Ambitions prepublication announcement 20190104.pdf

Clifford Ando

Ambitions prepublication announcement 20190104.pdf

2018, The Ambitions of Government: prepublication announcement

The document explains the origin and scope of a forthcoming preprint.

Division of the Humanities Classics 1115 E. 58th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 T 773.702.8514 F 773.702.9861 classics.uchicago.edu 4 January 2019 Dear all, I write today with a prepublication announcement of a project of mine that dates back many years. The announcement seems useful because neither the form of the documents, nor the form of publication, will be standard. In 1999, as my first book (Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, University of California Press, 2000) went into production, I commenced work on a project that I intended to serve in some ways as prequel, and in some ways as a correction, to that earlier volume. (I will offer an account of the book's leading questions in a moment.) I worked on this book for some years: I compiled hundreds of pages of notes and a large bibliography, and I gradually elaborated an outline of the argument. I also began the process of transcribing into the outline references to the data I had compiled in my notes: lists of examples and abbreviated close readings that bore on the argument at any given juncture. The outline alone came to occupy some 55 pages. I also began to write the book: some 95,000 words of drafts, comprising four of six chapters, exist. (A version of the book received wonderful, helpful and sympathetic reports from readers for the University of California Press, and in an ideal world, these could be made available, too, as the chapters and outline remain unrevised.) I felt sufficiently confident that the project would come to fruition that I gave the work a title (Administration and acculturation in the Roman empire; later changed to The Ambitions of Government), and even began to refer to it. I also taught two graduate seminars that explored themes related to the project, both of which engaged with significant items in the literature that I particularly admired, as those in the know will recognize in their titles ("State and subject in the Roman empire"; "Romans outside Rome"). In spite of all this, it gradually became clear to me that I lacked fluency with the material, which is to say, I came to feel quite strongly that what I was writing was not clear. (I hope that I write more clearly now: it helps that in my work on that project, I read a great deal by people whose writing, as well thinking, I admire immensely.) For this and other reasons, I shifted my energies elsewhere, though I recognized in hindsight that my writing in those other domains was often no clearer. In consequence, perhaps c. 2005, I set work on this project aside, always intending to return. (The graduate seminars on this material came later, which was a way of keeping one's eye on the bibliography.) But I am no longer sure that I will write this book, or at least that I will write it in the form in which I conceived it nearly twenty years ago. I am therefore going to prepare the outline, bibliography, and the syllabus for the two graduate seminars, and post them to the University of Chicago's digital repository (knowledge.uchicago.edu—the version of record) and Academia.edu on 9 January 2019. If there is interest and it seems appropriate, I might post the more polished drafts of the chapters, too. My hope is that the documents, however provisional, will suffice to aid the work of others, and so further the project—the conversation, if you will—of ancient history. So what was the book about? In the briefest possible terms, it concerned the organization of human beings in the landscapes of Roman provinces, and Roman efforts to control geographic aspects of social and economic conduct. Where did populations live, and with whom were they allowed to interact? The chronological focus of the book therefore lay on the initial decades of Roman administration in any given area. Constituent concerns were: (i) What did the Romans seek to know about territories and populations under their control? (ii) How did they record, represent and use this knowledge? (iii) What were the practices or technologies they deployed in moving populations—e.g., from mountain to plain—or in aggregating them, from villages into cities? (iv) How did they imagine government of provincial landscapes to work? Did they think in terms of units of population that were legally and culturally homogeneous? Or did they imagine the populations even of units of governance as complex, and what did that mean for the practice of empire? (v) There were many areas and, indeed, many kinds of areas, where standard forms of Roman government—"standard" meaning "government through cities" (what I might now call "republican empire")—were not going to work, where it was impossible to cultivate urban living of a recognizable type. How did the Romans practice government of non-urbanized populations? (vi) What was all this for? What were the ends of empire, at any given time? Were the Romans committed to a project of Romanization, and what would they have understood by such a term? The book would have amounted to a prequel to my first book insofar as the project was concerned to elucidate the processes by which the populations and channels of communication were created, which lay beyond the communicative actions whose operations and effects Imperial Ideology sought to analyze. It would have amounted to a correction insofar as my first book paid little heed to the material conditions of social and political conduct. It was in that sense even more Habermassian than I knew. Students of ancient empire will recognize that the questions posed by The Ambitions of Government have been central to a number of recent books on empires of the ancient Mediterranean, notably those by Paul Kosmin and Ryan Boehm. If I were to take the project forward now, I would do so in constant dialogue with their work, as well as that of Seth Richardson, and much else besides. Until 9 January, best wishes for the new year. yours, Clifford Ando David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Humanities; Professor of Classics, History and Law and in the College, University of Chicago Chair, Department of Classics, University of Chicago (2017–2020)

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