Performing Normativity in the Ancient World Series: Prof. Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow), Legal Normativity in the Roman Senate

The Roman Republican Senate: lessons in innovation

The Roman Republic presented itself – and is often seen – as a society fiercely opposed to change, in which ‘new things’, res nouae, were synonymous with revolution, and where legislation was often associated with danger to the res publica. The Roman Senate presented itself, collectively and individually, as the arbiter of the norms that underpinned this ideal.

This paper seeks to show how, during the period of Roman expansion in the second century BCE, the Senate leveraged its normative role into a sustained and systematic development of elite power and wealth at the expense of the rights of the Roman people, and looks ahead to the consequences in the last decades of the Republic.

Chair: Shekinah Vera-Cruz, LHub & University of Warwick

Speaker: Professor Catherine Steel is a Roman historian whose work primarily centres on political history and the relationship between individual and collective action. She has published extensively on the work of Cicero, on Roman oratory and rhetoric, and on the political culture and institutions of the late Republic. She received a British Academy mid-career fellowship (2011-12) to investigate the institutional history of the Roman Senate in the Republican period an its importance as a model of republican government for subsequent polities. This project was titled, 'SPQR: the Roman Republican Senate in the 21st century'. She also received a grant from the European Research Council for a five-year project to edit the testamonia and fragments of non-Ciceronian authors, in a project titled ‘Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators’. An edition of this material is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Currently, Professor Steel teaches and researches at the University of Glasgow, and is preparing a monograph on the Republican Roman Senate.