Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic Politics in Prose

The study of Roman republican magistracy has traditionally been the preserve of historians posing constitutional and prosopographical questions. As a result, one fundamental aspect of our most detailed contemporary and near-contemporary sources about magistracy has remained largely neglected: their literariness. This book takes a new approach to the representation of magistrates and shows how the rhetorical and formal features of prose texts - principally Livy's history but also works by Cicero and Sallust - shape our understanding of magistracy. Applying to the texts an expanded concept of exemplarity, Haimson Lushkov shows how a rich body of anecdotes concerning the behaviour and speech of magistrates reflects on the values and tensions that defined the republic. A variety of contexts - familial, military, and electoral, among others - flesh out the experience of being, becoming, and encountering a Roman magistrate, and the political and ethical problems highlighted and negotiated in such circumstances.

Introduction: exemplarity, magistracy, and narrative; 1. Magisterial authority and the politics of affection; 2. Authority in crisis: the Caudine Forks; 3. Elections and the generation of exempla; 4. Elections as narratives of magistracy; Epilogue: staging authority.

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. She studies the Latin literature of ancient Rome, focusing especially on historical accounts of the Roman republic. She is currently working on two book projects on Livy's monumental history of ancient Rome, the first systematic study of Livy's citation practices and the first English commentary since the nineteenth century on Book 22. She is co-editor, with William Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri and Katherine Wasdin, of Reception and the Classics (2012), and her work has also appeared in The Huffington Post and The Guardian.