464 Parshia Lee-Stecum
general. It might also reflect some anxiety about a multiplicity that needs to be explained
away, or at least ordered (Dench 2005: 132; Lee-Stecum 2005: 30–2; Farney 2007:
6–7). Yet, it is consistent with the configuration of Roman elite ethnicities constructed
over the course of the republican period from at least as early as the late third centuryBCE.
Many years after the Italian enfranchisement and Cicero’s articulation of the dual
patriaemodel, Florus (probably writing in the second centuryCE) would describe the
Social War as a civil war between peoples of the samegensand “blood” (sanguis:Florus
2.15.7). Elsewhere in his work, Florus (2.6.1) describes the creation of a unified Roman
people in direct biological (indeed bodily) terms:
For, since the Roman people has mixed in itself Etruscans, Latins and Sabines and traces one
blood from all of them, it has made a body from all these limbs and is one people made from
all of them.While this, too, simplifies the complex personal and communal negotiations that
doubtlessly characterized questions of identity among Roman and Italian elites in the
Republican period, it is a logical development of the discourse of Romano–Italian
ethnicity embraced by the Roman aristocracy.
Beyond Italy
In the turmoil of the later first centuryBCEand the development of the principate under
Augustus, the composition and size of the Roman elite fluctuated. Even before Claudius’
opening of the Senate to the elites of Gallia Comata, the ethnic breadth of the Roman aris-
tocracy had begun to expand beyond Italy. Enfranchised elites from the Iberian province
of Baetica joined the Senate as early as the second centuryBCE. Julius Caesar expanded
the franchise to include communities of northern Italy in 49BCE. As Claudius empha-
sized, Augustus admitted senators from Cisalpine Gaul. The new role of emperors, and
before them dictators such as Sulla, who could appoint or sponsor new senators, played
a part in this further ethnic diversification of the elite. The opportunity to erode old
power bases and bind the aristocracy to imperial patronage provided some motivation,
although this can be overstated. In the end, as Hopkins and Burton (1983: 189) observe,
“[w]e do not know whether or how far emperors consciously encouraged the recruit-
ment of provincials into the Roman senate in order to control the senatorial aristocracy.”
Later emperors, several of whom traced non-Italian origins for their own families, would
expand the Senate to include an increasing range of communities and peoples. By one
widely accepted calculation, at the turn of the third centuryCE, the number of senators
with attested origins outside of Italy started to outnumber those with attested Italian
origins (Hammond 1957: 77). However, evidence for senatorial origins can be tenu-
ous (Hopkins and Burton 1983: 144; Mennen 2011: 65–6), and clearly some caution
is required before it can be claimed that half the Roman elite in the reign of Septimius
Severus identified themselves with non-Italian origins. The extent to which provincial
senators identified or presented themselves and their families as ethnically distinct from