘the greater the distance between women and sources of valued knowledge, the greater the gender stratification in the society’ (Spain, 27). In Republican Rome, sources of valued knowledge were spatially located in places like the elite house – seen at least in part as women’s domain – while the topography and archaeology of the political space of the Forum suggests an open and accessible multipurpose square which was not defined by architectural barriers and was available to all.
Other contemporary theoretical work considers the relationship between the public/private divide and gender: in this model, while women are not physically confined to ‘private’ space or men to ‘public’ space, the public/private divide is a tool used to police gender. Women are conceptually tied to the private sphere, and when they are in public space they are either constrained and marked or smothered and denied. Our imperfect understanding of Roman concepts analogous to ‘public’ and ‘private’ make it hard to apply this model directly, but by heeding Soja and Hooper’s call to look not for ‘the difference that space makes’ but ‘the spaces that difference makes’, we can in fact turn the question on its head and use Roman gender policing to understand the public/private divide itself. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries.
Many of Republican Rome’s civic buildings and monuments sent a clear message to that same ideal viewer: they testified to a patron’s glory, military success, and the unbroken tradition of Roman virtus – ‘manliness’ – stretching down the centuries. But what of those who could not vote for the patron or serve in the army, and were biologically incapable of ‘manliness’? In a world where the elite house was hardly less ‘public’ than the Forum and elite patrons used architectural style and decoration to construct the buildings they donated as civic benefactions almost as an extension of their own private property, we cannot unthinkingly rely on the unstated equivalences between the dichotomies public/private and masculine/feminine which characterize much work on gendered space in our own culture. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
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Version of record at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45020052
When Publius Clodius ordered Rome’s tabernae to be shut for one of his meetings in 58 BC, he was not only trying to gather a crowd by forcing tabernarii onto the street. Shutting the shops was a symbolic move alluding to the archaic iustitium and to the actions of Tiberius Gracchus. It allowed Clodius to claim both that his meeting was vital to the safety of the res publica and that he (and not Cicero) had the support of the entire Roman people, including the lowliest.
Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer to spaces in both ‘public’ and ‘private’ contexts. Vitruvius mentions basilicae among the ‘public’ areas of an elite house (6.5.2), drawing explicit parallels with non-residential architecture. The overlap highlights the lack of a strict distinction between public and private in domestic space, but consideration of the relationship between the civic form and its domestic equivalent demonstrates even closer links between public and private space. Domestic and civic architectural typologies at Rome developed in tandem, with relationships of influence working in both directions. A fuller investigation of the influences flowing in both directions can help us understand better the operation of the private/public divide and spatial experience both within and beyond the house.
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In the Roman Empire, images relating to imperial power were produced all over the empire at every social level, and even images created at the centre were constantly remade as they were reproduced, reappropriated, and reinterpreted across the empire. We use the language of social dynamics, drawn from economics, sociology, and psychology, to see how imperial imagery was embedded in local contexts. Patrons and artists often made use of the universal visual language of empire to navigate their own local hierarchies and relationships, rather than as part of direct communication with the central authorities, and these local interactions were vital to the formation and functioning of a unified visual language of empire.
Individual chapters range from large-scale monuments adorned with sculpture and epigraphy to quotidian oil lamps and lead tokens; they stretch across the entire empire from Hispania to Egypt, and from Augustus to the third century CE.
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Taking public space as her starting point, Amy Russell offers a fresh analysis of the ever-fluid public/private divide in Republican Rome. Built on the 'spatial turn' in Roman studies and incorporating textual and archaeological evidence, this book uncovers a rich variety of urban spaces. No space in Rome was solely or fully public. Some spaces were public but also political, sacred, or foreign; many apparently public spaces were saturated by the private, leaving grey areas and room for manipulation. Women, slaves, and non-citizens were broadly excluded from politics: how did they experience and help to shape its spaces? How did the building projects of Republican dynasts relate to the communal realm? From the Forum to the victory temples of the Campus Martius, culminating in Pompey's great theatre-portico-temple-garden-house complex, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome explores how space was marked, experienced, and defined by multiple actors and audiences.
Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.
Each year the concilium plebis, the tribal assembly open only to plebeians, elected 10 tribunes of the plebs . Many of our ancient sources, particularly for the late Republic, focus overwhelmingly on individual, ‘revolutionary’ tribunes of the plebs . The tribunate of the plebs , Romans believed, was a desperate and unilateral expedient invented by the plebs alone during the Struggle of the Orders. This chapter lays the groundwork, treating the practical implications of the tribunate's (extra-)legal status, its history and development over time and its reputation as an ideologically ‘popular’ magistracy. It then moves to explore political culture in action in more detail, asking how the tribunes' traditional role as the people's champions affected how individual tribunes behaved during their year in office. The chapter considers how the tribunate fits in to larger debates about Roman political culture, ideology and the role of the people.
