Projektbeschreibung
Lokale Institutionen und politische Eliten in römischen Städten
Im vom Europäischen Forschungsrat finanzierten Projekt PECUNIA sollen die materiellen und finanziellen Ressourcen untersucht werden, die verschiedenen sozialen Gruppen und Einzelpersonen durch ihre Teilnahme am politischen Leben ihrer Städte im Römischen Reich (70 v. Chr. bis 284 n. Chr.) zur Verfügung standen. Die Arbeit von PECUNIA wird den Schwerpunkt von den gut untersuchten Gaben der Eliten an ihre Gemeinschaften auf die Vorteile verlagern, die mit ihrer öffentlichen Stellung verbunden waren. Die Methodik des Projekts umfasst eine reichsweite Erhebung, die Extraktion vernachlässigter Daten aus einer Vielzahl schriftlicher Quellen und deren Analyse anhand von Konzepten aus Politikwissenschaft und Soziologie der Eliten. Im Rahmen der Studie wird untersucht, wie Positionen in lokalen Institutionen strukturell mit privaten Möglichkeiten verbunden waren und wie dieses Phänomen im römischen Zentrum und in den Städten geregelt und wahrgenommen wurde.
Ziel
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.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
Schlüsselbegriffe
Programm/Programme
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsGastgebende Einrichtung
75006 Paris
Frankreich