Author : Julia Mebane
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0355077779
The Body Politic and Roman Political Languages by Julia Mebane Pdf
One of the great puzzles of classical antiquity is that while the Roman republic came to an end in 31 B.C.E., its paradigm of politics did not. Augustus, the first emperor, took the title of princeps--first citizen--and insisted that he was nothing more than a republican magistrate. Institutions maintained their traditional functions and writers roundly proclaimed the restoration of the ancestral res publica after a generation of civil war. Indeed, if we take the Romans at their word, the republic was alive and well for nearly a century after its fall. I take the apparent disjuncture between political discourse and constitutional form as my point of departure. Drawing on a diverse range of poetic, historical, and antiquarian texts, my dissertation argues that thinkers did acknowledge the implementation of autocracy, but that they did so in the realm of figurative language rather than explicitly political speech. In particular, they radically revised one of the foundational metaphors of Roman political life: the metaphor of the body politic.