Speaking to Roman Power

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 7 concerns the attempts of individual communities to establish new norms of behaviour and interaction with the Roman state and its representatives through diplomatic and personal contact. It argues that embassies in the period concerned were proactive, strategic, and targeted; almost exclusively undertaken by individual cities, not on a collective basis. It then shifts the perspective to the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of unofficial contacts between individual provincials and Romans, which undermined existing institutional vectors, arguing that as power was progressively monopolized at Rome, personal contacts came to play an increasingly important role in the grant of privileges to provincial communities and they responded by relying on private relationships over public ones.