Title: Romulus' asylum : Roman identities from the age of Alexander to the age of Hadrian /
Authors: Dench, Emma.
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 2005
Subjects: National characteristics, Roman.; Ethnicity Rome.; Group identity Rome.
Abstract: "Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: 'race-mixture' has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as 'multicultural'. Moving beyond these and more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed. The changing relationship with the Greek world and Greek culture is not the only significant one : the articulation of local and Roman identities in Italy is of profound importance for the distinctive articulation of being Roman."--Jacket.
Contents: Introduction -- Roman ethnographies -- Romulus' asylum : the character of the Roman citizenship -- The idea of Italy -- Flesh and blood -- Languages and literature -- Epilogue : closure?