Ancient Rome

The history of political thought occupies an uneasy status between two fields that do not always agree on either their methodology or their aims: political history, which seeks to reconstruct the actions and motivations of political actors, and political thought, which mines the past for conceptualizations of the dimensions of community life. In the case of the Romans, history and political thought parted company in the twentieth century, in large part because political theorists came to see the Romans as too bound up in history and displaying little of the originality, transcendence, and systematizing genius associated with Greek political thought. That assessment has changed as scholars have revised how we think about the connection between history and concepts. In particular, there is a new appreciation of how concepts acquire richness and form through the sedimentation of practices, ideas, debates, experiences, and responses to events. I look at four directions in reassessments of the history of Roman political thought: neo-Romanism, constitutionalism, political philosophy, and theoretical approaches that identified conceptual practices embedded in rhetoric, the experiences of bodies, and configurations of space and time.