Research - Dr. Catherine Tracy
Roman Political and Social Strategies
Catherine Tracy (formerly Feeley)
Department of Classics
Dr. Tracy's current research focuses on the strategies employed by political agents in the Roman Republic. This includes the political decisions of the ordinary Roman voters, whose behaviour can be accessed indirectly through the published speeches, letters, and treatises of the politician Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero's populism has tended to be ignored since, in his published writing, he tried to conceal the precarious hold he had on elite political support, and to conceal his efforts to appeal to the mass of urban and rural voters. Dr Tracy's work focuses on Cicero's real dependence on popular support, and thereby adds more evidence to the "democracy debate" that has interested historians of the Roman republic for the last 20 years. Dr Tracy's theoretical approach involves Rational Choice Theory and Game Theory as methods for understanding and evaluating the behaviour of the various political agents of Republic Rome.
She has a forthcoming article entitled "Constantia: Cicero's Practical Philosophy" (within a collection entitled "Cicero's Practical Philosophy", University of Notre Dame Press 2008) that discusses the ways in which Cicero responded to the popular requirements of being a successful politician, and how he then explained and justified such populist activity within the elite context of philosophical debate. She is also working on a study of the power of non-voting urban crowds in Roman politics ("Who Were the Quirites? The Composition of Contio Audiences", presented in oral form at the American Philological Association conference in January 2008).
A study of Roman adoption, which relates to her interest in social and political strategies, is also in progress. Romans used the artificial creation and dissolution of kinship ties to allow the male head of household (the "pater familias") to control his property and his name. While not unaware of the reality of blood ties, they privileged the laws of adoption to an extraordinary degree. An adopted son acquired all the rights and responsibilities of a genetic son (and could supersede a genetic son if the pater familias chose). At an inferior social level, freed slaves also acquired their ex-masters' names. A pater familias of sufficient wealth and position thus overcame the limitations of ordinary procreation, which thereby freed him from dependence on the reproductive powers of his legitimate wife. The link between patriarchy and adoption is therefore important in understanding Roman social and political relations.
