scholarly journals The Groma and the Gladius: Roman Surveyors in the Later Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jason C Morris

<p>Boundaries have been a concern for all settled peoples in all times and places. The Romans  were no exception to this rule. Literary documents from the second century B.C. right  through to the end of the Western Empire in the fifth century A.D. show a continuous  preoccupation with the delineation of boundaries and the ownership or control of land. As part of this preoccupation, the Romans developed a complex legal framework for coping with property ownership. To accompany this legal framework, they developed a sophisticated system of boundary marking and land surveying known as centuriation. A great deal of scholarly attention has been expended on understanding both the system of centuriation and the legal framework governing Roman land use. Far less attention has been paid to the social development of the agrimensores or land surveyors who actually carried out the operation of centuriation and dealt with the problems of property disputes in the Imperial period. This thesis will focus on the social identity of the Roman land surveyors with a particular emphasis on understanding their origins in the surveying institutions of the later Republic. To accomplish this study, the thesis will be broken down into three broad chapters, each chapter containing two or three subsections. The first chapter will examine the social identity and evolution of the finitor, who has traditionally been considered the surveyor of the Roman Republic. The second chapter will examine the identity of the agrimensores or mensores in the particular context of the Roman army in an effort to distinguish them from the metatores, three names which have been considered to refer to the same or a similar occupation. The third chapter will examine the mensor in the context of the Roman Republic and trace the social forces that shaped their identity as specialists in land law and surveying.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jason C Morris

<p>Boundaries have been a concern for all settled peoples in all times and places. The Romans  were no exception to this rule. Literary documents from the second century B.C. right  through to the end of the Western Empire in the fifth century A.D. show a continuous  preoccupation with the delineation of boundaries and the ownership or control of land. As part of this preoccupation, the Romans developed a complex legal framework for coping with property ownership. To accompany this legal framework, they developed a sophisticated system of boundary marking and land surveying known as centuriation. A great deal of scholarly attention has been expended on understanding both the system of centuriation and the legal framework governing Roman land use. Far less attention has been paid to the social development of the agrimensores or land surveyors who actually carried out the operation of centuriation and dealt with the problems of property disputes in the Imperial period. This thesis will focus on the social identity of the Roman land surveyors with a particular emphasis on understanding their origins in the surveying institutions of the later Republic. To accomplish this study, the thesis will be broken down into three broad chapters, each chapter containing two or three subsections. The first chapter will examine the social identity and evolution of the finitor, who has traditionally been considered the surveyor of the Roman Republic. The second chapter will examine the identity of the agrimensores or mensores in the particular context of the Roman army in an effort to distinguish them from the metatores, three names which have been considered to refer to the same or a similar occupation. The third chapter will examine the mensor in the context of the Roman Republic and trace the social forces that shaped their identity as specialists in land law and surveying.</p>


1964 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 97-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Levick ◽  
Shelagh Jameson

During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, Italian business-men swarmed into newly acquired provinces and lands that had fallen under Roman influence. Sometimes they settled abroad with their families and, as landowners, obtained a form of wealth that raised them in the social scale. At the end of the second century B.C. Italians began to emigrate and become landowners in another way—by the foundation in the provinces of colonies, veteran and civilian. It was Gaius Gracchus who initiated colonization overseas, and it remained a radical, controversial policy—but an indispensable one. Both forms of emigration kept up their momentum until the Imperial age. As they passed through the empire or settled abroad, families of Italian negotiatores and colonists left evidence of their movements, mainly in the form of inscriptions. Under the Caesars we may, in some cases, trace their progress in reverse: the descendants of Italian émigrés—negotiatores, colonists, and landowners—returned to Italy and held posts to which some at any rate of their ancestors could never have aspired.


1955 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 148-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough

At the beginning of the Principate, Italy, which had been extended to the Alps by the incorporation of Cisalpine Gaul in 42 b.c., was essentially a land of selfgoverning urban communities that exercised authority over an adjacent country district. By the third century, when earlier differences in the legal status of these communities had been largely abolished, the title most commonly applied to them was civitas, although older terminology did not pass entirely out of use: Cassiodorus, for example, twice uses municipium. For the attached country district the usual name was territorium, defined by the second-century jurist Pomponius as universitas agrorum intra fines cuiusqu civitatis. The Christian church adopted the existing Roman civil circumscriptions as the basis of its territorial organisation, so that in ecclesiastical texts civitas came to have the special sense of ‘diocesan see’: in this sense it is common in the Act a of sixthcentury councils. Despite a steady decline in civic autonomy in the later Imperial period, the city and its territory continued to be the basic unit of secular administration. In the fifth century the title of iudex was not yet accorded to any official connected with the city, and this was still so after the Ostrogothic occupation of Italy and the establishment of comites Gothorum.


