'Crowds and Camps: Exploring the politicisation of the Late Roman Republican Legions through the interrelationship between Urban and Civic Space, 137-46 BCE'
My thesis seeks to find new ways to explore the communicative habits and collective acts of the Late Roman Republican legionary through the comparison of institutional and extra-institutional spaces in the city and camp. This is intended to build on smaller investigations into this topic that have formed part of my undergraduate and master’s studies. I wish to focus on one ‘official’ military space, the contio, and several ‘unofficial’ ones, namely streets, tents and the conversantibus. Spurred forth by the work of Fergus Millar, scholars have thoroughly re-investigated the civic equivalents or counterparts to these military spaces, with their emotive and performative impact regarded as integral to the diffusion of the res publica’s ideals and the politicisation of its lower strata. Yet little attention continues to be paid to the military sphere, even though the non-elite male citizen (thanks to high mobilisation rates) was far more likely to encounter these formative spaces in the camp rather than in Rome. Therefore, I propose a systematic re-analysis of camp space through the language and methodologies of civic and political participation, placing the organic, bottom-up, cultivation of a civic and political consciousness amongst the non-elite soldiery centre stage. In its broadest sense, this engages with the wider historiographical tradition, that has dismantled the notion of late republican ‘client-armies’, which still lingers in general works and popular imagination. More specifically, my project would create an effective spatial framework through which to understand the day-to-day patterns of communication and information distribution that preclude major expressions of popular will, such as mutinies or verbal exchanges with commanders.
