Unrest in the Roman empire. a discursive history

Unrest in the Roman empire. a discursive history

Veranstalter
Lisa Pilar Eberle, Universität Tübingen; Myles Lavan, University of St. Andrews
Veranstaltungsort
Evangelisches Stift
Ort
Tübingen
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
13.06.2019 - 14.06.2019
Website
Von
Lisa Pilar Eberle

Resistance and revolt in the Roman empire have long been a subject of scholarly interest. Most research on this problem has been conducted in the mode of social history, trying to analyze the social origins and political motivations of ancient revolts. Unlike in other periods of history, however, the sources for such histories are rarely legal and administrative records but narrative accounts of such revolts preserved in the ancient literary record, meaning that the elite authors of these ancient literary accounts were engaged in the same enterprise as social historians are today: they too were trying to explain why and how certain groups of people challenged the place in the social order that those in power envisaged for them, a fact that social historians of resistance and rebellion in the Roman empire often fail to acknowledge. While the distinctive nature of the evidence for resistance and revolt in the Roman empire raises an important methodological concern - how can social histories of these phenomena avoid replicating the thought patterns of ancient texts’ elite authors? - it also offers a singular opportunity: to examine how ancient elite authors and their audiences identified, categorized and narrated instances of resistance in the Roman empire. The goal of this workshop is to excavate and critically analyze the histories of such ancient theorizing of unrest in the empire from the republican period to Late Antiquity.

The event will take place at the Evangelisches Stift. If you are interested, please just come along! In case of questions, get in touch with Lisa Eberle (lisa.eberle@uni-tuebinge.de) and Myles Lavan (mpl2@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Programm

Program

June 13th

Introduction
9.00 – Welcome/Setting the scene (Lisa Eberle and Myles Lavan)
9.10 – Towards a history of Roman discourses of unrest (Myles Lavan)
9.50 – Aporetic unrest: Appian's materialism reconsidered (Lisa Eberle)

Roman concepts
11.00 – The Roman Language of civil war: from Internal War and stasis to bellum civile (Carsten Hjort Lange, Aalborg)
11.40 – Securitas as ideology and narrative strategy (Michele Lowrie, University of Chicago)
12.20 – Uproar and Unrest in Roman Law: Seditio in its Legal Context (Nicole Giannella, Cornell)

Roman (and others’) concepts: piracy & banditry
14.00 – No Sea Could Be Navigated: Piracy in the Roman Mediterranean (Gil Gambash, Haifa)
14.40 – Bandits, barbarians and usurpers: the narrative of provincial unrest in the third and fourth century (Bruno Pottier, Aix-Marseille)

Slaves & soldiers in Roman historiography
15.50 – Tacitus, Florus, and slave revolts: servile insurrection as a historiographical tool (Peter Morton)
16.30 – Mutiny, then and now: diachronic perspectives on military unrest in Roman historiography (Hans Kopp, Bochum)

June 14th

Provincial perspectives (I): Greek cities
9.30 – Friends and enemies of Rome? Stasis in the second century BCE (Henning Börm, Konstanz)
10.10 – Struggles to define and counter-define dissent in the cities of the early Roman East (Benjamin Gray, Birkbeck)

Provincial Perspectives (II): Jews and Christians
11.20 – Tell me how I conquered you: some clues from the 2nd c. BCE Mediterranean (Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Princeton)
12.00 – The Apologetic Memory of Persecution (James Corke-Webster, King's College London)

Troublesome people? Christians & women
13.40 – The charge of coniuratio: A court record from Roman Egypt (Sabine Hübner, Basel)
14.20 – Locating Gender-Based Violence in Late Antiquity (Ulriika Vihervalli, Cardiff)

New and changed centers
15.30 – Revolt, Sedition and Counterinsurgency in the Later Roman State (John Weisweiler, Cambridge)
16.10 – Tyranny, Invasion, and Rebellion in the Visigothic Kingdom (Damien Fernandez, Northern Illinois)
16.50 – Closing thoughts and discussion (Greg Woolf, Institute for Classical Studies, London)

Kontakt

Lisa Pilar Eberle
Wilhelmstrasse 36
72074 Tübingen

lisa.eberle@uni-tuebingen.de


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Englisch
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