2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-286
Author(s):  
Mario Torelli

Abstract In 2006, the Soprintendenza Archeologica del Lazio began an excavation at the site of Fosso dell’Incastro on the coastline of Ardea. A well-preserved settlement buried under huge sand dunes was discovered, featuring a Roman castrum created in the fourth century BCE around a sanctuary dating back to the mid-sixth century BCE. Its characteristics not only suggested that the ancient site was Castrum Inui, previously known only through the ancient literary sources (e.g., Virgil, Servius and Macrobius), but also that its sanctuary could be attributed to an inconspicuous local deity, Inuus—often correlated with Pan and Sol. In its final phase (the early Imperial period), the sanctuary housed three sacred buildings: Temple A, Temple B, and a small shrine dedicated to Aesculapius. Temple B, the site of Inuus’ worship, was constructed in the Etrusco-Italic style during the first quarter of the fifth century BCE, while Temple A was built during the mid-second century BCE. Temple B was oriented to the southwest, one typical for religious buildings connected to chthonic cults; two altars built during the fourth century BCE were placed along the façade of the temple, one facing the east and on the axis of the temple, the second close to its southwest corner. It was also enhanced with an acroterion depicting the head of a warrior with the skin and horns of a goat or cow over his helmet, a motif that establishes a connection between Innus, Pan and Faunus. Temple A, on the other hand, faced the northeast and was enhanced with a sculpted pediment in high relief showing an assembly of gods and possibly Aeneas. Both its orientation and the iconography of the pediment suggest that it was dedicated to Aeneas Indiges, a pan-Latin version of the old cult of Inuus.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Behringer ◽  
Kai Sassenberg ◽  
Annika Scholl

Abstract. Knowledge exchange via social media is crucial for organizational success. Yet, many employees only read others’ contributions without actively contributing their knowledge. We thus examined predictors of the willingness to contribute knowledge. Applying social identity theory and expectancy theory to knowledge exchange, we investigated the interplay of users’ identification with their organization and perceived usefulness of a social media tool. In two studies, identification facilitated users’ willingness to contribute knowledge – provided that the social media tool seemed useful (vs. not-useful). Interestingly, identification also raised the importance of acquiring knowledge collectively, which could in turn compensate for low usefulness of the tool. Hence, considering both social and media factors is crucial to enhance employees’ willingness to share knowledge via social media.


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of the development of the general sociological theory of J.G.Turner. These foundations are metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and an analytical scheme. Turner began to develop a general sociological theory with a synthesis of metatheoretical ideas of social forces and social selection. He formulated a synthetic metatheoretical statement: social forces cause selection pressures on individuals and force them to change the patterns of their social organization and create new types of sociocultural formations to survive under these pressures. Turner systematized the basic concepts of his theorizing with the allocation of micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social reality. On this basis, he substantiated a simple conceptual scheme of social dynamics. According to this scheme, the forces of macrosocial dynamics of the population, production, distribution, regulation and reproduction cause social evolution. These forces force individual and corporate actors to structurally adapt their communities in altered circumstances. Such adaptation helps to overcome or avoid the disintegration consequences of these forces. The initial stage of Turner's general theorizing is a kind of audit, modification, modernization and systematization of the conceptual apparatus of sociology. The initial results obtained became the basis for the development of his conception of the dynamics of functional selection in the social world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khatija Bibi Khan ◽  
Owen Seda

Feminist critics have identified the social constructedness of masculinity and have explored how male characters often find themselves caught up in a ceaseless quest to propagate and live up to an acceptable image of manliness. These critics have also explored how the effort to live up to the dictates of this social construct has often come at great cost to male protagonists. In this paper, we argue that August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone present the reader with a coterie of male characters who face the dual crisis of living up to a performed masculinity and the pitfalls that come with it, and what Mazrui has referred to as the phenomenon of “transclass man.” Mazrui uses the term transclass man to refer to characters whose socio-economic and socio-cultural experience displays a fluid degree of transitionality. We argue that the phenomenon of transclass man works together with the challenges of performed masculinity to create characters who, in an effort to adjust to and fit in with a new and patriarchal urban social milieu in America’s newly industrialised north, end up destroying themselves or failing to realise other possibilities that may be available to them. Using these two plays as illustrative examples, we further argue that staged masculinity and the crisis of transclass man in August Wilson’s plays create male protagonists who break ranks with the social values of a collectively shared destiny to pursue an individualistic personal trajectory, which only exacerbates their loss of social identity and a true sense of who they are.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Fellmann

In this paper I claim that the metaphysical concept of culture has come to an end. Among the European authors Georg Simmel is the foremost who has deconstructed the myth of culture as a substantial totality beyond relations or prior to them. Two tenets of research have prepared the end of all-inclusive culture: First, Simmel’s formal access that considers society as the modality of interactions and relations between individuals, thus overcoming the social evolutionism of Auguste Comte; second, his critical exegesis of idealistic philosophy of history, thus leaving behind the Hegelian tradition. Although Simmel adheres in some statements to the out-dated idea of morphological unity, his sociological and epistemological thinking paved the way for the concept of social identity as a network of series connected loosely by contiguity. This type of connection is confirmed by the present feeling of life as individual self-invention according to changing situations.


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