How Romans Became ;;Roman;;: Creating Identity in an Expanding World.

Romanness;Cicero;Classical Studies;Humanities;Greek & Roman History

Arno, Claudia Inga R.Van Dam, Raymond H. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Romanness;    Cicero;    Classical Studies;    Humanities;    Greek & Roman History;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/91557/carno_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which the concept of what it meant to be ;;Roman” changed over the fourth through first centuries BCE in the minds of both Romans and non-Romans.I use literary evidencefrom the second and first centuries, especially Cicero’s speeches and treatises, as a window into the perceptions of the Roman elite, and the material culture (especially architectural, before Augustus) of Italian cities from the fourth to the first century as evidence of the official adoption of Roman practices by Italians.While Rome granted citizenship or partial citizen rights to individuals and towns over several centuries on a case-by-case basis, which suggests that Romans harbored a certain amount of flexibility in their ideas about what constituted their group identity, Rome’s transformation from a regional power to an imperial one necessitated a redefinition of what it meant to be Roman by birth or to acquire Roman citizenship.My conclusion is that, with the extension of Roman citizenship to most of the Italian peninsula in 90/89 BCE, the Roman citizenship became a characteristic that could be held in addition to a local identity.Meanwhile, for the original Romans (who lived in Rome and whose ancestors had been Romans), being a Roman was no longer simply a matter of citizenship status.They had two options: they could either surrender their uniqueness and sense of Roman identity, or develop a sub-definition of Romanness based on birth and on behaving in a particular way.This placed ;;new men” like Cicero in the position of having to manufacture a Romanness as close as possible to that of the hereditary Romans and distinct from that of the newly-Roman Italians.Following the Social War, therefore, there were three distinct ways of understanding Roman citizenship: hereditary Romans understood Romanness to be a combination of ancestry and social and political participation; new men understood it to consist entirely of behavior that conformed to Roman traditions of virtue and service to the state; and the new, Italian, Romans saw it as a legal status to be acknowledged and enhanced by certain public behaviors.