Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome

The ancient Romans are usually thought of as a monolithic ethnic group, though in fact they formed a self-consciously pluralistic society. In this book, Gary D. Farney explores how senators from Rome’s Republican period celebrated and manipulated their ethnic identity to get ahead in Rome’s political culture. He examines how politicians from these lands tried to advertise positive aspects of their ethnic identity, how others tried to re-create a negative identity into something positive, and how ethnic identity advertisement developed over the course of Republican history. Finally, in an epilogue, Farney addresses how the various Italic identities coalesced into a singular Italian identity in the Empire, and how Rome’s experience with Italic groups informed how it perceived other groups, such as Gauls, Germans, and Greeks.