Rome, Italy and Empire from Caesar to Claudius: 46 BC to AD 54

Beginning this period in 46 BC immediately presents us with issues of uneasy adjustment and faltering responses to shattering social and political change. The Civil War, fought from one end of the Mediterranean to another, raised problems about the character of Urbs and Orbis, city and world, and their relations. Caesar drew his own solutions from the widest cultural range. The first years of the period set the scene for the developing drama of the transformation of every aspect of the societies of the Mediterranean world ruled from Rome, and of the identity of Rome itself, as experiment, setback and new accommodation succeeded each other in the hands of the generals of the continuing war-years, and finally, after Actium, of Augustus and his advisors. The central problems of this subject concern the dynasty, charisma and authority of the Roman Emperor, the institutions of the Roman provincial empire, and the most intensely creative age of Roman art and Latin literature, and how these were related. The sequel addresses three very different rulers, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula and Claudius, whose reigns did much to shape the idea of an imperial system and its historiography, which we sample through Tacitus and the biographies of Suetonius, and the virulent satirical sketch by Seneca of Claudius’ death and deification. The subject invites consideration of the changing relations of Greek and Roman, and the increasing unity of the Mediterranean world; and also of the social and economic foundations of the Roman state in the city of Rome and in the towns and countryside of the Italy of the Georgics and Eclogues. Within Roman society, political change was accompanied by upward social mobility and by changes in the cultural representations of status, gender and power which pose complex and rich questions for the historian.

For those offering the period as text-based subject, passages for compulsory comment and translation will be set from Suetonius, Life of Augustus; Res Gestae Divi Augusti (ed. P.A. Brunt and J.M. Moore, Oxford 1967); Tacitus, Annals I, XI-XII.

A document on WebLearn (‘Documents Roman HistoryI.6.doc’) lists key documents, some of which will be set (with a translation) among the optional gobbets (qu. 16).

It has been decided that (where possible) tutorials for this period of Roman History will take place in the second half of Michaelmas Term and Hilary Term, and Lectures on this subject will thus normally take place in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms.

Choosing your combinations
this period makes a natural pair with the preceding one, since I.5 explores the conditions which made Caesar's complete ascendancy possible. It also goes excellently well with opition I.11, Politics, societ and culture from Nero to Hadrian, in which many of the themes continue. This period also offers excellent historical background to both work on literature of the late Republic and early Empire(III.2,9 or 11) and on Roman art and archaeology (IV.3 and 4).