RS SILENCE · ‘The Space and Sound of Silence: Embodied Political Communication and the Roman Senatorial Elite’

‘The Space and Sound of Silence: Embodied Political Communication and the Roman Senatorial Elite’

Silence does not indicate an absence of communication, but is full of meaning. People interpret silences according to the cultural norms they have, or according to their expectations of a person, group, or situation. Thus, studying silences is very revealing for historians and other researchers who seek to understand the values and practices of a society and the complex ways in which these are expressed. For people in the ancient Roman world, the interpretation of silence was especially important in the political field, as speech and silence were fundamental to the small group face-to-face interactions of politics. Because of the centrality of speech and silence, the Romans, and particularly the elite, had developed complicated ideas and practices regarding silence. One important aspect of this was the idea that silence could be used as a diagnostic tool for whether a political system was tyrannical. This idea was a large part of discussions during the transformation of the political culture from a participatory Republic to an autocratic Empire in the late first century BCE and early first century CE. Silence as an aspect of Roman political culture has not been studied before, so filling this gap in our knowledge is important for developing our knowledge of Roman culture, as well as providing a comparison to other historical societies and our own contemporary world.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union