Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World

Uses a broad range of evidence to explore how the Roman Empire worked and was experienced by its subjects.

Emma Dench (Author)

9780521810722, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 August 2018

222 pages, 5 b/w illus. 1 map
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.43 kg

This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Introduction
1. Towards a Roman dialect of empire
2. Territory
3. Wealth and society
4. Force and violence
5. Time
Epilogue: becoming Roman?

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History: earliest times to present day [HBL], General & world history [HBG]