By Kit Morrell
Provincial governance lower than the Roman republic has lengthy been infamous for its corrupt officers and grasping tax-farmers, even though this can be faraway from being the complete tale. This publication demanding situations the normal photo, contending that major overdue republican voters have been extra fascinated with the issues in their empire than is mostly famous, and took powerful steps to handle them.
Attempts to enhance provincial governance over the interval 70-50 BC are tested intensive, with a selected specialise in the contributions of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) and the more youthful Marcus Porcius Cato. those efforts ranged way past the sanctions of the extortion legislations, encompassing exhibit trials and version governors, and drawing on ideas of ethical philosophy. In 52-50 BC they culminated in a coordinated reform programme which mixed far-sighted administrative swap with a concerted try to rework the ethos of provincial governance: the union of what Cicero known as 'Cato's coverage' of moral governance with Pompey's lex de provinciis, a legislations which remodeled the very nature of provincial command.
Though extra everyday as political competitors, Pompey and Cato have been united of their curiosity in strong governance and have been in a position to operating along one another to impact confident swap. This ebook demonstrates that it was once their eventual collaboration, within the past due 50s BC, that produced the republic's most important programme of provincial reform. within the method, it bargains a brand new viewpoint on those key figures in addition to an enriched realizing of provincial governance within the overdue Roman republic.
Read Online or Download Pompey, Cato, and the governance of the Roman Empire PDF
Best ancient & medieval literature books
The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides
Ovid's Heroides, a list of letters through girls who've been abandoned, has too often been tested as only a lament. In a brand new departure, this booklet portrays the ladies of the Heroides as a group of authors. Combining shut readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with severe equipment, the e-book argues that the issues of similarity among different letters of the Heroides, so frequently derided by means of sleek critics, symbolize an excellent exploitation of intratextuality, within which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously models herself as an alluding writer inspired via what she has learn in the Heroides.
Technopaignia Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung (Mnemosyne Supplements)
Technopaignia is the 1st finished assortment and scholarly research of a corpus of literary phenomena whose particularity is composed within the inventive play with formal good points (acrostics, anagrams, palindromes and so forth. ). The examine either discusses every one phenomenon individually as part of the heritage of old literature and touches upon extra primary questions on the perception of language, the interplay of literary construction and reception, the relation of literary and non-literary sorts of writing, the character of paintings and so forth.
Fiction on the Fringe: Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age
This choice of essays deals a accomplished exam of texts that usually were excluded from the most corpus of the traditional Greek novel and limited to the margins of the style, reminiscent of the "Life of Aesop", the "Life of Alexander the Great", and the "Acts of the Christian Martyrs".
Anthology of classical myth : primary sources in translation
This quantity is designed as a significant other to the normal undergraduate mythology textbooks or, while assigned along the primary Greek and Roman works, as a source-based substitute to these textbooks. as well as the whole texts of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod's Theogony, this assortment offers beneficiant choices from over 50 texts composed among the Archaic Age and the fourth century A.
- Recreating Jane Austen
- Man and the word : the orations of Himerius
- Sibylline Sisters: Virgil's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing (Classical Presences)
- Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama
Extra resources for Pompey, Cato, and the governance of the Roman Empire
Example text
Introduction 19 Chapter 1 explores the programme Pompey implemented as consul in 70 to address the related problems of exploitation in the provinces and corruption in the courts. I suggest that Pompey probably did not intend to change the composition of juries. Instead, his solution consisted of the election of censors to remove the senate’s most corrupt members; a call for stricter trials, starting with the ‘show trial’ of C. Verres; and the promotion of better standards of provincial governance.
Cic. Verr. 45) Finally, when Cn. Pompeius himself first held a contio near the city as consul-elect, where, in accordance with what seemed to be most greatly expected, he indicated that he would restore the tribunician power, the Pompey and the reforms of 70 23 result was noise and the grateful murmuring of the assembly. Yet when he said, in the same contio, that the provinces had been ravaged and abused, and that the courts were behaving scandalously and disgracefully, and that he intended to see to and take care of this matter, then truly it was not with a noise but with the greatest clamour that the Roman people signified its approbation.
To the same end, Cicero exaggerates the incidence of acquittals by senatorial juries. It is true that C. Gracchus originally introduced equestrian juries in response to a series of scandalous acquittals (App. 22); however, a survey designed to increase the pool of available jurors seems unsustainable in view of Cicero’s explicit and consistent comments in the Verrines. Neither does he include cases where political concerns, rather than actual bribery, might have influenced the verdict, as he suggests elsewhere in the case of Cn.