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Full-Text Articles in History
The Needed Man: The Evolution, Abandonment, And Resurrection Of The Roman Dictatorship, Mark B. Wilson
The Needed Man: The Evolution, Abandonment, And Resurrection Of The Roman Dictatorship, Mark B. Wilson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Despite being an integral institution of the Roman state, employed frequently and routinely from the Republic’s earliest crises to the last days of the climactic fight with Hannibal, the Roman dictatorship is profoundly misunderstood. Perplexed by the idea of the Roman Republic—a state born out of the rejection of the preeminence of any one man—nonetheless investing the power of the state in a single unelected individual, and reacting to the anomalous first-century BCE dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, both late-Republic historians and modern scholars have consistently described the office in ominous and fundamentally mythological terms that are largely contradicted by …
Recognizing Freedom: Manumission In The Roman Republic, Tristan Husby
Recognizing Freedom: Manumission In The Roman Republic, Tristan Husby
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Roman manumission was at the center of three different groups: the Roman state, Roman slave-owners, and freeborn Romans who did not own slaves. I draw upon G.F.W. Hegel, Orlando Patterson, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu to describe Roman manumission as a ritualized practice that transforms a slave’s life from unlivable to livable. The term “unlivable” comes from the philosopher Judith Butler, who developed it in conversation with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and the term “social death,” which sociologist Orlando Patterson used to describe slavery. Hegel and Patterson’s thoughts on the movement and experience of freedom are useful for theorizing Roman slavery …