Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c.400-200 BCE

Description

During the fourth and third centuries BCE, Roman expansion into Italy reshaped the peninsula's Archaic societies and prompted new political relationships, new economic practices, and new sociocultural structures. Rural landscapes and urban spaces throughout Latium saw intensified use amidst novel principles of land management, animal husbandry, and architectural design. This book offers fresh perspectives on these transformations by embracing a wide range of approaches to Middle Republican history. Chapters take up topics and methods ranging from fiscal sociology, bioarchaeology, comparative slaveries, field survey, art and architectural history, numismatics, elite mobility, and beyond. An emphasis is placed on how developments in this period reshaped not only Rome, but also other Latin and Italian societies in complex and often multilinear ways. The volume promotes the Middle Republic as a period whose full dynamism is best appreciated at the intersection of diverse lines of inquiry.

SETH BERNARD is Associate Professor of Roman History in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on the social and economic history of Rome and Italy, particularly during the Republican period. He is the author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (2018). LISA MARIE MIGNONE is a research affiliate at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Her research examines Roman social, cultural, and religious geography: the ongoing and interactive relationship of historical events, the sites in which they occur, and the people who perform them. She is the author of The Republican Aventine and Rome's Social Order (2016). DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA is Associate Professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies, at Princeton University. His main lines of research are Roman Republican religious and cultural history, the history of slavery, and classicisms in the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. He is the author of Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (2020).