Researcher: Professor Bill Gladhill
"The Poetry of Alliance at Rome" is a cultural reconstruction of the processes, contexts, and tensions inherent in the performance of ritual alliances in Rome. Such alliances are not merely restricted to international relations between Rome and another polity, but they permeate not only the stratified codes of conduct throughout Roman society, but they also bring order and coherence to the cosmos. Each moment of alliance pushes and pulls on all prior alliances in each of their various social and cosmological spheres. The manuscript completely alters modern conceptions of Roman alliance in the study and evaluation of a broad range of prose and poetic works. Roman narratives about alliance raise fundamental questions about the tension inherent in forming unions within an empire and a highly competitive social environment.
The manuscript is currently under consideration for Cambridge University Press and its expected date of completion is August 2011. Students interested in participating in the project are invited to contact Professor Gladhill.