Agreeing to differ: consensus, culture and politics in the Roman empire (Prof. Emma Dench)

Created:	2016-05-27 14:08
Institution:	Faculty of Classics
Description:	The Gray Lectures 2016 In recent years, the Roman empire has increasingly been modeled as a power- and belief- system in which the inhabitants of empire came to be participants, rather than as a binary system of Romans oppressors and oppressed native peoples. But while the Roman symbolism of power (including the power to enforce) loomed ever larger in local consciousness even beyond the frontier, that does not mean that we should imagine a singular power- and belief-system within which individual units always nested neatly, like a matryoshka doll. The two Gray Lectures (‘Reproducing Roman power’, and ‘Weapons of the not so weak’) explore the uses made by local authorities of the Roman symbolism of power, a consequence of the Roman empire’s heavy dependence on local agents, a source of both its strength and its vulnerability. The Seminar (‘Roman imperial change as conversion narrative’) explores the origins and consequences of understanding Roman imperial change as a conversion narrative.