Introduction

Traditionally, historians regard the demise of the Roman Republic as the end of politics. If politics is regarded as decision making that affects society as a whole, something certainly changed with the advent of single rule. Yet the traditional political institutions of senate and city council continued to exist for a remarkably long period of sixth centuries afterwards. It is argued that their role became social rather than political and that they became self-referential, offering the elite a platform to define and negotiate its own position and enact and negotiate major tensions and ambiguities of elite life. The behaviour of their members is best analysed under the heading of political culture, here defined as ‘a style of doing politics’. Such an approach focuses on the social meaning of the form of the behaviour rather than on the content of the decisions. The approach is underpinned by the theory of bounded rationality, which assumes that participants are bound by language and conventions. It is argued that a case study approach, focusing on specific texts or clusters of texts, offers the best way to proceed. It presents seven cases that will be studied in successive chapters, each representing a major tension or ambiguity inherent in Roman political culture.