Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: For a number of years now, Aelius Aristides' Roman Oration has enjoyed a well-deserved reputation among historians of antiquity.1However, this has not always been the case.Despite describing it as 'the best general picture of the Roman Empire in the second century,'2 not even the prestige of the Russian scholar M. Rostovtzeff was sufficient to defend the Roman Oration from the disdain of his colleagues.The flowery prose of the Greek sophist seemed to most scholars at the time as pointless as it was ponderous, for which reason quotes from the Roman Oration were few and far between.This began to change from the 1960s onwards, when it was discovered that the Second Sophistic was not only a worthy object of literary but also social study.This revival of literary studies at the end of the twentieth century heralded an awakened scholarly interest in Aristides' oration.3An important factor for its historiographical renaissance has been the incorporation of 'narrative' as a category of historical analysis.For this reason, the Roman Oration is nowadays considered a magnum opus not only as regards ancient rhetoric but also with respect to the narrative construction of the Roman Empire,4 and should thus regain its rightful place as 'the best general picture of the Roman Empire in the second century' .In the first decades of the second century, the Roman Empire had set out on the path towards the harmonisation of local and regional laws whose origins, in * This article is part of the project 'Adriano y la integración de la diversidad regional' (HAR2015-65451-c2-1 MINECO/FEDER), financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competititvidad, Government of Spain. 1 Excellent translation, accompanied by the Greek text, and commentary: Elio Aristide, A Roma (a cura di F. Fontanella) (Pisa 2007).I have used the English translation by C.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Juan Manuel Cortés-Copete
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3113890840