Maarten Schmaal, MA

In my master’s thesis, I challenge Nicola Terrenato’s perspective on early Roman imperialism, which involves a magnified role for the private agendas of Italian elites vis-à-vis state agendas, by means of a thorough quantitative analysis of both the literary and material sources, reinforced by a qualitative analysis of the most representative case studies. Terrenato’s views, while highly attractive, up until this point relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence. Through its systematic approach, my thesis has shown that, while this anecdotal evidence should by no means be seen as cherry-picking, it also does not tell the entire story and forms only part of the puzzle. The private agendas of Italian elites certainly had a much larger role in early Roman imperialism than supposed in traditional scholarship, but their exact relationship to the Roman state is more complicated than Terrenato hypothesizes.