Project description
Local institutions and political elites in Roman cities
Funded by the European Research Council, the PECUNIA project will investigate the material and financial resources provided to various social groups and individuals by their participation in the political life of their cities during the Roman empire (70 BC - 284 AD). PECUNIA’s work will shift the focus from the well-studied elites’ gifts to their communities to the benefits associated with their public position. The project's methodology involves an empire-wide survey, the extraction of neglected data from a wide range of written sources, and their analysis using concepts derived from political sciences and sociology of the elites. The study explores how positions in local institutions were structurally linked to private opportunities and how this phenomenon was regulated and perceived at the Roman centre and in the cities.
Objective
Examining the hundreds of cities which formed the basis of the Roman Empire (70 BC-AD 284), PECUNIA interrogates the material and pecuniary interests made available to local elites by their political activity. It investigates how positions in local institutions were structurally associated with private opportunities and how this phenomenon was conceived and regulated at both levels of the imperial system, i.e. the Roman centre and the cities. In the civic milieu, the flow of gifts and mandatory contributions of the well-off to their communities has been extensively explored by scholarship, while the fields of re-sources made available to them by the government of the cities have remained unaddressed. This mainly results from the focus on contributions of members of the political elites which is found in the inscriptions, engraved under the direction of the governing bodies of the cities, in praise of their actions. Based on the observation that sources also account for legal and illegal gains, PECUNIA instead aims at producing a comprehensive analysis of private interest in public affairs, by (1) using an empire-wide inquiry, whereas in institutional and social studies the civic world has so far only been approached regionally, (2) harnessing heterogeneous data from classical sources and also from less sought corpora, (3) using investigative concepts and data modelling stemming from political science and sociological studies of the elites, to elaborate new interpretative paths about the production of stability in local governance in the Roman Empire. By gaining substantial and systematic evidence and devising new questions capable of navigating it, PECUNIA thus illuminates the expectations regarding participation in public life by the various sub-groups in the elites and it frames a new paradigm of local power, considering all stakeholders and their attitudes to the realities of private interests in local functions, from the local people to the Roman administration.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75006 Paris
France