Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire

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University of California Press, Oct 16, 2000 - History - 494 pages
The Roman empire remains unique. Although Rome claimed to rule the world, it did not. Rather, its uniqueness stems from the culture it created and the loyalty it inspired across an area that stretched from the Tyne to the Euphrates. Moreover, the empire created this culture with a bureaucracy smaller than that of a typical late-twentieth-century research university. In approaching this problem, Clifford Ando does not ask the ever-fashionable question, Why did the Roman empire fall? Rather, he asks, Why did the empire last so long?

Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire argues that the longevity of the empire rested not on Roman military power but on a gradually realized consensus that Roman rule was justified. This consensus was itself the product of a complex conversation between the central government and its far-flung peripheries. Ando investigates the mechanisms that sustained this conversation, explores its contribution to the legitimation of Roman power, and reveals as its product the provincial absorption of the forms and content of Roman political and legal discourse. Throughout, his sophisticated and subtle reading is informed by current thinking on social formation by theorists such as Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.
 

Contents

Introduction Communis Patria
1
Ideology in the Roman Empire
19
The Roman Achievement in Ancient Thought
49
The Communicative Actions of the Roman Government
73
Consensus in Theory and Practice
131
The Creation of Consensus
175
Images of Emperor and Empire
206
Orbit Terrarum and Orbit Romanus
277
The King Is a Body Politick for that a Body Politique Never Dieth
336
Conclusion Singulare et Unicum Imperium
406
WORKS CITED
413
GENERAL INDEX
451
INDEX LOCORUM
459
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About the author (2000)

Clifford Ando, Professor of Classics, History, and the College at the University of Chicago, is author of Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (UC Press), winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association, among other books.

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