Spheres of Control: The Origins of Government in Early Rome

Author: Fred K. Drogula
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197789810
Published In: August 2026
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

List Price: HKD 1,183.00

HKD 1,147.51 Save HKD 35.49 (3%)

Download Order Form

Add to Wishlist
| Add to Compare

Description
Contents

Details

The origins and development of early Rome had already faded into legend by the time its people began writing down the history of their city. Rome's first historians relied heavily on cultural memory when reconstructing the past, but memory constantly reinterprets and reshapes the information it preserves to keep it relevant and meaningful to successive generations. The stories familiar to those first historians had already gone through many generations of reworking and adaption, a process that disguised change and caused the historians to present the government of early Rome as being anachronistically similar to the government of the later Republic. This gradual recontextualization resulted in the surviving narrative tradition, which minimizes and even conceals developments and presents the Roman government as remaining largely unchanged over five centuries.

In Spheres of Control, Fred K. Drogula argues first that understanding Roman historiography makes it possible to identify and remove many of the most common errors, anachronisms, and fictions that appear in these narratives. He also argues that—once any erroneous material is removed from traditional accounts—the remaining information not only maps easily onto the new historical framework, but doing so creates a more logical and cohesive reconstruction of Rome's early development and resolves many problems that scholars have identified with the existing narrative tradition. Drogula shows that a new reconstruction of the development of government in early Rome can be found by removing material from the traditional narratives that is likely to be erroneous and by recontextualizing the material that remains into a framework based on archaeological discoveries and new readings of ancient texts.

Introduction

Chapter One: Unframing the Past

Chapter Two: The Peoples of Earliest Rome

Chapter Three: Rethinking the Reges and their Disappearance

Chapter Four: The Early Republic

Chapter Five: The Republican State Develops

Chapter Six: The Development of the Patricio-Plebeian Senate

Chapter Seven: Polybius Comes to Rome

Conclusion

References

Index