{"id":83764,"date":"2024-04-02T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=83764"},"modified":"2024-04-01T09:30:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-01T13:30:11","slug":"qotd-supersizing-the-polis-roman-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/04\/02\/qotd-supersizing-the-polis-roman-style\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Supersizing the Polis<\/em>, Roman-style"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Discussing the Roman Republic after already looking at the normal structure of a polis<\/em><\/a> offers an interesting vantage point. As we’ll see, the Roman Republic<\/a> has a lot of the same features as a polis<\/em>: a citizen body, magistrates, a citizen assembly, all structured around a distinct urban center and so on. On the other hand, as we’re going to see, the Romans have some different ideas about the res publica<\/em> (that’s their phrase which gives us our word “republic”). They imagine<\/em> the republic differently than a polis<\/em> and that leads to some meaningful differences in its structure and nature, even though it seems to share a lot of “DNA” with a polis<\/em> and in some sense could be described as an “overgrown” city-state.<\/p>\n

Which leads into the other major difference: size. We’re going to be taking a snapshot<\/strong> of the Roman Republic, necessary because the republic changed over time. In particular what we’re going to look at here is really a snapshot of the republic as it functioned in the third and second centuries, what Roman historians call the “Middle Republic” (c. 287-91BC). Harriet Flower defines this period as part of “the republic of the nobiles<\/em><\/a>” which as we’ll see is an apt title as well.<\/p>\n

But even by the beginning of this period, the Roman Republic is enormous<\/em> by the standards of a polis<\/em>. While a polis<\/em> like Athens or Sparta with total populations in the low hundreds of thousands was already very large by Greek standards, the Roman Republic was much<\/em> bigger. We know that in Italy in 225 there was something on the order of three hundred thousand<\/em> Roman citizens liable for conscription, which implies a total citizen population right around a million. And that massive polity in turn governed perhaps another two million<\/em> other Italians who were Rome’s “socii<\/em><\/a>” (“allies”), perhaps the social category at Rome closest to “resident foreigners” (metics<\/em>) in Greek poleis<\/em>. This is in Italy alone, not counting Rome’s “overseas” holdings (at that point, Sicily<\/a>, Corsica and Sardinia<\/a>). In short, the Roman Republic may in some ways be shaped like a polis<\/em>, but it was a full order of magnitude larger than the largest poleis<\/em><\/strong>, even before<\/em> it acquired provinces outside of Italy. As you may imagine, that has implications!<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part I: SPQR”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2023-07-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discussing the Roman Republic after already looking at the normal structure of a polis offers an interesting vantage point. As we’ll see, the Roman Republic has a lot of the same features as a polis: a citizen body, magistrates, a citizen assembly, all structured around a distinct urban center and so on. On the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,41],"tags":[1527,732,1457,1345,561],"class_list":["post-83764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-athens","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-romanrepublic","tag-rome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-lN2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83764"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88317,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83764\/revisions\/88317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}