Thinking about Kings

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

A very large amount of writing about the Roman kings survives from antiquity but the majority of it is deemed by most modern scholars to be of no historical value. Yet much has been built on this evidence, implicitly or explicitly, in legal, anthropological and archaeological accounts; and the way in which one may read between archaeology and literary evidence for this period remains a difficult methodological problem. This paper seeks to uncover what we may legitimately and appropriately say about Roman kingship, to investigate some of the major interpretative trends of the past century or so, and to propose a more complex model of the generation of traditions about an institution and a phenomenon which may in reality have been far more fluid and unstable than the Romans themselves portrayed it.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)21-42
JournalBulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
Volume54
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2011

Keywords

  • Early Rome
  • Kingship
  • Historiography

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