More than dutifulness : pietas as a social and political concept in the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE)

This thesis investigates the meaning of the abstract concept pietas in the Roman Republican period (509-27 BCE). Building on the frameworks of recent conceptual studies and methodologies of cognitive semantics, this study combines semantic and script-based approaches to evidence of pietas across literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. Chapter One surveys all instances of the lexeme in Latin literature before 100 BCE and considers the different relationships governed by pietas, the intratextual social contexts of each usage, and the extratextual cultural and political contexts of the usage, to develop a prototypical model of how pietas was conceptualised by contemporary Roman audiences. Chapter Two examines the multiplicity of pietas’ active performance across different agents, objects, and relationship structures. It concentrates on the underlying thread across the actions and obligations that manifest pietas and the exponential emphasis placed upon the concept’s performance in periods of individual or civic tension. Chapter Three explores the relationships between the concept of pietas and the divine personification of Pietas. In situating the foundation of the Temple of Pietas within its Hellenistic and Roman contexts, I argue that the monument was a cultural resource for making claims on the meaning, manifestation, and importance of pietas to individuals and to Rome. Chapter Four investigates the social value of being pius through analysis of pietas scripts in political competition. It argues that both aristocratic gentes and noui homines harnessed similar behaviours, actions, and motifs to develop a personal reputation for pietas. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that pietas is a polysemous moral category that cannot be encapsulated in a single term such as ‘dutifulness’ but serves a broad social function in defining the roles and actions that individuals must perform to ensure the cohesion and structure of their community.