Studies in the History of Greece and Rome

The Landmark 3-Volume Set That Transformed The Study Of The Roman Empire

Fergus Millar, Hannah M. Cotton, Guy MacLean Rogers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807872864
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Fergus Millar is one of the most influential contemporary historians of the ancient world. His essays and books, including The Emperor in the Roman World and The Roman Near East, have enriched our understanding of the Greco-Roman world in fundamental ways. In his writings Millar has made the inhabitants of the Roman Empire central to our conception of how the empire functioned. He also has shown how and why Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam evolved from within the wider cultural context of the Greco-Roman world. This is a three-volume collection of Fergus Millar's essays, which transformed the study of the Roman Empire by shifting the focus of inquiry onto the broader Mediterranean world and beyond. Volume I: Opening this collection of sixteen essays is a new contribution by Millar in which he defends the continuing significance of the study of Classics and argues for expanding the definition of what constitutes that field. In this volume he also questions the dominant scholarly interpretation of politics in the Roman Republic, arguing that the Roman people, not the Senate, were the sovereign power in Republican Rome. In so doing he sheds new light on the establishment of a new regime by the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. Volume II: This second volume of the three-volume collection of Millar's published essays draws together twenty of his classic pieces on the government, society, and culture of the Roman Empire (some of them published in inaccessible journals). Every article in Volume 2 addresses the themes of how the Roman Empire worked in practice and what it was like to live under Roman rule. As in the first volume of the collection, English translations of the extended Greek and Latin passages in the original articles make Millar's essays accessible to readers who do not read these languages. Volume III: The 18 essays presented here include Millar's classic contributions to our understanding of the impact of Rome on the peoples, cultures, and religions of the eastern Mediterranean, and the extent to which Graeco-Roman culture acted as a vehicle for the self-expression of the indigenous cultures. The volume also includes an epilogue by Millar written to conclude the collection.

Rome, the Greek World, and the East

VOLUME 1

The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution

Fergus Millar
Edited by Hannah M. Cotton and Guy M. Rogers

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2002 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved

Set in a Bembo revival
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee on
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Millar, Fergus.
Rome, the Greek world, and the East / Fergus Millar;
edited by Hannah M. Cotton and Guy M. Rogers.
p. cm. —(Studies in the history of Greece and Rome)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. The Roman Republic
and the Augustan revolution
ISBN 0-8078-2664-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8078-4990-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Greece—Civilization. 2. Rome—Civilization.
I. Title. II. Series.
DE3. M52 2002
938—dc21 2001027500

Cloth 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1
Paper 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Polybius Was Right, by Guy M. Rogers

Abbreviations

Author’s Prologue

Part I. Conceptions and Sources

1. Taking the Measure of the Ancient World

2. Epigraphy

Part II. The Roman Republic

3. Political Power in Mid-Republican Rome:
Curia or Comitium?

4. The Political Character of the
Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C.

5. Politics, Persuasion, and the People,
before the Social War (150–90 B.C.)

6. Popular Politics at Rome in the Late Republic

7. Cornelius Nepos, “Atticus,”
and the Roman Revolution

8. The Last Century of the Republic:
Whose History?

9. The Mediterranean and the Roman Revolution:
Politics, War, and the Economy

Part III. The Augustan Revolution

10. Triumvirate and Principate

11. The Emperor, the Senate, and the Provinces

12. State and Subject:
The Impact of Monarchy

13. “Senatorial” Provinces:
An Institutionalized Ghost

14. Ovid and the Domus Augusta:
Rome Seen from Tomoi

15. Imperial Ideology in the Tabula Siarensis

16. The Roman City-State
under the Emperors, 29 B.C.–A.D. 69

Index

Preface

Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford, is one of the most influential ancient historians of the twentieth century. Since the publication of A Study of Cassius Dio by Oxford University Press in 1964, Millar has published eight books, including two monumental studies, The Emperor in the Roman World (Duckworth, 1977) and The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.–A.D. 337 (Harvard, 1993). These books have transformed the study of ancient history.

In his study of the role of the emperor in the Roman world Millar argued that the reign of Augustus inaugurated almost three centuries of relatively passive and inert government, in which the central power pursued few policies and was largely content to respond to pressures and demands from below. After more than twenty years of scholarly reaction, The Emperor in the Roman World is now the dominant scholarly model of how the Roman Empire worked in practice.

Reviewers immediately hailed Millar's magisterial study of the Roman Near East as a “grand book on a grand topic” (TLS, 15 April 1994). In this grand book, displaying an unrivaled mastery of ancient literary, epigraphical, papyrological, and archaeological sources in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages, Millar made the indigenous peoples of the Roman Near East, especially the Jews, central to our understanding of how and why the three great religions of the book, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, evolved in a cultural context that was neither “eastern” nor “western.” There can be no doubt that The Roman Near East 31 B.C.–A.D. 337 will be the standard work on the subject for a long time to come.

More recently, Millar has challenged widely held notions about the supposed oligarchic political character of the Roman Republic in The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Michigan, 1998). In the future, Millar intends to return to the Roman Near East for another large-scale study, to be entitled Society and Religion in the Roman Near East from Constantine to Mahomet. In this study Millar will bring the story of Greco-Roman culture in the Near East from the early fourth century up to the Islamic invasions of the seventh century A.D.

