Nationality as a Factor in Roman History

Walbank, F. W.

doi:10.2307/310981

Cited by 56 publications

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“…In a seminal essay written in 1972, ‘Nationality as a Factor in Roman History’, the historian F.W. Walbank observed that extant Greek literature tended to treat the concept of a Greek nation as a kind of abstraction, which garnered attention only during crises or cultic celebrations.…”

Section: Ethnicity Through Greek and Roman Eyesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While scholars of antiquity have long written about ancient notions of ethnicity, race and nationalism (Hadas 1950;Bickerman 1952;Jones 1959;Sherwin-White 1967;Snowden 1970Snowden , 1983Walbank 1972), the past few decades have witnessed a marked increase in theoretically and methodologically nuanced treatments of these categories as markers of both kinship and community in the Mediterranean world (Dench 1995(Dench , 2005Cornell 1997;Hall 1997Hall , 2002 Mitchell and Greatrex 2000; Goldhill 2001;Malkin 2001a; Gillett 2002;Geary 2002;Isaac 2004;Smith 2004;Zacharia 2008;Derks and Roymans 2009;Richter 2011;McCoskey 2012;Gardner, Herring, and Lomas 2013;Andrade 2013;McInerney 2014;Revell 2010Revell , 2016. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, literary critics and sociologists, scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have shifted their discussions of ethnicity away from essentialist, instrumentalist and primordialist conceptualizations of the category and instead have moved toward an understanding of the ideological, historical and discursive processes by which notions of national or ethnic kinship were constructed, maintained, altered and refashioned (Barth 1969;Armstrong 1981;Gellner 1983;Smith 1986;Banks 1996;Baumann 1999;Marx 2003;Brubaker 2004;Anderson 2006;Berger and Lorenz 2008;Hobsba...…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

Berzon

2018

Currents in Biblical Research

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This article outlines how recent scholarly interventions about notions of race, ethnicity and nation in the ancient Mediterranean world have impacted the study of early Christianity. Contrary to the long-held proposition that Christianity was supra-ethnic, a slate of recent publications has demonstrated how early Christian authors thought in explicitly ethnic terms and developed their own ethnic discourse even as they positioned Christianity as a universal religion. Universalizing ambitions and ethnic reasoning were part and parcel of a larger sacred history of Christian triumphalism. Christian thinkers were keen to make claims about kinship, descent, blood, customs and habits to enumerate what it meant to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community. The narrative that Christians developed about themselves was very much an ethnic history, one in which human difference and diversity was made to conform to the theological and ideological interests of early Christian thinkers.

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Section: Ethnicity Through Greek and Roman Eyesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

Berzon

2018

Currents in Biblical Research

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“…They were organized by traditional associations, each, typically, jealous of its own interests and suspicious of the others; and their fragile unity was little able to withstand Roman opposition (see, MacMullen 1966:ch. 6;Brunt 1959;Walbank 1972). 8 The importance of Roman reliance on and assimilation of local provincial aristocrats, although certainly essential to the stability of the Roman Empire, should not be made to bear too much weight by itself, but should be seen as part of a larger pattern of inclusion of which other aspects were also vitally, not peripherally, important.…”

Section: The Role Of the Professional Classesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ancient historians agree that there were no rebellions of this sort against Roman rule (Brunt 1965:277;Walbank 1972;MacMullen 1966, ch. 6), but the question as to why there were not any has only been addressed incidentally or tacitly, most often in discussions about the comparative longevity of the Roman Empire.…”

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confidence: 99%

Roman and Modern Imperialism: A Reassessment

Miles

1990

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Those who view Rome from the perspective of modern empires have been struck by Rome's longevity (for example, Brunt 1965:267; Doyle 1986:81–103; Syme 1958:1). Attempts to explain this phenomenon, however, have given little if any consideration to why movements of national independence have occurred in modern times, but not in Roman antiquity. This is the more striking inasmuch as nationalist rebellions against imperial rule typically accompanied the dissolution of direct imperial control over native populations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certainly the decisions of modern imperialists to give up their empires have been influenced by political idealism or by calculations of economic self-interest unique to their historical situations (Liithy 1964:34). Nonetheless, the role of their subjects must also be taken into consideration, because it was the initiative of the colonial natives, not that of the imperial masters, that typically has resulted in the first calls for independence and, most often, in the nationalist rebellions that provoked imperialists into dismantling their empires. Idealistic impulses and calculations of economic self-interest alike have taken place within the context of that initiative and cannot help but to have been colored by it. It would be a mistake to identify nationalist sentiment and rebellion as the only reasons for the collapse of modern empires, but they must be included among the decisive reasons.

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“… 6 See, for instance, Walbank (1972) 160, who argued that ‘[u]sually the granting of civitas and Latin rights is the recognition of Romanisation already achieved; and this goes steadily ahead, eroding national distinctions’. …”

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confidence: 99%

Citizenship as a Reward or Punishment? Factoring Language into the Latin Settlement

Stewart

2017

Antichthon

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In the Latin Settlement, which was supposedly initiated in 338 BC, Rome organised many of the incorporated communities into either the civitas or civitas sine suffragio. Livy, and those scholars who have accepted his explanation, claim that the use of these two types of citizenship was influenced by the political and military circumstances of each community’s incorporation. Such an argument posits that Rome judged each community on the basis of its past behaviour and ‘rewarded’ or ‘punished’ it accordingly, using these different forms of citizenship. However, Livy’s anachronistic and inconsistent approach to the Roman franchise undermines this explanation – at least in its simplest form. This paper highlights the inconsistencies in Livy’s account of the Latin Settlement and offers an alternative explanation for the differing grants of citizenship. It is argued that the pre-existing languages and cultures of the different communities need to be taken into account, as does the legal significance of the use of Latin at Rome. In sum, this paper argues that the decision to incorporate a community as a civitas or as a civitas sine suffragio was not straightforwardly based on the political or military circumstances of each community’s incorporation, but also (or rather) involved the recognition of cultural and linguistic differences in each community and the consequent practicalities of the inclusion of each in Rome’s legal and political apparatus.

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Nationality as a Factor in Roman History

Cited by 56 publications

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Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

Roman and Modern Imperialism: A Reassessment

Citizenship as a Reward or Punishment? Factoring Language into the Latin Settlement

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