A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Roman Elite Ethnicity 469

Farney, Gary D. 2007.Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome.Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. A detailed and entertaining analysis of the sociopolitical
uses of ethnic affiliation among the Roman elite over the course of the Republican period using
evidence from literature and coinage.
Feldherr, Andrew, ed. 2009.The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gruen, Erich S. 1992.Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press. Details the role of Greek culture in the Roman elite’s construction of their own
and Rome’s identity in the middle and late Republic.
Gruen, Erich S. ed. 2005.Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner.
Mennen, Inge. 2011.Power and Status in the Roman Empire,AD193–284. Leiden: Brill. Recent
re-examination of the status and background of the Roman aristocracy in the third centuryCE.
This can be read in conjunction with the older, but still useful study of Hopkins and Burton
(1983), who in turn draw on Hammond (1957) for the statistical basis of their interpretation of
the aristocracy under the emperors.
Wiseman, Timothy Peter. 1974. “Legendary Genealogies in Late-Republican Rome.”Greece &
Rome, 21.2: 153–64. Not explicitly concerned with ethnicity, but a classic examination of how
the Roman elite used myth and genealogy to construct their personal and family identities.