ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

and Gauls, at the very least, so the populations that Roman colonies later occupied werenot necessarily 'indigenous' or 'aboriginal,' and clearly 'Italian' does not suffice due toits lack of accuracy or specificity.Historiography of Roman ColonizationThe lenses through which modern historians view Roman colonies of the early andmiddle Republic need to be just as carefully examined as those for colonization andcolonialism in general. It is easy to ask which ancient authors provided informationabout Roman colonization. Perhaps it is more important to also question the biases ofthese authors and seek other source material to verify the nature of colonization in theearly and middle Republic. Thus, this section addresses recent scholarship on two topics:first, whether the rigid colonial categories fit the mid-Republican colonies andsettlements, and second, the emerging reevaluation of early and mid-Republicancolonization.Recently, scholars have begun to tease out observations on the archaic and mid-Republican colonies based on historiographical analysis of the literary evidence, as wellas reflection on patterns in the archaeological record. G. Bradley's article, 'Colonizationand Identity in Republican Italy,' illuminates Roman colonization particularly in thearchaic period: the sixth through fourth centuries BCE. During this time, colonizationwas not controlled as strictly by the state as later sources made it out to seem. 13Theassumption that the senate dominated any colonization efforts in the early Republic isanachronistic since the senate did not become powerful until the passage of the lex Ovinia13 Bradley (2006), p. 162.5