Abstract

The subject of this study is the academic heritage of Iya Leonidovna Mayak related to the principal issues of her research, i.e. the Roman social history of the royal time and the first half of the early republican period. The article analyzes Mayak’s ideas concerning a number of key theoretical issues of Roman studies related to the concepts of civitas, populus, ager publicus during the archaic era. This is the first attempt at generalizing the academic contribution of I.L. Mayak in the study of socio-political and socio-economic relations in Rome from the VIII to the first half of the 4th century B.C.E. The fundamental ideas of the works by Mayak are considered in the context of the world historiography of recent decades. The author stats that while the scholars of the Roman archaic society were divided in their attitude toward the annalistic tradition, as well as the interpretation of archaeological material, and one group of them, the adepts of postmodern negativity, generally denied the reliability of the sources regarding this ancient period of Roman history, I.L. Mayak invariably supported the followers of the Italian archaeologist A. Carandini, who insisted on the importance of the ancient narrative on the early city. In the discussion on pages of the Bulletin of Ancient History at the turn of the 1980s–1990s regarding E.M. Staerman’s concept of the Roman civitas as a stateless formation before the era of Octavian Augustus, I.L. Mayak was among those who did not agree with her argument, without denying Staerman’s main methodological approach. According to Mayak, the essential feature of the Roman civil community was an ancient form of ownership that distinguished civitas and polis organization as a whole from the community of ancient eastern city-states. She thought that the plebs were not included in the populus, not only in the royal time, but also during the early Republic. Mayak regarded the plebeians’ lack of access to the ager occupatorius, which was disposed by the patricians for free, as a sign of inequality in the area of land relations. She saw the purpose of the agrarian struggle as changing the mode of operation of the ager publicus in the interests of the plebs. I.L. Mayak happened to be among those few scholars who devoted their works not only to the institutional and legal history of the archaic Roman community, but also to its social studies.