Making Sense of Monarchy in the Roman World, 50 BC – AD 100

Explores the ways in which Greek and Roman writers critiqued the idea of monarchy during the early Roman Empire.

Explores how monarchy and monarchical systems are presented and thought about by writers, such as Cornelius Nepos and the author of Luke-Acts, who lived at the time of the enormous constitutional and cultural change in the Roman world from the last decades of the Republic to the reign of Trajan.From the last decades of the Roman Republic to the establishment of the Trajanic monarchy, the period 50 BC to AD 100 was a period of constitutional and cultural change in the Roman world. Our main literary accounts of this period of transformation – the narratives of Appian, Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Suetonius, subtle and insightful they may be, were all written with the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, they were products of a literary and political culture which was distinct from that which they were describing. This volume attempts to locate an earlier phase. Taking authors ranging in time from Cornelius Nepos to the author of Luke-Acts, the chapters in this volume ask what their texts reveal about the ways in which writers thought about monarchy or monarchical systems, how they were influenced by earlier traditions, and how they responded to the monarchical reality of their own times.