CURSUS HONORUM: PATHWAYS TO RANK AND POWER IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

Money and Power in the Roman Republic, 2016

La revue Latomus, fondée en 1937 par M.-A. Kugener, L. Herrmann et M. renard, ainsi que la « Collection Latomus », fondée en 1939 par M. renard, sont publiées par la « Société d'études latines de bruxelles-Latomus », A.S.b.L. La revue paraît quatre fois par an. Elle forme annuellement un tome de 500 à 1.200 pages. Chaque article est signé et l'auteur en est seul responsable. Tout ouvrage intéressant les études latines adressé à la revue fera l'objet d'un compte rendu dans la mesure du possible, mais aucune réplique ne pourra être insérée. Président honoraire de la Société : Carl deroux. Conseil d'Administration de la Société : Marie-Astrid Buelens (secrétaire), pol defosse (secrétaire adjoint), david engels (président), Caroline levi (trésorière). Membres de la Société : 1) Membres effectifs : Loïc borgies, Alexandre BucHet, Marie-Astrid Buelens, Arlette Bunnens-rooBaert, Altay coșKun, pol defosse, Carl deroux (directeur général honoraire), Marc dominicy, emmanuel dupraz, david engels (directeur général, rédacteur en chef

This paper challenges conventional views of a rise in aristocratic power in Late Antiquity. I argue that, far from giving senatorial families more independence from state institutions, emperors managed to reduce the power of the nobilitas and tie its members more closely to the imperial court. As an office-holding aristocracy whose material interests and value-system were inextricably intertwined with the institutions of monarchy, the late Roman senate more closely resembled the governing élite of the Chinese empire than the hereditary aristocracies of later European history.

Eos, 2020

In investigating the issues associated with an emperor’s power, such as its legitimation and transmission (as the review of the works by Paweł Sawiński and Oliver Hekster shows), one must take into account a great many aspects. The legitimation of power is a complex term, even in David Beetham’s classic framework. Most importantly, it is not limited just to the actions of those in power, as desired by Theodor Mommsen, Ronald Syme, and above all by Egon Flaig. Their error is repeated by all those interpreters of the principate who try to describe the Roman political system either by relegating it to a single dimension, setting the Roman reality in the heavy interpretative framework of well-known and better-defined political systems, or by calling upon sociological theories, which shift the discussion onto completely new territory. In order to efficiently grasp the multi-dimensional nature of the principate, legitimation and succession, one must reconcile oneself to its specific complexity as well as have at one’s disposal tools capable of analyzing that complexity, as power can be legitimated on a variety of levels – those of rules, convictions, and behaviour. The government has legitimacy if it follows certain rules; those rules are justified by the convictions of both those in power and those ruled, and manifest signs exist of those ruled accepting the specific set-up of power.

Are the personal identities of elite decision makers a domestic source of state identity? This article explores this question and reveals how state identity was produced in the Roman world system during the early Principate. 1 The argument advanced proposes the Roman world was ensconced by a metavalue of honor that significantly shaped the personal identities of Rome's aristocratic decision-making classes. Competition for honor subsumed aristocratic life and shaped not only the personal identities of the elite, but also the persona of the Roman state. The Romans extrapolated their psychological framework, in which the stratification of domestic society rested on personal identities of honor, to their outlook on foreign policy. Akin to their domestic lives, those executing foreign policy conceptualized Rome as engaged in a status competition for honor with the polities existing its world system. Preserving and enhancing one's honor relative to others was fundamental in domestic life, and this was also the state's primary objective in relation to all others. The identity of the Roman state, therefore, was an aggressive status seeker.

This paper explores the ways in which the relationship between emperor and senators was visualized in the urban space of late-antique Rome. I argue that the fourth century did not witness a private take-over of public space by the aristocracy, but on the contrary the establishment of a new topography of control. The placement of statuary in the Forum of Trajan and the Forum Romanum both celebrated the supremacy of the monarch over the imperial aristocracy and contributed to maintain that supremacy.

The American Historical Review, 2006

The Roman Republican Triumph Before the Spectacle, ed. C.H. Lange and F.H. Vervaet, pp. 197-258, 2014

Published with the support of grants from:

2016

University of Ottawa, 2017

Roman emperors came to power through a hybrid dynastic/elective selection system that was never formally codified. This lack of codification has caused problems for modern scholars looking to identify and categorize those who were involved in selecting the next Roman emperor. This thesis believes that these problems exist because scholars are not distinguishing the names of key ancient institutions from the underlying types of power which backed their capability for action. This thesis seeks to solve this problem by creating a categorization system for imperial accessions based around a basic unit called the “political interest.” At its core, a political interest is a combination of the name of the individual or group as listed in the primary sources, the different types of power they possessed, and the level of decision-making authority they wielded during an imperial selection. Using this system, this thesis creates a database of Late Roman emperors with information on when they came to power, the various stages of their accessions, what political interests supported them, and where these interests were located. This thesis then analyzes the political and geographic trends from the database and supplies provisional explanations as to why changes in the Late Roman accession process occurred.

