You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book investigates the working mechanisms of public opinion in Late Republican Rome as a part of informal politics. It explores the political interaction (and sometimes opposition) between the elite and the people through various means, such as rumours, gossip, political literature, popular verses and graffiti. It also proposes the existence of a public sphere in Late Republican Rome and analyses public opinion in that time as a system of control. By applying the spatial turn to politics, it becomes possible to study sociability and informal meetings where public opinion circulated. What emerges is a wider concept of the political participation of the people, not just restricted to voting or participating in the assemblies.
Political Conversations in Ciceronian Rome offers for the first time a perspective of Roman politics through the proxy of conversations and meetings. In Rome oral was the default mode of communication in politics: oratory before the people in assemblies, addresses and discussions in the Senate, speeches in the law courts, rumours, and public opinion. We are familiar with the notion that the Roman political world of the Late Republic included lofty speeches and sessions of the Senate, but an important aspect of Late-Republican politics revolved around senators talking among themselves, chatting off in the corner. Only when they could not reach each other in person, Roman senators and their pe...
From assemblies to courts of justice, from the Senate to the battlefield, from Rome to the provinces: public opinion could vary and take many guises. Roman politicians were aware of its existence and influence, and engaged with it. This book offers a study of public opinion in the Roman Republic, with an emphasis from the 3rd to 1st centuries BC. It focusses on four main issues: nature and components of public opinion; public opinion in relation to military and administrative questions; the interaction between public opinion and public dialogue and, finally, the transmission of public opinion. It furthermore asks the following question: Who was the populus Romanus? How did public opinion influence specific political or military decisions? Can Habermas' view of public opinion be applied to the Roman Republic? How was the rhetoric of fear applied to public opinion? Drawing on the more recent interpretations of Roman Republic, this volume studies the mechanisms that make public opinion and politics work at many different levels. It provides an engaging view on political communication and the interaction between the elite and the people.
This volume aims to address the question of political communication in the Roman world. It draws upon social sciences and the current trend for the historical study of political communication. The book tackles three main problems: What constitutes political communication in the Roman world? In what ways could information be transmitted and represented? What mechanisms made political communication successful or unsuccessful? This edited volume covers questions like speech and mechanisms of political communication, political communication at a distance, bottom-up communication, failure of communication and representation of political communication. It will be of help to specialists in the Roman world, but also to students and researchers of political sciences, and specialists of political communication in pre-industrial times.
Examines the clash between political systems and political action as the Roman Republic disintegrated.
1. Asymmetric Information and the Roman Economy: Introduction -- 2. Economics and Information: Asymmetries, Uncertainties and Risks -- Part 1: Information Management -- 3. Managing Economic Public Information in Rome: the Aerarium as Central Archive of the Roman Republic -- 4. Managing Uncertainty and Asymmetric Information in Roman Auctions -- Part 2: The Real Estate and Land Property Market -- 5. Asymmetric Information, ager publicus and the Roman Land Market in the Second Century BC -- 6. Domum pestilentem vendo: Real Estate Market and Information Asymmetry in the Roman World -- 7. Marriage and Asymmetric Information on the Real Estate Market in Roman Egypt -- Part 3: The Labour Market -- 8. Information Asymmetry and the Roman Labour Market -- 9. Asymmetric information and adverse selection in the Roman slave market: the limits of legal remedy -- Part 4: Trade and Financial Markets -- 10. Information Landscapes and Economic Practice in the Roman World -- 11. Roman Professional collegia and Economic Control. A Monopoly of Information? -- 12. A case of Arbitrage in a Worldwide Trade: Roman Coins in India -- 13. Information Governance in Roman Finance -- 14.Conclusions.
This book adopts a new approach to the classical world by focusing on ancient popular culture.
This title brings together contributions which rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. With careful attention to a range of evidence, it shines a light on orators and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the familiar genres of forensic and political speech.
When the Roman Republic became the master of an overseas empire, the Romans had to adapt their civic institutions so as to be able to rule the dominions that were successively subjected to their imperium. As a result, Rome created an administrative structure mainly based on an element that became the keystone of its empire: the provincia. This book brings together nine contributions from a total of ten scholars, all specialists in Republican Rome and the Principate, who analyse from diverse perspectives and approaches the distinct ways in which the Roman res publica constituted and ruled a far-flung empire. The book ranges from the development of the Roman institutional structures to the diplomatic and administrative activities carried out by the Roman commanders overseas. Beyond the subject on which each author focuses, all chapters in this volume represent significant and renewed contributions to the study of the provinces and the Roman empire during the Republican period and the transition to the Principate.
Cicero, and others in the Roman Republic, were masters of both invective and panegyric, two hugely important genres in ancient oratory, which influenced the later theory and practice of rhetoric. The papers in this volume address strategies of vituperation and eulogy within the Republic, and examine the mechanisms and effects of praise and blame.