Introduction

Abstract

The title of this volume states some working assumptions, and seeks to engage with a debate that has a long and complex history. It explicitly alludes to a book that just over a decade ago put forward a radical reassessment of the history of the Roman Republic, its structure, and its periodization. In Roman Republics (2010), Harriet Flower argued that the five centuries or so between the end of the regal period and the emergence of the Augustan regime are not best understood as a coherent or unified Republican age, but should instead be viewed as a sequence of fundamentally different, if interrelated, Republican setups. A central chapter in Flower’s volume is devoted to the second century bce as a whole, and places it under the rubric “A Community in Transition”: an age in which new rules, new protagonists, and new problems came to the fore. This volume seeks to flesh out that agenda by pursuing a number of thematic approaches in a set of interconnected chapters. This introduction summarizes their key research questions and findings.