During the same period in which he has produced these ground-breaking books, Millar also has published over seventy essays on aspects of Greco-Roman history, from the Hellenistic period until the middle of the fifth century A.D. These essays have laid the foundations for or supplemented the ideas and arguments presented in Millar's very well known books. Some of these essays, such as “The Emperor, the Senate and the Provinces” (Journal of Roman Studies 56 [1966]: 156–166), or “Emperors, Frontiers and Foreign Relations, 31 B.C.–A.D. 378” (Britannia 13 [1982]: 1–23), have appeared in hitherto accessible journals and are widely regarded as classics of scholarship. But other outstanding essays, published in specialty journals or edited volumes, such as Millar's study, “Polybius between Greece and Rome” (published in Greek Connections: Essays on Culture and Diplomacy [1987]: 1–18), have been more difficult to locate, even for professional historians doing research in the field.

Therefore, the primary goal of our collection, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, is to bring together into three volumes the most significant of Millar's essays published since 1961 for the widest audience possible. The collection includes many articles which clearly will be of great intellectual interest and pedogogical use to scholars doing research and teaching in the different fields of the volume headings: Volume 1, The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution; Volume 2, Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire; and Volume 3, The Greek World, the Jews, and the East. At the same time, we have conceived and organized the three volumes of Rome, the Greek World, and the East especially in order to make Millar's most significant articles readily available to a new generation of students.

The principle of arrangement of the essays in each of the three volumes is broadly chronological by subject matter treated within the ancient world, after an initial section on “Conceptions and Sources” in volume 1. We believe that this chronological arrangement of essays (rather than by publication date of the essays) gives intellectual coherence to each volume on its own and to the collection as a whole. Overall, as Millar himself has defined it in the prologue, the subject of this collection is “the communal culture and civil government of the Greco-Roman world, essentially from the Hellenistic period to the fifth century A.D.”

Publication of a three-volume collection of essays, drawn from a wide variety of journals and edited volumes, over nearly four decades of scholarly production, presents editors with some major stylistic challenges. Our collection contains more than fifty essays. Most of these essays originally were published in learned journals or books, each of which had its own house style. Some learned journals also have changed their house styles over the time that Millar has published in them. For these reasons we have not attempted to bring all of the citations in the texts or notes of the articles in the collection into perfect stylistic conformity. Conformity for the sake of conformity makes no sense; moreover, to achieve such conformity would delay publication of the collection for years.

Rather, the stylistic goal of our collection has been to inform readers clearly and consistently where they can find the sources cited by Millar in his essays. To help achieve that goal we have included a list of frequently cited works (with abbreviations for those works) at the beginning of each volume. Thus, in the text or notes of the essays, readers will find abbreviations for frequently cited journals or books, which are fully cited in our lists at the beginning of each volume. For example, references in the notes to the abbreviation JRS refer to the Journal of Roman Studies. For the abbreviations themselves we have relied on the standard list provided in L'Année Philologique. In certain cases, where there have been individual citations in the original texts or notes to more obscure collections of inscriptions or papyri, we have expanded the citations themselves in situ, rather than endlessly expanding our list of frequently cited works.

In accordance with Professor Millar's wishes, for the sake of readers who do not know Latin or Greek, we have provided English translations of most of the extended Greek and Latin passages and some of the technical terms cited by Millar in the text and notes of the original essays. In doing so, we have followed the practice Professor Millar himself adopted in The Emperor in the Roman World in 1977. We believe that providing these translations will help to make Millar's essays more widely accessible, which is the essential goal of the collection. Readers who wish to consult the original Greek and Latin passages or technical terms which we have translated in the collection can look up those passages or technical terms in the original, published versions of the essays.

The editors would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have helped us in the process of collecting these essays and preparing them for publication. We are indebted first of all to Lewis Bateman, formerly senior editor at the University of North Carolina Press, who suggested the basic arrangement of the essays into three volumes. We are also grateful to David Perry, editor-in-chief, and Pamela Upton, assistant managing editor at the University of North Carolina Press, for their flexibility, advice, and support of the project.

Gabriela Cerra, Asaph Ben Tov, Tamar Herzig, Masha Chormy, Ori Shapir, and Andrea Rotstein in Israel and Desirée Garcia, Molly Maddox, and Dr. Nancy Thompson of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the United States provided editorial assistance. Our thanks also to Mark Rogers for his help with the maps. We owe a great debt to Priscilla Lange for her helpfulness and kindness to us in Oxford. We also would like to express our gratitude to the Fellows of Brasenose College Oxford and All Souls College Oxford for their hospitality while we were working on this project.

Above all, however, the editors would like to thank Fergus Millar, for his scholarship, his generosity, and his friendship over more than two decades.

Hannah M. Cotton
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem

Guy M. Rogers
Wellesley College
Wellesley

INTRODUCTION
Polybius Was Right

At the beginning of the three-volume collection of essays entitled Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Fergus Millar, in a prologue written for volume 1, looks back at the essays collected here and contends that “Ancient History” is meaningful and intelligible to us precisely because it is comparatively so recent and we are still so close to it in so many important ways.

Following the author's prologue, the essays of Millar in this volume defend the continued significance of the study of classics, argue for expanding the definition of what constitutes classics, and challenge the dominant twentieth-century scholarly interpretation of Roman politics. According to Millar, the Roman people, not the Senate, was the sovereign power in Republican Rome.

After a brief survey of the contents of volume 1, The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution, following the logic of Millar's argument, in this introduction I set out some of the relatively unexplored interpretive implications of accepting that Polybius was right about the role of the people in the structure of the Roman Republic.

In the first essay of this volume, “Taking the Measure of the Ancient World,” Millar reminds classicists and others of the enormous substantive and temporal boundaries of the field. Classics is, or should be, the study of the culture, in the widest sense, of any popu...

Table of contents

• Fergus Millar's Rome, the Greek World, and the East
• VOLUME ONE
• VOLUME TWO
• VOLUME THREE