The Historiography of the Participation of Freemen in the Late Republican Serviles Wars

This article is a historiographical study of how modern historians (from the 19th to the 21st centuries) assessed the participation of free people in the servile wars from the late Roman Republic. Its aim is to reconstruct, analyze and classify the historical research about the topic. It is argued t...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Piantanida, Fernando Martín
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/analesHAMM/article/view/12455
Aporte de:
Descripción
Sumario:This article is a historiographical study of how modern historians (from the 19th to the 21st centuries) assessed the participation of free people in the servile wars from the late Roman Republic. Its aim is to reconstruct, analyze and classify the historical research about the topic. It is argued that this topic became an important historiographical problem for the modern understanding of ancient revolts during the last century, especially since the 1930s when Soviet historians proposed considering the rebel “programmes”. However, nineteenth-century authors had already pointed the participation of freemen and even, in some cases, emphasized their importance, defining their relationship with the rebel slaves as a “common cause”. Western historiography from the 20th and the 21st centuries has taken different lines of interpretation with regard to this question: from considering it as an important matter, although it does not change the servile definition of the rebellions; to judge the participation of freemen as something absolutely insignificant and, consequently, neglect it; or to rank it above the servile element and ponder them as provincial uprisings against Roman domination. To sum up, a number of criteria will be proposed to classify the historiography on this field of study.