centred on the Forum was launched to capture that sense of Italian pride and power through the ancient monuments (Edwards 2008). In 1911, in one of the exhibitions at the restored Baths of Diocletian to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, plaster casts from each province of the Roman empire were exhibited to impress upon the visitor a clear sense of Rome’s imperial might (Dalla mostra al museo 1983; on the role of ancient Rome in this period, see Giardina and Vauchez 2016). Italy, however, with the conquest of Libya in the same year, was only the latest European country to implement an imperial expansion. In Britain, between the 1850s and 1920s, politicians, intellectuals and social reformers had been discussing the issues of empire and nation, central to the debates of the time, through the prism of ancient Rome, whose empire was conjured into echoing, in fact, the British empire and appealing to the nationalistic mode of the time (Bradley 2010; Butler 2012). In Germany, in the meantime, in response to Mommsen’s analysis of ancient Rome through the lens of law (Linderski 1990), Matthias Gelzer published Die Nobilität der römischen Republik (1912). A turning point in the study of Roman political culture (Ridley 1986), this work investigated the social structural dynamics of the Roman oligarchy and identified the nexus of personal obligations as the fundamental factor at the centre of the power dynamics in Roman Republican politics (see Chapter 7, Yakobson). A few years later, in 1920, Friedrich Münzer, who is often associated with Gelzer as the founder of a new interpretative framework of Roman politics, moved the debate further. In his Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien, he analysed Roman politics through the changing composition of the Senate, where the working of families and the personal connections of the Roman aristocracy replaced the working of the constitution and its legal arrangements. Developing this model for prosopographical studies, Ronald Syme wrote The Roman Revolution (1939), one of the landmarks of the twentieth century for the study of Roman politics (see Chapter 7, Yakobson; Linderski 1990). Composed in the tranquillity of Oxford, this work, however, was also a reaction to the political events of the 1920s and 1930s (Momigliano 1966: 729–737). A growing scholarly adulation for Augustus at the time was accompanied by an appropriation of Rome’s ancient past by the fascist regime in Italy, as the extravagant celebrations of the Bimillenario Augusteo in 1937 illustrate (Cagnetta 1976; Scriba 1995; Marcello 2011; Arthurs 2017; for an interesting comparison between Mussolini and Hitler in relation to classical antiquity see Roche 2019; for a different approach to ancient Rome in Spain at this time Wulff 2003). Firmly at the centre of Syme’s study was the governing class. In the rest of Chapter 7, Alexander Yakobson takes the story on, past the upheavals of World War II, to trace the subsequent readings of this political culture. In the 1980s, in response to contemporary concerns, as Yakobson discusses, Fergus Millar proposed a democratic reading of the Roman political system. His interpretation sparked a very lively debate, which gained momentum because, according to Hölkeskamp, ‘Two different scholarly traditions – a new approach to politics in political science on the one hand, and the new cultural history of politics in premodern political formations on the other – were combined and generated a fresh and innovative view on Roman Republican politics’ (abstract to Chapter 1).
Recent approaches to cultural history in the ancient world focus on the notion of symbolic capital and civic rituals (Hölkeskamp 2010), while neo-Republicanism has placed the political culture of the Republic at the centre of the history of political thought and contemporary analytical philosophy. By investigating the Roman Republican origins of a tradition of thought centred on the ideals of liberty, virtue and self-government, neo-Republicanism sets itself in deliberate opposition to liberalism and has now become one of its most powerful interlocutors, if not alternatives (Pettit 1998, 2013; Skinner 1998; van Gelderen and Skinner 2002–2005).
Despite repeated claims of the triumph of modernism and, conversely, of the decline of ancient studies, the political culture of the Roman Republic has regained central stage in contemporary studies of ancient Rome as well as in the intellectual world we currently inhabit.
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