Overview

This book explores the nature of Roman identity through a study of the cultural and ideological effects of Roman citizenship on Greeks living in the first three centuries AD. Terms such as culture and identity are not static ideas, but constructions of a particular social milieu at any given point in time. Roman citizenship functioned as a kind of ideological apparatus that, when given to a non-Roman, questioned that individual's native identity. Beginning from the hypothesis that the possession of Roman citizenship provides solid evidence that a person has at least some ideological interest in Rome, the theoretical bases of Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu are used as guides in an analysis of four sources: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Paul of Tarsus, the jurist Ulpian, and civic coins minted in the Greek east. These sources answer the question 'What is a Roman?' in different - and often conflicting - ways, in turn showing that modern terms such as 'Romanization' gloss over all of the diversity within, and plasticity of, the cultures of both the Romans and those people whom they 'conquered'.

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9783639073430

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