Special Episode – Early Rome with Emeritus Professor Tim Cornell

There is much less scholarly work on the early Roman Republic than there is on periods like the late Republic or early Empire. This is understandable as there are fewer primary sources, and what we have does not always seem quite as reliable. There are still people who have chosen to focus on this era, and one of our major scholarly sources has been the work of Emeritus Professor Tim Cornell.

Professor Cornell has held many prestigious academic posts in his long career, working at Christ’s College, Cambridge, the British School at Rome, University College London, the University of Birmingham, the Institute of Classical Studies, and he is currently the President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. His book The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (1995) is an incredible resource. Another of his major contributions to scholarship was overseeing the multi-volume Fragments of the Roman Historians (2013) which brings all the fragments of scholars for whose works are not extant together in one collection. In short, Cornell's work has had a huge influence on the field of early Roman history!

We were blown away that Professor Cornell agreed to sit down and chat to us about all the most confusing parts of early Rome. He helped us to address issues such as:

What were battles really like?
What was the structure of the government in this period?
What on earth was going on with the Conflict of the Orders?
And most importantly, who really is the better historian, Dionysius or Livy?

We hope that you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it. It certainly helps to draw together a lot of the themes in our episodes so far and paint a more complete picture of this first phase of the Roman Republic.If you are interested in reading more of Professor Cornell's work, please check out his profile on Academia.Edu.