CANCELLED Friday Seminar Series: Nicholas George (UQ) (MPhil Mid-Candidature Review)

The urban environment of Rome changed dramatically from the Late Republic into the Early Empire, and as such it seems likely that the spatial nature of civil violence within the city also may have been altered. This seminar describes the relationship between space and civil violence in the Late Republic and analyses what changes, if any, occurred as the Roman system transformed into the early Principate. The analysis begins with the assassination of Tiberius Gracchus and identifies two major categories of violence, political and apolitical acts, that describe the nature of violence in Rome until the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. To date, there has been no major study of the spatial character of violence in the city, or more precisely both the Romans’ own cultural understanding and the material reality of those acts as they occurred in those spaces, though Fagan (2016) is a strong foundation. This research however will contribute to our understanding of the extent to which the organisation and appearance of Rome at different time-periods affected where acts of violence occurred, when they occurred, and why.