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The introductory chapter explores the methodology of approaching imperial imagery, from definitions and categorisations to modes of analysis. Defining imperial imagery as imagery that relates to imperial power, the authors reject universal models that purport to encompass all aspects of the production and use of such images in favour of context-based approaches which focus on the ways in which they became embedded in local image systems. The authors single out social dynamics, a term borrowed from economics, sociology, and psychology indicating how large-scale phenomena are the sum of many individual interactions. Social dynamics gives a way to understand how and why imperial imagery was created and used in Roman society at all levels. Imperial imagery had roles to play beyond the emperor’s own sphere, and he was often neither its author nor its audience; instead, individuals used imperial images to communicate with their immediate neighbours, geographically and socially. Multiple users and viewers across the spatial and social spectrums of the empire (and beyond) brought their own experiences to imperial images, and to understand them, we must analyse them in their local contexts.
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A small group of altars to the Lares Augusti, set up by the vicomagistri of Rome’s urban neighbourhoods in the Augustan period, provides examples of imperial imagery produced by patrons of low social status. Their decoration shows the early effects of new Augustan motifs, but they are not merely examples of imagery trickling down from an original, central prototype. The patrons of these altars adapted and even invented images to express their relationship with the princeps for a local audience, and for viewers the altars were themselves sources of imagery, no less ‘official’ than any other source.
I analyse the senatorial SC coins under Augustus as visual objects in their own right, with particular emphasis on how ordinary Romans might have understand the ordinary, worn coins that passed through their hands. One of the largest contributions these coins can make comes from their ubiquity and their legibility. They form the most abundant evidence for the Senate’s very existence during this period. They make a claim for the role of the Senate as a group on a medium previously reserved for individual competition, and they make that claim to a wide audience.
Built space structures everyday life in the city, and people build spaces that suit their conceptions of what their society is, or should be. The connection is both material and symbolic. In this chapter I aim to tackle the question of how Romans related two of the city’s most important political spaces at two different historical moments: the Forum Romanum during the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire. By drawing on the French theorist Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and a more recent set of concepts devised by organisational theorists Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell, I propose a vocabulary that might allow us to discuss the relationship between an individual and an urban space in their societal context. Once we have a consistent mechanism for putting that relationship into words, we can begin to compare it with other relationships at other times and in other places described in the same terms.
The Forum Romanum of the late Republic and the Forum of Augustus during the early Empire both have a claim to be their city’s primary political space. There is so much more to be said about each example: these are rich and multivalent spaces, which allow for many different interpretations, and Althusser’s critics must be right that alternative interpretations, misrecognitions, resistance, and more were possible even for their original Roman visitors. But it should be no surprise to find that, on the whole, their architecture reflected the power relations that structured society at these two different historical moments.
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Rome’s transformation from city-state to territorial empire involved a massive increase in wealth; it also both created and responded to fundamental political changes, in a moment often positioned as the creation myth of republicanism. James Tan has modelled the Republican economy as a three-way relationship between aristocrats, the state, and the people. Aristocrats competed with the state for access to the riches of conquest; simultaneously the state’s dependence on citizen taxation declined. This paper examines the relationship between state and people as both practical and ideological. The People were sovereign, yet it was the People who increasingly lost their status as economic and political stakeholders even as their empire grew. The complex relationship between the people and the populus (‘the People’ as an institution) had economic as well as political elements, and is central to how we should apply notions of economic sovereignty to Republican Rome.
The Senate under Augustus was a strikingly different institution from the one we know from Cicero. It became one of the pillars of the regime, allowing Augustus to lay claim to a rhetoric of continuity and legitimacy he could not have achieved in any other way. But there was a fundamental change in the way senators themselves saw their role, and the relationship Rome's political, economic, and social elite had to senatorhood more broadly. The Senate itself became largely cooperative rather than competitive, and developed a new corporate personality. This shift fed into many of Augustus' own goals, but it also represented a rational response by the senators to their new reality.
The Fasti Capitolini, set up by the Senate, refuse to accept the destruction of history. The arrangement of the inscriptions on the monument focused the viewer’s attention in particular on the Middle Republic, highlighted in the central archway. This collective Golden Age, rather than any individual’s successes, was proposed as an exemplum for the res publica. And unlike Augustus and his own Golden Age, balanced precariously on the intersection between present, future, and mythical past, the Senate claimed historical and epistemological validity for the period they set up as a model. The paradigm of history they offered, not just to Augustus but to any viewer, was both innovative and strikingly different to the dominant Augustan model as displayed in the nearby gallery of exceptional, exemplary summi viri. This was an inclusive, collective version of Roman history and memory, watched over by and indeed metonymous with the Senate themselves.
For Romans, the group of people constituting ‘the public’ were clearly and narrowly defined: they were the members of the populus Romanus, the institution from which the concept of publicness itself was derived. When they positioned the populus Romanus as the sole political public audience, Roman political discourse and the politicians who used it also defined the populus Romanus as the sole and indivisible source of legitimate public opinion. The conceptual indivisibility of the populus Romanus, when confronted with the ease with which a politician could draw a partisan crowd, generated a range of problems around public opinion which were subtly different from those we find today.