The objective of this study is to synthesize and extend research conducted in connection with the series of three international conferences held at the Villa Vigoni (Menaggio, Como) from 2010 to 2012, on the exercise of justice in the Roman Empire during the High Empire and late Antiquity. As indicated by the title chosen for the publication (Recht haben und Recht bekommen im Imperium Romanum: das Gerichtswesen der römischen Kaiserzeit und seine dokumentarische Evidenz), the purpose of these meetings was notably to underscore the wealth and diversity of documentation on the subject of judicial practice.1 With this in mind, it was less a matter of focusing on normative sources-late-antique compilations that have been amply explored since the nineteenth century-than of emphasizing what the large number of inscriptions and papyri discovered during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have contributed to our knowledge of how justice operated on an everyday basis and how it was experienced by those subject to it. This work has certainly fulfilled its goal in this regard through the use of epigraphic and papyrological documents, some of which had never been published.

Another teaching document for teaching the West in the Premodern World

Spoils in the Roman Republic - Boon and Bane, 2023

This volume presents the research findings of the collaborative RUB Research School project “Spoils in the Roman Republic” which was conducted at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum from 2015 to 2018. Workshops were held on three occasions during this period and contributed to an extremely fruitful scholarly conversation that culminated in the final conference in September 2018.

2012

This dissertation examines the military and social roles of centurions in the Roman legions during the Republic and Principate. It combines textual accounts of centurions from such authors as Caesar, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio, as well as epigraphic and archaeological evidence for centurions themselves, including funerary monuments, dedicatory inscriptions, and the physical remains of legionary camps. I evaluate this evidence, moreover, with reference to contemporary military and critical social theory (which integrates concepts of civil-military relations, performance, and symbolic systems), considering the centurion not only in the context of the Roman legions, but in broader Mediterranean warfare and society. I argue that centurions were at once the linchpin of the legions’ social and military, hierarchy and the chief representatives of the Roman Emperor’s power at the periphery of the empire. By showing the critical functions of the intermediate members of Rome’s legions, this research challenges scholarship that assumes the supremacy of elite military and political values in shaping Roman attitudes towards warfare and imperialism. I show, moreover, that military authority in the Roman army was often quite fluid, and I identify various contexts in which it was disputed or redefined. The dissertation is organized into six chapters. The first chapter describes the centurion’s disciplinary role in the Roman army. Centurions were responsible for both discipline and punishment in the legions, and by analyzing their reputation for severity, I reassert the significance of corporal punishment in developing Roman military culture. Chapter Two investigates the centurion’s idealized behaviour in warfare, and how it affected views towards leadership and personal authority in the Roman legions. The third chapter demonstrates how these seemingly contrasting ideals of severe discipline and outrageous aggressiveness in combat were complementary rather than contradictory practices in Roman attitudes towards warfare, and that this perceived balance was crucial to the development of the legion’s ranks and organization during the Principate. Chapter Four evaluates legionary centurions’ rank and social status in the legions, including their career paths, military expertise, and training. Using papyrological and epigraphic evidence in particular, I show how centurions identified themselves as part of a corporate body, distinct from both the rank-and-file and aristocratic leadership. The fifth chapter explains their intermediate position in the legion’s social hierarchy between soldiers and aristocratic commanders, and how this position was important to integrating new soldiers into the Roman military community. Finally, Chapter Six assesses the political and administrative roles of centurions in imperial administration, arguing that they were the chief representation of Roman power among local populations at the periphery of Rome’s empire. In organizing the chapters according to the centurions’ various statuses and functions (e.g., combat, institutional discipline, camp management, diplomacy, regional administration), the dissertation concomitantly traces the social, political, and institutional development of the centurionate from Republic to Principate, including its cultural representations. I demonstrate that although the centurions’ traditional role on the battlefield increasingly gave way to more bureaucratic duties, they conversely became more emblematic of Roman martial traditions in their vestments, equipment, and cultural image – a military anachronism, and reflective of a broader trend in which the vestiges of an idealized Republican army endured in the professional legions of the later Principate. This dissertation, therefore explores not only the functions, but the identity and self-image of these officers. This dissertation contributes to scholarship in two fundamental ways. Primarily, it is the first study that combines and analyzes such a broad array of textual, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence for centurions, including duties, characterizations, and expectations. In doing so, the dissertation offers the first comprehensive, scholarly study of legionary centurions in the Roman Empire. Second, the dissertation demonstrates that this analysis of Roman intermediate ranks and social positions is crucial to understanding how attitudes towards discipline, violence, masculinity, and personal authority were manifested both within the Roman military community and throughout the Roman Empire.

Tradition and Power in the Roman Empire Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Nijmegen, 18–20 May 2022) (Leiden/Boston: Brill), 2024

The introduction to Tradition and Power in the Roman Empire Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Nijmegen, 18–20 May 2022) (Leiden: Brill, 2024), in which the importance of tradition is discussed in the context of how the Roman Empire worked as a power structure.