The ‘Politics of Honour’

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 investigates the role played by civic decrees in constructing a relationship between individual communities and the Roman state. It begins by exploring the use of honorific decrees by provincial communities to engage with representatives of the Roman state. It analyses how decrees for individual magistrates intersected with divergent Greek and Roman praxes of honour, arguing that they continued to play a vital role in mediating the relationship between poleis and their hegemon. It then focuses on the limited extant examples of civic decrees which were not honorific in nature and dealt with Roman actors. It argues that public representations of loyalty to Rome in non-honorific contexts were primarily motivated by local concerns.