Project

Administration and acculturation in the Roman Empire

Program

Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars

Department

Classics

Location

For residence at the Huntington Library

Abstract

Subjects of the Roman empire experienced Roman rule most directly as a set of practices for organizing and dividing the land and situating them upon it. I plan to reconstruct and analyze the principles and practices by which the Romans ordered their empire, at the level of administration, geography, demography and law. Part one, on practice, proceeds from the drawing of boundaries, to the governance of cities and villages and their economic relations, and concludes with the movement and settlement of peoples, urban, rural and semi-nomadic. Part two, about administration, inquires first into the resources available to Roman officials for negotiating cultural difference and governing populations of mixed legal status, and then into the changing ambitions of Roman government between the period of conquest and the high empire.