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4 books match the query 'Roman Republic'

cover of Murder Was Not a Crime: Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic

Murder Was Not a Crime

Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic

By Judy E. Gaughan

University of Texas Press, 2009

Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder.

With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence.

Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's "murder law," arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.

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cover of The Roman Republic in Political Thought

The Roman Republic in Political Thought

Fergus Millar

Brandeis University Press, 2002

It is a fact that the very long-lived Roman Republic has consistently played a surprisingly slight role in political theory and discussions about the nature of democracy, forms of government, and other matters, particularly when compared to the enormous attention paid to fifth-century BCE Athenian democracy. Fergus Millar re-opens the issue of how the Roman Republic was understood and used by political thinkers from the Ancient World to the present. Describing both the reality of the late Roman Republic and showing how its nature was distorted even by contemporary sources, he tracks its treatment (or absence) in political discourse from Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and in debates surrounding the creation of the American constitution, particularly in the Federalist papers. In brief, clear prose, with quotations in English from important works, and economical use of endnotes, he reinforces his unconventional thesis about the significance of direct democracy in the late Roman Republic. In the process, he also provides an unprecedented tour through 2000 years of Western political theory from the point of view of the Roman Republic, in general, and theories of direct democracy and the balance of power, in particular.
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cover of The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic: The Thirty-five Urban and Rural Tribes

The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic

The Thirty-five Urban and Rural Tribes

Lily Ross Taylor

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Fundamental to an understanding of the Roman Republic is comprehension of the tribal system employed to organize citizens. Used first for the census, raising an army, and tax collection, tribes later became voting districts for the election of magistrates. Voting districts were distributed geographically in and around the city of Rome and eventually throughout the Italian countryside, and they have been studied through evidence largely textual and epigraphical. In this volume, first published in 1960, evidence is adduced to locate and describe the tribes' locations. In his major new update, Lily Ross Taylor's disciple and scholarly follower Jerzy Linderski brings forward new evidence resolving earlier cruces, updates the lengthy bibliography on voting districts, and situates this invaluable work in its historical perspective.
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cover of Women in Fragments: Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

Women in Fragments

Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

Jessica H. Clark

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Our sources of knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic are flawed. Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently. In the historiography handed down by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who assumed the Roman Republic to be fully androcentric. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In this detailed and insightful volume, Jessica H. Clark returns to the source material to gain insight into how Roman men understood the lives, roles, and contributions of the women they wrote about.

Reexamining the puzzle pieces of ancient literature, Clark proposes that the earliest Roman historians represented women in complex ways, revealing their appreciation of women’s communities and women’s engagement in the project of the Republic, in contrast to the attitudes assumed by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She attributes those scholars’ assumptions to the social and political circumstances of their own times and demonstrates how these assumptions have continued to inform our own perceptions of Roman women and therefore Roman society more generally. This study ultimately uncovers not only the women of the Roman Republic but also how modern preconceptions have distorted their image and the stories we tell about ancient Rome.

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