Time, Space, Power, Warfare and Conquest through Roman 'Maiestas-ideology' and the Mediterranean Eco-system of Community Glory in the Middle Republic

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My research engages in a systematic attempt to re-conceptualise the amplification of Roman power in the Mediterranean from the C. 3rd-1st BC. Questions surrounding Roman imperialism have attracted copious scholarly attention but, I suggest, they are locked in a set of anachronistic and reductive frameworks which misinterprets a substantial portion of the whole phenomenon. Most notably this concerns the 'aggressive vs. defensive imperialism' debate, initiated most prominently in 1979 by William Harris and now sustained, much against their original aims, by Arthur Eckstein and Paul Burton by their use of International Relations Theory. I take an ideological (with ideology being loosely conceived as encompassing a specific set of ideas and their associated beliefs, values, emotions and discourse) approach to understanding the amplification of Roman power: that is, recognising that manifestations of power are culturally contingent where material forces are given meaning by the various conceptual boundaries, delineations and categories of contemporary societies - in the words of Tonio Hölscher 'reality too is a construct... the perception of reality is also a construct... such mental constructs are determined by cultural circumstances, specific to individual societies in different historical periods' (Hölscher (2003) 2). Instead of thinking about Roman imperialism (so often treated as a singular phenomenon to be defined and explained), this paper treats Roman power as, in the words of John Richardson, a 'mosaic of imperial modes' (Richardson (2008) 4). Our task becomes not so much to establish the causes and definite taxonomies of Roman imperialism as to explore the Roman ideologies which established the parameters of motivations, actions and discourse. Our study of Roman empire-building in the Middle Republic needs to allow for a multiplicity of different imperial taxonomies, a myriad of different layered structures and ideologies shaping such taxonomies, and a variety of perspectives from which Roman imperium could be viewed, experienced and constructed - all three significantly differentiated by time, place and individual agency. My central focus is on the reconstruction of what I term maiestas-ideology (a shorthand for the emotions, values, language and discourse of the maiestas/dignitas of the populus Romanus. The significance of this ideology comes from its dual-capacity of 'maiestas-ideology' to determine behaviour (the augmenting or defending of maiestas and dignitas could motivate warfare, conquest and expansion; influence what a statesmen or representative said, how he said it, and how he behaved; shape the imperial structures employed in a given area) and influence the way that the Romans conceptualised warfare and conquest, space and geography, history and time, power and authority. At the same time, I will acknowledge that Roman 'imperialism' was not a geographically or chronologically uniform process, as it is so often treated. Yet it is exactly in understanding the varying influences and manifestations of 'maiestas-ideology' in time and space (as noted above) and the intersections, influences, and conflicts between it and other ideological modalities, (for example, the pax deorum as the basis of Roman success, the domi and militiae, the pairing of virtus and fides as defining Roman values, fear of Carthage and the Gauls), especially within domestic political discourse, which promises to offer tantalising insights and provoke new questions about the way the Romans viewed and talked about their world. In the later stages of my DPhil, I will be able to begin reconstructing the different motivations for and constructions of 'empire' in Italy, Iberia, Gaul, Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and the East, coming to a holistic reconceptualisation of Roman expansion in the Middle Republic.