Horizontal binding forces, state regulation and local civil society: the city of Rome and Western Asia Minor in the Late Republic

该项目调查罗马城和小亚细亚西部城市的横向约束力和自治团体对当地社会凝聚力的重要性(公元前150年至时代之交)。我们的目标是平衡和纠正学者们对垂直赞助关系和社会政治精英的现有关注。这是因为在民国后期，自上而下的关系趋于衰弱，国家监管的能力也没有显着提高。因此，该项目选择了一个更广泛的视角：以学位论文的形式进行了两个案例研究。第一个集中在中心，首都城市，第二个集中在外围的一些城市，即亚洲省份。人们关注的焦点与其说是“大政治”的正式程序，不如说是当地社会的整体。令人惊讶的是，由于自治团体的存在，罗马的日常生活继续进行，而且相当顺利，尽管国家能力有相当大的波动，尽管发生了暴力骚乱，尽管参议员精英几乎完全被流放和暗杀所消灭。在亚洲，罗马统治者的金融镇压，内战期间有时的残酷干预，以及伴随着持续数年的占领的重大外部战争(针对米特里达斯)，都对当地秩序产生了相当大的影响。然而，即使在这里，自组织进程似乎仍在以某种令人满意的方式继续进行。基于这一观察，我们认为，罗马帝国较大城市的治理星座的质量不仅取决于国家监管和精英阶层的努力，而且关键是取决于公民社会先锋队的运作。因此，该项目还有助于回答为什么罗马社会、罗马国家和罗马对地中海的统治在共和国的危机和垮台中幸存下来的问题。自治团体不得不在非常不利的条件下在罗马和亚洲生存下去。这一事实突显了它们所表达的水平约束力的稳定力量和韧性。

The project investigates horizontal binding forces and self-governing groups in the city of Rome and in cities of western Asia Minor for their importance for the cohesion of local societies (c. 150 B.C. to the turn of the era). We aim to balance and correct the existing focus of scholars on vertical patronage relations and on sociopolitical elites. This is because top-down relations tended to lose strength during the late Republic and the capacity of state regulation did not increase significantly. The project therefore chooses a broader perspective: two case studies are conducted in the form of dissertations. The first one focuses on the center, the capital city, the second one on some cities in the periphery, namely in the province of Asia. The focus is less on the formal processes of ‘big politics’ than on the local society as a whole. It is striking that daily life in Rome continued, thanks to self-governing groups, and it did so rather smoothly, despite considerable fluctuations in state capacity, despite violent unrest, and despite an almost complete annihilation of senatorial elites by exile and assassination. In Asia, financial repression by the Roman masters, sometimes brutal interventions during the civil wars, and a major external war (against Mithridates) accompanied by an occupation that lasted several years all made a considerable impact on local orders. Nevertheless, even here the self-organizing processes seem to have continued in a somewhat satisfactory manner. Based on this observation, we suggest that the quality of governance constellations in larger cities of the Roman Empire not only depended on state regulation and the efforts of elites, but crucially on the functioning of a civil society avant la lettre. Thus, the project also contributes to the question of why Roman society, Roman statehood, and Roman rule over the Mediterranean survived the crisis and fall of the Republic. Self-governing groups had to endure in Rome and Asia under very unfavorable conditions. This very fact underlines the stabilizing power and resilience of the horizontal binding forces expressed in them.