This introductory chapter presents the book’s themes and contents, taking up the topic of how we define the Roman Middle Republican period. While the periodization to which “Middle” Republic pertains is wholly modern, the essays in this book argue for a discrete unit of historical inquiry. Our “Middle Republican” period was transformative for the societies of Rome and Italy, while its full dynamism is best captured through an expansive and capacious approach embodied by this collection of chapters.

This chapter revisits the function of Rome’s earliest cast bronze coinages or aes grave (RRC 14, 18, and 19). Primary attention is given to the complex denomination system and new statistical analyses of the weights of known specimens. This new evidence is combined with known find spot data and comparative evidence from aes rude to suggest that the heaviness of these monetary objects met regional cultural expectations while also imitating Greek coinage styles. The chapter also demonstrates that these series are unlikely to conform to different weight standards, being all on a libral standard, with the existence of a so-called “supra-libral” standard being only a misinterpretation of the available data. The degree of variation in the data, with many “overweight” specimens among the lower denominations, strongly suggests that the intrinsic value of the raw materials was secondary to their face value.

The record for the consular fasti of the Mid-Republic, as one of our more reliable sources for the period, offers valuable insight into who was in power at a crucial time for the transition of Rome from city-state to territorial empire. It has been recognized at least since Münzer that many family names in the lists were not originally from Rome, but instead from other Italian communities. The chapter attempts to take systematic stock of this important phenomenon by means of an analysis of the origins of all the known consular families of the time in order to track the emergence, persistence, and long-term trajectory of each family. The ability of elite families to join the highest echelons of Roman politics from various parts of Italy can be seen as a key process that characterizes the early phases of Roman expansion. The quantity of new consular families arguably represents a measure of power-sharing arrangements that were put in place vis-à-vis other Italians, potentially illuminating diplomatic interactions that have often been underestimated. In short, an important flipside of this great historical transition can be revealed, emphasizing the role played by Italian elites in the Mid-Republican conquest.

This chapter treats the use of history in Oscan Campania in the Middle Republican period. While we have no written histories from the region at this time, by taking a broader understanding of “historical culture” I argue that we may still recognize complex and developing interests in recording and using the past on the part of Campanian elites. In particular, tomb paintings of the fourth and third centuries BCE show a radically new iconography that seems intended to convey real events. The pattern of cultural development in the region compares well with coeval trends at Rome. These affinities confirm that Rome’s own development toward written history by the Second Punic War should not be understood as uniquely Roman but as having formed a local expression of wider Italian cultural trends.

In imposing citizenship on the defeated Latins and Campanians following the Latin War, the senate’s principal object was not, as is sometimes asserted, to increase the number of recruits available for the Republic’s legions. Its aim, rather, was financial. Lengthy campaigns in Samnium were in prospect. These would require substantial increases in annual outlays for stipendium and other costs well above what had been usual when warfare had entailed briefer operations mainly within Latium. Those increases would in turn require significantly more tributum to be collected from the Republic’s assidui. The senators consequently faced a choice: they could greatly increase the tributum paid by each of the old citizens, or they could dramatically enlarge increase the number of tributum payers by turning many of the recently defeated Latins and Campanians into new citizens optimo iure or sine suffragio and thereby impose a lighter financial burden on each. The senate’s choice to distribute the greatly increased cost of future wars among many more assidui to a very great extent underwrote the long series of lengthy campaigns in Samnium and elsewhere after 338 that would gradually and inevitably establish Rome’s dominion over the Italian Peninsula.

A significant increase in agricultural production underpinned the many socioeconomic transformations that define first-millennium-BCE Italy. However, the farming regimes that underpinned this rise in surplus production, and its evolution through Republican times, are poorly defined. This lack of clarity is problematic, because cultivation and herding practices dictated the relative value of land versus labur. Without good archaeological data on this fundamental area of the Republican economy, we are ill-equipped to address central questions of land use, investment, and the motivation for territorial expansion in the Middle Republican period. This chapter argues for the importance of farming regimes as a force that shaped Roman social and economic history, and provides a first step towards an agroecology of the Roman expansion. It presents a new synthesis of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data integrated with wider evidence for agricultural processing and rural production. This analysis places bioarchaeological evidence for Republican farming in its peninsular context for the first time. Results indicate that production was motivated more by regional trajectories than by Roman annexation, and that rural settlement changes did not have a major immediate impact on the bioarchaeological data considered here. Lastly, we highlight key points of change alongside pathways for future research.

The chapter aims to illustrate the transformations that took place in the urban centers of Latium vetus during the 4th and 3th centuries BCE, the chronological period that includes the last, turbulent decades of the political autonomy of the cities of Latium and that sees, after the dissolution of the Latin League, the constitutional redefinition of the subjected communities and their inclusion in the political, military, and economic dynamics of Rome. At the same time, the chapter proposes to evaluate the role of Latin urban culture in the process of Roman expansion in Latium adiectum and in the wider colonial phenomenon: This shows extensive territorial reorganization and newly founded urban centers which are hardly “Roman” and are more related to or derived from the urban Latin tradition (for in terms of settlement principles, spatial organization, use of materials, and construction techniques). The communities of ancient Latium, in fact, must have had a primary role in the process of conquest and “Romanization” of the Peninsula, a process that because of its dynamics, its manifestations, and its outcomes, would be more correctly defined as “Latinization.”

This paper explores how the sociopolitical, economic, and demographic transformations of the Middle Republican period affected rural settlement and landscape exploitation in Central Tyrrhenian Italy. Two lines of archaeological inquiry are pursued. The first concerns settlement data from three major survey projects: the South Etruria Survey, Rome Suburbium Project, and Pontine Region Project. Despite local variation, these surveys highlight two general changes firmly placed in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC: an increase in rural site numbers and the rise of specialized commercial farms. The second topic concerns centuriation. It is argued that some field systems, including the centuriation of the Pontine plain, were laid out in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries to reclaim marginal landscapes. Labor-cost analyses suggest such projects involved substantial and sustained investment. The chapter then discusses the implications of these rural transformations in relation to urban contexts and the period’s broader history. Despite continuous warfare, Central Italy apparently witnessed demographic and economic growth, which in turn contributed to Rome’s expansion.

This chapter seeks to consider the legal background and precedents for the developments of the Middle Republic, with a specific focus on the Twelve Tables. By thinking through what the Twelve Tables imply about the conditions of later sixth- and fifth-century Rome we can arrive at a clearer understanding of the fourth century, and a picture of considerable and long-term intellectual sophistication in Central Italy.

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.