The annual election of magistrates was the most visible element of the competition that structured Roman Republican politicians' entire lives. Even a man born into the most exclusive social position had to win the approval of the comitia in competition with other men who may well have had many of the same advantages. Elections were personal: the ultimate test of virtus. The men who lost these contests, contests for which they had been preparing all their lives, faced distress and embarrassment. A defeat struck at the very roots of their selfhood.
When Republican politicians attempted to find accounts of defeat that both salvaged their identity as elite men and preserved the integrity of the system, they allowed themselves to discuss openly norms and values that were usually implicit. Sometimes, however, the result was a parallel political discourse about norms and values that was entirely tendentious: just as politicians could lie about the facts of why they lost, they could also appeal to invented or exaggerated norms.
In the ancient Republican city of Rome, there were few spaces segregated by gender. Nor were women always conceptually tied to ‘private’ space. Yet the public/private divide was still used to police gender. This paper considers feminist approaches to spatial analysis, and uses gender as a lens to help us understand Roman urban space. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
When I read this article now, I am horrified at how close my argument gets to the kind of rhetoric used in recent years by TERFs or 'gender-critical' writers to deny trans women's rights and position their existence as some kind of attack on cis women. I hadn't come across that rhetoric at the time; now that I have, I think that if I were reading the piece for the first time I would suspect that the author was making an anti-trans dogwhistle. And I worry that trans scholars and others who love and support them may have read it and been hurt, or felt less welcome in the research community.
I believed then and believe now that trans women are women, and that all women's (all people's!) liberation is bound together. I am sorry.
Abstract
Feminist approaches to gendered space, including the second wave theories of the 70s (Ardener, Pateman), the Marxist-inflected geographies (Soja and Hooper) and urban theories of the 90s (Spain, Wilson), and more recent work (Puwar), often rest on assumptions situated in their own time and place which are not easy to apply to the ancient world. For example, some such models claim that gender stratification is often reinforced by spatial segregation, that women are not given access to places where power is exercised or knowledge is kept, and that ‘the greater the distance between women and sources of valued knowledge, the greater the gender stratification in the society’ (Spain, 27). In Republican Rome, sources of valued knowledge were spatially located in places like the elite house – seen at least in part as women’s domain – while the topography and archaeology of the political space of the Forum suggests an open and accessible multipurpose square which was not defined by architectural barriers and was available to all.
Other contemporary theoretical work considers the relationship between the public/private divide and gender: in this model, while women are not physically confined to ‘private’ space or men to ‘public’ space, the public/private divide is a tool used to police gender. Women are conceptually tied to the private sphere, and when they are in public space they are either constrained and marked or smothered and denied. Our imperfect understanding of Roman concepts analogous to ‘public’ and ‘private’ make it hard to apply this model directly, but by heeding Soja and Hooper’s call to look not for ‘the difference that space makes’ but ‘the spaces that difference makes’, we can in fact turn the question on its head and use Roman gender policing to understand the public/private divide itself. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries.
Many of Republican Rome’s civic buildings and monuments sent a clear message to that same ideal viewer: they testified to a patron’s glory, military success, and the unbroken tradition of Roman virtus – ‘manliness’ – stretching down the centuries. But what of those who could not vote for the patron or serve in the army, and were biologically incapable of ‘manliness’? In a world where the elite house was hardly less ‘public’ than the Forum and elite patrons used architectural style and decoration to construct the buildings they donated as civic benefactions almost as an extension of their own private property, we cannot unthinkingly rely on the unstated equivalences between the dichotomies public/private and masculine/feminine which characterize much work on gendered space in our own culture. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
Version of record: https://elibrary.steiner-verlag.de/article/99.105010/historia201602018601
Version of record at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45020052
When Publius Clodius ordered Rome’s tabernae to be shut for one of his meetings in 58 BC, he was not only trying to gather a crowd by forcing tabernarii onto the street. Shutting the shops was a symbolic move alluding to the archaic iustitium and to the actions of Tiberius Gracchus. It allowed Clodius to claim both that his meeting was vital to the safety of the res publica and that he (and not Cicero) had the support of the entire Roman people, including the lowliest.
Ancient sources use similar terminology to refer to spaces in both ‘public’ and ‘private’ contexts. Vitruvius mentions basilicae among the ‘public’ areas of an elite house (6.5.2), drawing explicit parallels with non-residential architecture. The overlap highlights the lack of a strict distinction between public and private in domestic space, but consideration of the relationship between the civic form and its domestic equivalent demonstrates even closer links between public and private space. Domestic and civic architectural typologies at Rome developed in tandem, with relationships of influence working in both directions. A fuller investigation of the influences flowing in both directions can help us understand better the operation of the private/public divide and spatial experience both within and beyond the house.
This is a low-res b/w copy to protect the holders of image copyrights. See http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2014.73.4.478 for the full version.
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