UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    CHOOSING ONE’S WORDS: HOW JULIO-CLAUDIAN EMPERORS COMMANDED THEIR ELITE SUBJECTS IN THE WORKS OF LATIN HISTORIANS
    (2022) Abrams, Brian Michael; Eckstein, Arthur; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Roman emperors acted within a culture deeply concerned with personal honor. In this environment issuing commands to aristocratic subjects presented the potential for conflict, as the honor of the commanded subject was at risk. One technique adopted by some of the Julio-Claudian dynasty was to embrace ambiguity in how they phrased their commands. Through an examination of the verbs used by Latin historians to describe the emperor issuing a command, it becomes clear that emperors relied upon this type of ambiguous phrasing when dealing with elite subjects. However, there was little use of ambiguity when dealing with non-elite subjects. There is a generational divide in the use of ambiguity, and it is argued here that this was because the elder Julio-Claudians had been present for the genesis of this strategy during the reign of Augustus, while the younger members of the dynasty had not. Strategic ambiguity was a method by which the emperor could fashion himself as first citizen rather than as a master.