Amphorae XVI

Date: Wednesday the 29^th June, 2022

Time: 4pm

Location: Room E109, Level 1, Forgan Smith (01), St Lucia

This year’s keynote lecture entitled Reforming the Roman Republic will be given by Dr Kit Morell.

Dr Kit Morrell is the Susan Blake Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Melbourne. Kit’s research focuses on the political and legal history of the late Roman republic. She is currently working on an ARC DECRA project on ‘Reforming the Roman Republic’. Her previous publications include a monograph, Pompey, Cato, and the Governance of the Roman Empire (2017) and The Alternative Augustan Age (2019), co-edited with Josiah Osgood and Kathryn Welch.

Reforming the Roman Republic

Roman history of the late republican period is conventionally framed in terms of the ‘crisis’ or inevitable ‘fall of the Roman Republic’, as the tumultuous politics of its last decades gave way to civil wars, Caesar’s dictatorship, and a new system of government under Augustus as princeps. On top of this, Rome’s republican institutions are generally seen as unsuited to developing the sort of reforms that might have averted the crisis. As a result, historians have tended to neglect or underestimate the efforts of republican Romans to address the undoubted problems of their empire and indeed Rome’s capacity to reform itself.

In this paper, Kit Morrell will advocate an alternative approach by surveying some institutional reforms proposed or implemented during the late republican period. Through their efforts to improve imperial governance and combat corruption in the city, Romans are revealed as capable of diagnosing problems in structural terms, devising institutional reforms, and creating new types of institution. In the process, Kit will discuss how her interest in reform in Rome evolved from PhD thesis to book to postdoctoral research project, and suggest how a better understanding of reform in Rome might help to reform the way we approach Roman history and other accepted narratives of the past.