Federico Santangelo

This book is a study of Sulla s policies in Italy and in the Greek East. Its main aim is to show how Sulla revived Rome s alliances with the local elites at a critical moment for the survival of her Mediterranean hegemony. The discussion calls into play a wide range of political, economic and religious issues, and the argument is developed from three complementary standpoints: role of elites, administration, and ideology. Sulla, the Elites and the Empire deals with both the impact of a prominent individual and the impact of the Roman empire. It sets outs to offer a new understanding of Sulla and his age and, more generally, to contribute to the understanding of the late Roman Republic.

A Study of Roman Policies in Italy and the Greek East

Sulla, the Elites and the Empire

David García Domínguez

Juan García González

This book offers a distinctive take on the civil wars that unfolded in the Late Roman Republic. It frames their discussion against the backdrop of the Mediterranean contexts in which they were fought, and sets out to bring to the centre of the debate the significance of provincial agency on a traumatic and complex process, which cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on Roman and Italian developments. The study of the late Republican civil wars can be productively read as an exercise of ‘connected history’, in which the fundamental interdependence of the Mediterranean world comes to the fore through a set of case studies that await to be understood through a properly integrative approach. Our project brings together an international and diverse lineup of scholars, who engage with a wide range of literary, documentary, and archaeological material, and make a collective contribution to the reframing of a problem that requires a collaborative and interdisciplinary outlook, and can yield invaluable insights to the understanding of the Roman imperial project.

Connected Histories of the Roman Civil Wars (88–30 BCE)

Giusto Traina

Margherita Facella

This book provides a collaborative reassessment of Pompey’s campaigns in the Greek East, the ensuing political settlement, and the consequences they had in Rome and in Italy. An international group of scholars offers a fresh reconsideration of a dossier that has received much attention over the centuries, albeit usually through the somewhat limiting (if crucially informative) prism of Greek and Latin textual sources. By adopting a more capacious approach, encompassing traditions that found room in Jewish, Byzantine, and Syriac authors, and providing new discussions of the epigraphical and numismatic evidence, this volume brings into sharper focus the ambition and significance of Pompey’s intervention. The long-term engagement of the Roman commander in the region emerges as a moment that had profound implications to the history of the Roman empire, marked a controversial turning point in internal politics, and set the Roman presence in the Eastern Mediterranean on a new footing. It was the opening act of a new season of Roman geopolitics that would go on to shape the longer-term trajectory of the empire.

Part I: Sources and Historical Questions

Pompey’s New Order in the Mediterranean East (67–61 BCE)

This book offers a comprehensive assessment of the intersection between Roman politics, culture and divination in the late Republic. It discusses how the practice of divination changed at a time of great political and social change and explores the evidence for a critical reflection and debate on the limits of divination and prediction in the second and first centuries BC. Divination was a central feature in the workings of the Roman government and this book explores the ways in which it changed under the pressure of factors of socio-political complexity and disruption. It discusses the ways in which the problem of the prediction of the future is constructed in the literature of the period. Finally, it explores the impact that the emergence of the Augustan regime had on the place of divination in Rome and the role that divinatory themes had in shaping the ideology of the new regime.

Divination, Prediction and the End of the Roman Republic

Claudia Beltrao da Rosa

This book gathers eight papers devoted to specific aspects of Cicero's engagement with Roman religion, and seeks to make a wider contribution to the understanding of Cicero's work as historical evidence. By engaging with religion as a fundamental factor of social cohesion and political stability, both in his theoretical works and his speeches, Cicero shaped a wide-ranging and ambitious discourse around themes and images that were firmly located in first-century BCE Rome. His contribution also proved very influential in the centuries to come. The volume focuses on the relationship between law, religion, and religious authority in Cicero; the interplay between divine images, ritual contexts, and the conceptualization of the divine; Cicero's construction of a Greek deity for a Roman audience; the role of religious elements in the shaping of a Roman political identity; the tension between 'natural law' and Roman pietas; the problem of divine and human foresight; the relationship between theoretical views of the gods and late Republican public cult; and the reception, use, and readaptation of Ciceronian theology in the English Enlightenment.

Federico Santangelo

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