Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture, Politics, and History under the Principate

by Andrew B. Gallia

The Roman Principate was defined by its embrace of a central paradox – the ruling order strenuously advertised continuity with the past, even as the emperor's monarchical power represented a fundamental breach with the traditions of the “free” Republic it had replaced. Drawing on the evidence of coins, public monuments, and literary texts ranging from Tacitus and Pliny the Younger to Frontinus and Silius Italicus, this study traces a series of six crucial moments in which the memory of the Republic intruded upon Roman public discourse in the period from the fall of Nero to the height of Trajan's power. During these years, remembering the Republic was anything but a remote and antiquarian undertaking. It was instead a vital cultural process, through which emperors and their subjects attempted to navigate many of the fault lines that ran through Roman Imperial culture.

334 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 2011

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several months ago I read Matthew Clark's book, Augustus Casesar's Web: Power & Propaganda in Augustan Rome, a woeful piece of historical scholarship that was only readable in so far as it demonstrated how not to try and equate the Classical world to the modern era. Gallia's Remembering the Roman Republic succeeded in all the ways that Clark's book failed.

Remembering the Roman Republic offers a detailed examination of how the leadership of the Principate founded by Augustus sought to manipulate and control both the Roman body politic and the Roman public-at-large by controlling how both remembered the pre-Augustan republic and continue to relate republican concepts of liberty and freedom to the equivalents of the same under Julio-Claudian and Flavian rule. The work expounds upon a deep, well-crafted body of research to examine how the emperors from both dynasties used both new and old institutions to validate their power with varying degrees of success. Gallia details how the Principate's various leaders relied upon manipulation of public imagery and memory to construct forms of propaganda that reveal the sophistication and development of the Roman world without distorting the inherent differences by relying on modern contrivances. While explaining how this process continued throughout the Principate period, Gallia focuses on the Flavian dynasty to a greater extent describing how Vespasian used techniques established by Augustus and his successors to cement the Principate under new leadership following the year of civil strife after Nero was deposed in 69 C.E. He explains, intriguingly, how this continued to follow a pattern of preserving Roman socio-culture, especially among elites, at a perpetual moment of conflict--allowing for links to the Republican past and the contemporary Principate to be redrafted almost at will. However, the instability of this state institutionalized deeper problems within the Roman state, as Domitian (Vespasian's youngest son) and later Roamn emperors would frequently struggle with throughout the imperial period.

Gallia's book is technical and assumes a broad base of knowledge about the late Republic and the early Roman Empire. I cannot recommend it to readers wanting to start an initial examination of the complicated world of Roman politics in the transition from republic to empire, but I do recommend it for those yearning for a more complete picture after examining the basics. Gallia freely admits in his introduction that this book is largely based upon and assembled from his work for his dissertation, and it sometimes lapses into overly-detailed accounts that are unnecessary. However, this editorial lapse is well worth the added pages to appreciate the wide-range of sources Gallia brought to bear in his treatment of the subject.