Status as performance in Roman society

Abstract

How should we approach the study of Roman society? The traditional approach has been to focus on the different groups identified by the Romans themselves as making up their political community, defined either in legal or political terms or more informally (e.g. the army and the poor). This focus on (in anthropological terms) ‘agents’ concepts’ –which inevitably limits our perspective to that of the dominant, literate elite who produce the bulk of our sources –raises the question of what sort of groups these are in modern sociological terms. In scholarship over the last few decades this has tended to be reduced to a choice between status and class, since other modern definitions of social groups based on income or form of labour are clearly anachronistic. The long-running debates about both these terms has led many recent studies to side-step the issue, by focusing on a binary division between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ (conflating wealth and power, and freea nd unfree, in a manner which neither reflects ancient categories of thought nor offers any significant analytical advantage from a modern perspective) or side-stepping the issue altogether by concentrating on the nature of social relations. This has produced some exciting and insightfulaccounts of the dynamics of Roman social interactions, but it leaves a whole other set of questions open: what were the key groups that made up Roman society, and hence shaped individuals’ behaviour and relations with one another?