Federico Santangelo, "Visions of the Roman people"

Talk Description: The Roman people is a ubiquitous and in many ways necessary presence in any account of the history of the Roman Republic. But when did it come into focus as a theme of historical investigation, and how? The question of how to define it and how to make sense of its role has received a number of sharply different and often conflicting treatments in modern historiography, which partly reflect tensions that are already apparent in the ancient evidence. This lecture will explore some of the key readings of the Roman people in the early modern and modern historiography on the Republic, and will discuss the ways in which they may be relevant to current historical debates.

Short Biography: Federico Santangelo took his first degree at Bologna, where he studied at the Collegio Superiore, and holds a PhD from University College London. He is the author of Sulla, the Elites and the Empire. A Study of Roman Policies in Italy and the Greek East (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2007), Divination, Prediction and the End of the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Teofane di Mitilene. Testimonianze e frammenti (Tivoli: Tored, 2015), Marius (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), Roma repubblicana. Una storia in quaranta vite (Rome: Carocci, 2019), La religione dei Romani (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2022), and Silla. Il tiranno riformatore (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2022). He has edited a volume of previously unpublished papers by Sir Ronald Syme (Approaching the Roman Revolution. Papers on Republican History, Oxford: OUP, 2017) and a sourcebook on the history of the Late Roman Republic (Late Republican Rome, 88-31 BC, London: LACTOR, 2017). He works mainly on the political and intellectual history of the Roman Republic, on Roman religion, on problems of local and municipal administration in the Roman world, and on aspects of the history of classical scholarship. He is Editor of History of Classical Scholarship (www.hcsjournal.org). He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Senior Fellow of Advance HE.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.