Michael Welbourn

Contact

• workArchaeology and Classics Buidling
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work0115 951 4800
• fax0115 951 4811
• abxmfw@nottingham.ac.uk

Research Summary

My research aims to look afresh at one of Republican Rome's most prestigious magistracies, the censorship. At the height of their power the censors concerned themselves with a wide range of different… read more

Current Research

My research aims to look afresh at one of Republican Rome's most prestigious magistracies, the censorship. At the height of their power the censors concerned themselves with a wide range of different tasks, and so my study necessarily involves tackling a variety of questions and issues: the social background of the individual censors, with an eye to answering the question of what factors could win a man this office; the political, social, and economic role of the censorship, and the precise mechanisms by which censors performed their duties.

This includes, among other things, the contracts they let for various public works projects, their performance of the lustrum, their review of the knights and revision of the senatorial roll, and of course their carrying out the census itself; the changing nature of the censorship over the course of the Republican period; the ways in which our sources choose to portray and talk about the office, and the reasons for this; the use made of the censorship by some of Rome's early emperors. Much of the modern scholarship on this subject is now rather old, and as such my objective is to reappraise the ancient evidence - historical, literary, visual, and epigraphic - in order to arrive at a new interpretation of this important magistracy.