Michele Bellomo
https://www.unimi.it/it/ugov/person/michele-bellomo
Profile
Michele Bellomo is Fixed-term Research Fellow B in Roman History at the University of Milan – Department of Literary, Philology and Linguistic Studies – where he completed his PhD in Classics in 2015. He teaches Roman History for the BA Degree in Studies in Cultural Heritage and for the joint (Milan-Venice) BA Degree in Ancient Civilizations for the Contemporary World. He has worked on Roman Republican institutions and on the development of Roman imperialism between the 3rd and 2nd century BCE, with a particular focus on the relationship between commanders and soldiers in the political debate. He has published the monography Il comando militare a Roma nell’età delle guerre puniche (Stuttgart 2019) and he has edited the volumes Studi di storiografia e storia antica. Omaggio a Pier Giuseppe Michelotto (Rome 2018) and, with Simonetta Segenni, Epigrafia e politica. Il contributo della documentazione epigrafica allo studio delle dinamiche politiche nel mondo romano (Milan 2017). He is one of the founders of the Gramsci Research Network, a centre which brings together scholars interested in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and in the application of his categories for the study of the Ancient World.
Abstract
“Roman orators before the troops in the Late Republic and Early Empire”
In recent years, numerous contributions have emphasised the relevance of the performative aspects of Roman political oratory for understanding the power dynamics between the elite and the popular element (Hölkeskamp 2004; Steel-Van der Bloom 2013). Many of these studies, however, suffer from rigid classifications of speeches based on occasions of delivery and rhetorical genres; the result is an almost dichotomous vision between the orator – representative of the ruling elite – and the audience. Political oratory applied to the military sphere appears much less investigated, and at most limited to the Late Republic (Pina Polo 1997, Mangiameli 2012). Military oratory played a crucial role in the evolution of the political dialectic, because military and civilian audience were profoundly interconnected well before the last century BC.
This part of the project will propose an analysis of Roman political oratory with reference to its manifestations in the military sphere. Focussing on Republican and early imperial Rome, the main aim will be to highlight the plurality of rhetorical-performative strategies employed by the imperatores in their relationship with the troops; and the reasons, modes and implications through which these strategies were transferred to the civil sphere, giving rise to bidirectional exchanges between the two ‘systems’. Such an investigation will ultimately conduct to (1) problematise the Aristotelian tripartition of rhetorical genres, shedding light on the intrinsic hybridity of such performances (with the use of the most recent sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies), and (2) to overcome the polarisation between the components of the civitas, highlighting the ‘two-way communication’ that always characterised Roman political dialectics.
