Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin’s extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire.
Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today’s most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
Clifford Ando is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Humanities in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago and a research fellow in the Department of Classics and World Languages at the University of South Africa.