Social dynamics under Roman rule

Proceedings of a conference held at the French School of Athens, 30-31 May 2014. Social mobility is a multi-faceted phenomenon which affected different social strata, from elites to lower classes, and involved several factors, both general (historical context, demographic trends) and more personal (legal and family status, wealth, personal relationships, professional skills, culture). The analysis of this subject in the Roman world shows a multiplicity of situations, highlighting different modes and degrees of social change depending both on the local contexts and on major political transformations. In Achaia and Macedonia, which constitute the geographical nucleus of this volume, examples of social ascent or descent are analysed in the various contributions, which focus on a specific geographic area (region, city) or social category (intellectuals, priests, freedmen) and deal with a particular aspect of the more general topic (mechanisms of social advancement or regression), or analyse single case studies (individual or family cases of social advancement) from the second century BC to the third century AD.