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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Juan Garcia Gonzalez
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This article explores the role that the exposition of the body, in a performative sense, played in Roman Republican politics in the first century B.C. The exhibition of a strong physique, capable of withstanding fatigue, exercised and ready for battle, became an important discursive element within the Roman elite; the possibility of showing the scars that the soldier had received while fighting in defence of the commonwealth was a proof of the virtus that the individual had displayed in combat. The homines novi, novices who sought to break the exclusivity of the senatorial oligarchy in order to gain access to the magistracies of the res publica, reproduced this ideology with the aim of comparing their own merits with those of the nobiles, who relied on the qualities of their ancestors to justify their endogamic exercise of power. Although Gaius Marius was the archetype of this discourse on novitas towards the nobilitas, in this paper I will propose a case study few considered until now, the Sertorian War (83-72 BC), a political and military conflict in which this conception of the body as an empirical exponent of the Roman virtue legitimating the figure of the homo novus developed with special strength in the Spanish provincial sphere.
Author(s): Garcia J
Editor(s): Crippa S
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Corpi e saperi. Riflessioni sulla trasmissione della conoscenza
Year: 2019
Pages: 229-246
Print publication date: 01/10/2019
Acceptance date: 25/07/2019
Publisher: Edizioni Pendragon
Place Published: Bologna
URL: https://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/corpi-saperi-riflessioni-trasmissione-conoscenza/libro/9788833641584
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9788833641584
