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Community and Capital: The Aristocratic System of Power in the Age of Cicero
Full text linkIn this dissertation, I make the case that a suite of social institutions—bonds within and between families, for instance, and especially amicitia, which is the focus of this project—played a defining role in the nature of the regime. This framework allowed a diverse “aristocratic community”—not only senatorial families in the city of Rome, but also wealthy proprietors throughout Italy, in conversation with an array of “sub-elites,” such as freedmen and Greek intellectuals—to act together. As is widely acknowledged, elite culture under the Republic was notably agonistic. Amicitia helped compensate for competition, counterbalancing rivalry with a potent thread of collective action. In addition, scholars regularly highlight the steep hierarchies that characterized Roman society at all levels. But amicitia again furnished a counterforce, often diminishing hierarchies in practice and helping to institute an ethic of what we might describe as “aspirational parity.” All hierarchies could at least in theory melt away, and even the society’s most rarified circles were open to recruitment of new members. The aristocratic community’s “Republic” was a system of power in which collective action could outperform competition, and stratification and exclusivity might yield to equalization and permeability.The chapters are divided into two sections, which investigate respectively the dynamics and the institutional function of “peer” and “asymmetric” amicitia bonds. In the first section, I discuss the function of friendships between the society’s principes and their importance as organizing forces within the system of power in the 50s. Chapter 1 engages with bonds between Cicero and three of his consular “peers”—Lentulus Spinther, Metellus Nepos, and Appius Claudius. These provide case studies of highly intentional amicitia, helping us delineate the nature of the institution in its most idealizing form and to understand the role of high-level friendship ties in the aristocratic community’s social framework. I suggest, moreover, that, as a response to their growing fear that the collective social weight of the dynasts might overbalance the system, Cicero and his fellow principes took special care to invest in their peer bonds, even cultivating bonds with fellow consulares with whom they might otherwise have remained at odds. In Chapter 2, I turn to Cicero’s bonds with the Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus. Although the three magnates threatened to undermine the traditional parity in the permeable circle of the community’s top men, Cicero nonetheless went out of his way to cultivate amicitia bonds with each of them. This was partly an attempt to protect himself and to thrive as much as possible within restrictive limitations. But I argue that Cicero also tried to use the rhetoric of parity—the sense that amici were one another’s “second selves”—to subtly encourage the dynasts to play by the traditional “rules of the game.” An investigation of Cicero’s relationships with these outstanding figures provides clues as to the nature of the regime change beginning in the 50s, which would come to fruition under Caesar in the 40s and would ultimately resolve itself into a monarchic Principate. The second section focuses on the dynamic of asymmetry within amicitia, both in friendships between aristocrats at different ages and career stages and as exemplified in the recommendation process. Chapter 3 presents two case studies of Cicero’s asymmetric friendships with rising junior aristocrats: Sestius and Caelius Rufus. As I seek to demonstrate, these bonds assisted the rise of the younger friend; they created reliable power resources for the senior partner; and they brought the interests and voices of people at a variety of levels of influence and status into the conversation that defined the society’s broader agendas, policies, and priorities. In Chapter 4, I treat the dynamics of recommendation. I analyze recommendations between senior aristocrats and rising members of the successor generation, using Cicero’s recommendation of Trebatius to Caesar—a highly intentional process, extending across multiple letters—as a window. Then, I undertake a broad exploration of the dynamics of recommendations between elites and sub-elites from different backgrounds and circumstances. This investigation of commendationes showcases interchange between senators, equites, freedmen, and Greek intellectuals, bringing the breadth and diversity of the aristocratic community to the fore. With the second section, I endeavor to show how vertical bonds could facilitate a degree of coherence within a multi-generational, Italy-wide elite, helping it operate, in its assorted subgroups, as an agenda-setting ruling “class” (or, more precisely an interlocking collection of networks) for the imperial Republic. In the conclusion, I address directly the question of regime change. I attend to continuities and transformations in the institution of amicitia. By locating shifts in its function—both as ideal and as social practice—we can better understand what it meant for a “Republic” to become a “Principate.
Political Representation(s) in Rome
No full textAccording to the conventional account, the concept of political representation played no active role before the early Middle Ages. But this vision is misguided. In Rome—not only under the Republic, but also during the imperial period—the practice of power was premised on a variety of forms of political representation. This claim is not entirely without precedent. One classicist, Gary Remer, has suggested that Cicero articulated a robust concept of the orator as political representative in his philosophical works. But this article carries the argument further. Various forms of political representation underpinned politics, operating at many levels and taking many forms beyond the standard election-based account, including personal representation and symbolic and cultural representation. This historical account grounds an intervention in political and legal theory. It helps construct a flexible and multidimensional account of representation, which illuminates modern representative dynamics with more nuance
The Louisiana Constitution and the Courts of Westminster: Standing and the Civil Law Heritage
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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