scholarly journals SOCIAL MOBILITY IN ANCIENT ROME IN THE THIRD CENTURY: A SOCIAL ESCALATOR OR A SOCIAL ELEVATOR?

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-47
Author(s):  
S.V. Prishchenko
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Third

A New Edition of the Marble Plan of Ancient Rome

1961 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 143-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Few monuments of Ancient Rome can command more interest and fascination than the Marble Plan of the city of Rome. Early in the third century this colossal map was put up in panels on the wall of a building in the Forum Pacis at the behest of the Emperor Septimius Severus or his Praefectus Urbi. It is a unique document not only because no other plan of a major Roman city survives, but also because the city which it depicts is Rome, at the height of her development as the capital of the world. Although only a fraction of the Plan has come down to us, these fragments are invaluable for our knowledge of individual buildings as well as of the city as a whole; hence its appeal to students of architecture and urbanistics, of archaeology and history.

scholarly journals SOLDIERS AND EQUESTRIAN RANK IN THE THIRD CENTURYad

2012 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 89-123
Author(s):  
Caillan Davenport
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
The Third

This article considers a group of inscriptions, ranging in date from the late second to late third centuriesad, which indicates that low-ranked members of the Roman army gained access to equestrian rank in this period. The inscriptions attest two interrelated phenomena: (1) the promotion of soldiers to posts in themilitiae equestres, a series of officer commands usually held by men from theordo equester; and (2) grants of equestrian status to soldiers' sons, many of whom were only very young. These developments represent a marked departure from the circumstances that prevailed in the early Empire, when equestrian rank could be bestowed only by the emperor on men who possessed a census qualification of 400,000 sesterces. In this article, I propose that successive emperors gave soldiers greater access to themilitiae equestres, and in some cases awarded equestrian rank to their sons, because they recognized the widespread desire for social mobility among the ranks of the army. The widening of access to equestrian rank within the Roman army contributed to the devaluation of this status over the course of the third centuryad.

War and Warfare in Ancient Rome

2013 ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Randall S. Howarth
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Synoptic View

This chapter offers a synoptic view of the evolution of Roman war and warfare, highlighting the threshold moments and key and problematic issues pertaining to the understanding of the Romans at war. Romans routinely distributed at least seventy thousand soldiers in consular and pro-consular armies every year by the last third of the third century BC. The wars with Carthage had promoted Roman advantage. The Imperial authorities have difficulty in enrolling soldiers and maintaining the ones they had. Roman diplomatic success had connoted on partnership in the conduct of war and the sharing of its benefits. The most obvious path to prestige in Rome has been found in the management of war and its rewards. It is noted that the Roman army and the habits of Rome at war should not be regarded in isolation from the social, diplomatic, and political contexts in which they existed.

Social Mobility and the Theodosian Code

1964 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramsay MacMullen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Black Sea ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Small Farmers ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Right

Until recent centuries, historians had to reckon with only limited social movement. I use the phrase in a very wide sense, to cover change of habitation, profession, or class; but even so defined, in a world dominated numerically by small farmers, people rarely moved around, or up or down, socially. This is as true of the thirteenth as of the third century.But it is usual to say that, granted these limitations, social movement was still much more restricted after 250 than before. This has recently been challenged by A. H. M. Jones. ‘The late Roman empire is often conceived of as a rigid hierarchical society, in which every man was tied to the station in life to which he was born.’ But the laws directing this confess, in their repetitions and relaxations, that they could not really be applied. Society, he says, was actually less static after 250 than before. Despite what has become the almost canonical view of the question, Professor Jones is certainly in the right. Under three major headings, all perfectly well known, many people did change jobs and homes. Some fled from invasion, in numbers powerfully suggested by the thousands of coin hoards from Britain to the Black Sea—we must assume that for every treasure we find, a hundred are still hidden, and for every man who buried his money, a hundred took it with them—; another group, from one to two hundred thousand, joined an expanded army; an equal number in Egypt alone turned monk. If we say, then, that over the century 250–350, half a million people were taken from one life and newly rooted in another, we have a figure by no means fantastic, yet without parallel in any earlier era of the Empire.

Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Adam Ziółkowski
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Scholarly Publication ◽  
The Third ◽  
Quo Vadis ◽  
A Charge ◽  
Rival View

Sienkiewicz, who in Quo vadis strove to render as accurately as possible the topography of ancient Rome—knowledge of which was increasing dramatically thanks to archaeological finds, especially in the catacombs investigated from 1842 by Giovanni Battista De Rossi—as a rule did not disclose his modern authorities. The only glimpse at the novel’s eruditional aspect is his retort to a charge, repeated in the Polish weekly Słowo after unnamed Roman archaeologists, of having committed an anachronism locating St Peter’s first teaching in Ostrianum, the cemetery founded in the third century, in which he emphasized that some leading Roman archaeologists date it to the first century. Neither party realized that they had different cemeteries in mind. Sienkiewicz’s critic thought that he followed De Rossi’s universally accepted identification of Ostrianum with Coemeterium Maius on Via Nomentana, founded in the third century; yet Sienkiewicz surely identified it with the newly discovered ‘hypogeum of the Acilii’ in the Cemetery of Priscilla on Via Salaria, seemingly datable to the late first century. From whom did he get this identification if its acknowledged author, Orazio Marucchi, five years after the novel’s publication still identified Ostrianum with Coemeterium Maius and was unaware that Sienkiewicz located it in the Cemetery of Priscilla? This chapter tries to find out who may have been Sienkiewicz’s informant and why the location of Ostrianum figuring in Quo vadis published in 1896 was first proposed in a scholarly publication only in 1901, by the archaeologist who a few months before had still held the rival view.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Status ◽  
Key Issues

This chapter discusses the key issues surrounding Perpetua’s life and her narrative, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. It introduces the most perplexing circumstances around her life and times: the authorship of her Passio (which is written in at least three different hands); her life and family; the conditions of her martyrdom and of martyrdoms during the pre-Constantinian period; the status of martyrdom texts as personal, social, or historical documents; whether persecutions can be historically verified or were exaggerated by the Christians and others; and the afterlife of Perpetua and her text in writers from the third century to contemporary times. The introduction lays out the arguments for these thorny issues and tries to find a reasonable position on each one.

Letters from High to Low in the Graeco-Roman Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Clarysse
Keyword(s):  
Roman Period ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
The Third ◽  
Total Lack

In this chapter, papyrus letters sent from superiors to their inferiors are studied on the basis of test cases ranging across the Graeco-Roman period in Egypt, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. This correspondence is drawn from four archival groups of texts: the archive of Zenon; the letters of L. Bellienus Gemellus and the letters of the sons of Patron; and the Heroninus archive. The letters are usually short, full of imperatives, and characterized by the absence of philophronetic formulae. Recurrent themes of the correspondence are urgency, rebukes, orders, and interdictions, and there is an almost total lack of polite phrases.

‘At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrastos Omissi
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Military ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter begins by considering what made the late Roman state distinctive from the early Empire, exploring the political developments of the later third century, in particular the military, administrative, and economic reforms undertaken by the tetrarchs. It then explores the presentation of the war between the tetrarchy and the British Empire of Carausius and Allectus (286‒96), taking as its core sources Pan. Lat. X, XI, and VIII. These speeches are unique in the panegyrical corpus, in that two of them (X and XI) were delivered while the usurpation they describe was still under way, the third (VIII) after it was defeated. In this chapter, we see how the British Empire was ‘othered’ as piratical and barbarian, and how conflict with it helped to create the distinctive ideology of the tetrarchy.

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