Intimate Communities. Honorific Statues and the Political Culture of the Cities of Africa Proconsularis in the First three Centuries CE
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation argues that the inscriptions of honorific statues reveal a dynamic political culture in the cities of the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis in the first three centuries CE. Although the known regulations governing the public life of Roman municipia and coloniae formally restricted decision making on public matters (outside of the election of magistrates) to the ordo decurionum, the inscriptions show that the flexibility existed for the non-decurional members of the community, that is the populus, to express their opinion collectively and even, on occasion, to initiate actions. \n \nIt is observed that previous studies tend to downplay or even ignore the participation of the populus in civic politics, and that they tend to present the picture of an ossified public life dominated by the decurions and leading families in the community. It is suggested that these previous studies focus too narrowly on a single dataset. In contrast, this dissertation employs a two-stage analysis. First, it studies the two political institutions of Roman cities: the ordo decurionum and the voting groups into which all adult male local citizens were distributed, the curiae. Moreover, it establishes as far as possible the formal procedures for erecting honorific statues. Second, both quantitative analyses and discourse analyses are applied to a catalogue of the 1080 published inscriptions of honorific statues from Africa Proconsularis. This second stage permits the comparison of the practices surrounding one important aspect of public life to the rules governing public life. \n \nThe dissertation concludes by proposing that one important contributing factor to the dynamism of civic political culture in Africa Proconsularis was the intimacy of the communities. It is asserted that, despite the participation of the communities in the Roman Empire, people's most important political relationships remained within their community. The face-to-face nature of these small communities made it necessary for the magistrates and decurions to be responsive to the demands of the populus and to permit the populus the ability to initiate actions in the public realm, as long as those actions conformed to Roman standards of behaviour.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it