Riot Control And Imperial Ideology Summary

749 Words3 Pages

Riots and the concentrated, borderline tyrannical, power of the Roman principate go hand and hand with each other as the steady balance between appeasing the emperor and appeasing the Roman citizen was tested. Ben Kelly’s Riot Control and Imperial Ideology in the Roman Empire dives into great historical depth to uncover the reasons why Roman thought and handling about riots is talked about in the way that various ancient sources depict it and uncovering what the true ideology behind controlling them was. Kelly gives historical context through the sampling and analysis of great Roman historians such as “Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio” (Kelly 153) and the opinions of various third party agents found in the “Acts of apostles and the so-called Acta Alexandrinorum.” (Kelly 153) Kelly combines his historical sampling with introspection in order to both combine the varying authors and to create a narrative that interlaces various opinions into an easy-to-understand argument for why ideologies, surrounding the riots, existed as they did. Kelly’s article divides itself into five distinct sections over the course of 23 pages. The sections linearly follow as such: “Reports About Riots,” (151) “When Should the Authorities Respond to Riots,” (156) “How Should the Authorities Respond to Riots,” (160) “What Happened When …show more content…

Most of these biased reports were said to be from the elite perspective as “document sources relevant to Roman riots simply have not survived on a scale