Cities and civic life in late Hellenistic Roman Sicily, Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 25 (2014) 165-208

Journal article

This paper offers an overview and reassessment of the evidence for the cities and civic life in Sicily in the last two centuries BC, the period of the Roman Republican prouincia. The paper begins with a brief critique of the traditional historical narrative and the extent to which this has been bound up in questionable assessments of city status, constructed primarily on the basis of the literary evidence. This critique is underpinned by an Appendix, which contains a detailed analysis of the interpretation of a key passage of Cicero (In Verrem 3.12-13). This first part is followed by three sections which offer an indicative overview of evidence for institutional civic life on the island, brief consideration of the constitutional form of Sicilian cities in the period (increasingly timocratic, dominated by a narrow elite), and a survey of the current state of the evidence for urban monumentalisation on the island. These elements are then brought together in a discussion of Sicilian elite behaviour in the urban context and within the wider historical context. A theme which runs throughout the paper is the extent to which ‘Roman’ Sicily can be usefully understood by comparison with patterns in polis life in the Late Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean, albeit moderated in various ways by the early encroachment of Roman provincial government.

Authors: Prag, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Editions de Boccard
• Journal: Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz
• Volume: 25
• Pages: 165 - 208
• Publication date: 2015-09-01
• Acceptance date: 2015-04-08
• EISSN: 2117-5624
• ISSN: 1016-9008
• Keywords: Sicily; Romanisation; Roman Republic; SBTMR; Hellenistic Sicily; Roman provinces; Cicero