Roman Elite Ethnicity 461Cicero,Republic2.14, and Florus 2.6.1). Regardless of the realities of inter-marriage
or movement among communities during the early centuries of Rome’s development,
the ruling families of Italian communities seem to have recognized and expressed their
cultural similarities in terms of genealogy.
The similarities can be overstated. The concept of an “Italian” identity (such as the
concept ofItaliaitself) was a long time coming and only hesitatingly expressed in terms
of ethnicity before the first centuryCE(Dench 2005: 152–221). In the decades following
the second and leading to the third Punic war, perhaps 20 years after Fabius Pictor’s
work on early Roman history, another Roman aristocrat, Cato the Elder, wrote his own
treatise on beginnings. At least one book of theOriginesdetailed the origins of Rome.
However, further books presented etiologies of other Italian cities (Chassignet 1987;
Sciarrino 2004; Gotter 2009). Only fragments of Cato’s text remain, cited in other much
later authors, but the timing and structure of his work may hint at changes in the Roman
elite’s perceptions of its relationship to other Italian peoples and the gradual development
of a broader Italian ethnocultural identity.
The construction of an Italian ethnicity (or ethnicities) for Rome’s ruling families
should also be seen in a broader Mediterranean context as a strategy of distinction. In
a cultural environment where ethnicity is expressed in genealogical terms, the construc-
tion of Italian identities allowed the Roman elite to distinguish themselves from Greek or
Punic competitors. Descent from the conveniently defunct Trojan people also served this
purpose. It may also have allowed for the expression of deeper ties with Italian commu-
nities that had on occasion during the Middle Republic eschewed common cause with
Rome. In the century before Cato wrote theOrigines, the relationship of the Italian
communities to Rome had been tested by invasion and intermittent economic hardship
(Staveley 1989: 422–30). In this context, ethnic ties among the aristocratic families of
Rome and their counterparts in the dominated cities of the Italian peninsula worked
both to magnify and encourage the loyalties and aspirations of Italian elites who had
stood by Rome in time of threat, and to bind closer those communities that had wavered
or seized the opportunity to oppose Rome’s political dominance. While the paucity of
evidence precludes charting the lines of relationship with any precision, the Italian iden-
tities of the Roman elite might be expected to have shifted in emphasis, strength, and
direction as the political and diplomatic landscape of the peninsula and the larger Roman
world shifted in the course of the Republic.
None of this, however, suggests that the elite of the Roman Republic understood their
own ethnicity as indistinguishable from that of ruling families in other Italian cities.
Nor was the meaning of any Italian origins uncontested. During the Republic, the con-
struction of genealogical origins linking Roman aristocratic families with Italian peoples
projects ethnic diversity within a common Roman identity rather than asserting ethnic
commonality through a shared “Italian” identity. That Claudius can evoke this diversity
in the late 40sCEsuggests the persistence of the idea, but also that its meaning was still
potentially at stake. An echo of earlier contests over the meaning of Roman ethnocultural
diversity is heard in the works of late first centuryBCEhistorians, Livy and Dionysius
of Halicarnassus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities1.4.2) suggests that