Champions of the crowd: aediles in Roman society

This thesis provides a social history of the plebeian and curule aedileships of the Roman republic. It examines the relationship between aediles and the Roman people, both in the idealized form described by the Roman aristocracy and from the perspective of the aediles' audience, the 'crowd'. To do this, it looks at where aediles interacted with the people, how they communicated, and which groups of people they interacted with. It asks several questions usually unasked in studies devoted to the constitution of republican Rome. How did Rome’s politicians communicate ideas to the people and their peers? In what spaces did they interact? What did Rome's politicians think the social role of a magistracy was, or ought to be? And, more elusively, what did the Roman people expect of their magistrates? The thesis is divided into three sections. The first provides a topography of the aedileship of the republic, allowing us to see where aediles opted to interact with the Roman people. The purpose of this section is to set the scene and to map attested aedilician theatres of interaction. The second section looks at how the aristocracy spoke and wrote about the aedileship. It analyses how some Roman aristocrats expected aediles to act, and how they imagined the people expected them to act. The final section investigates the question of popular expectations further. It examines the interactions that an aedile could anticipate having during his year of office. It questions how aediles comported themselves before the Roman people. Men who held the aedileship were expected, both by their peers and the people at large, to perform on the public stage and interact with the people in a distinctive, aedilician, way.