The Plautii, the Emancipation of Plebs and the Roman Expansion: Connecting the Internal and External Histories of the Roman Republic

Abstract

The history of the Roman Republic is often divided between internal events such as social struggles and institutional transformations and external events such as wars and conquests. The critique of methodical internalism developed by Global History has sparked an important discussion on the definitions of internality and externality and on the historical connections between processes that were formerly taken as internal or external.  Throughout the fourth century BCE, important changes took place both in what is traditionally taken as Roman "internal history" (the emancipation of the plebs) and in what is taken as “external history” (the reorganization and consolidation of Roman domination over central Italy). The objective of this article, whose starting point is the political action of the Plautii family, is to argue that we can understand the transformations of that time as pieces of the same historical process: the rearticulation of social groups in central Italy. Therefore, the emancipation of the plebs and the Roman expansion are not mere contemporaneous and parallel historical processes, but facets of the same historical process, which is larger and has an ampler geographical scope.