About

Clifford Ando is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor and a faculty member in the Departments of Classics and History at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the histories of religion, law, and government in the ancient world. He has written extensively on ancient religion, emphasizing the connection of religion to empire and imperial government, especially in relation to pluralism and tolerance, as well as problems of representation in ritual objects. His work also explores the history of political culture in the Roman provinces, the relationship between imperial power and local cultural change, and the structure of ancient empires. Ando's scholarly contributions include a study of Latin as a language of law and a project on legal theory in contexts of weak state power. He is the general editor of the collaborative project Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law, which aims to produce a new edition, translation, and commentary on Roman laws preserved in epigraphy. His academic background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan obtained in 1996. His research continues to address topics related to Roman history, religion, law, and political thought.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• History
• Linguistics
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Ancient history
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Political economy
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law

  Comparative Legal History · 2025-07-03

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• Epilogue — A Kind of Magic

  2023-10-09

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  This chapter studies both Christopher Faraone’s practice and his statements on method with regard to several enduring problems in the study of religion in the ancient Mediterranean: how comparative and formal analysis can be made to contribute to historical argument; how we might respect, but also surmount, the diversity of contexts of classical and post-classical Greek culture; and how to proceed in light of asymmetries of chronology in the distribution of evidence.

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• The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists

  Law and History Review · 2023-05-26 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Numerous Roman grants to local communities of the right to use local law survive in contemporaneous copies starting in the second century BCE. Contemporaneous with these grants of autonomy, Rome urged institutional changes that reconstituted local elites as aristocracies of office. By contrast, evidence that individuals identified themselves as experts in local law survives in bulk only starting in the second century CE. The paper urges that the superimposition of Roman courts as courts of the second instance created a role in local polities for expertise in local law in mediation with these Roman courts, and that local elites sought to monopolize this role and the technocratic prestige that it brought.

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• Empire, Status, and the Law

  American Journal of Legal History · 2023-06-01

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  Abstract One phase in the long history of Roman citizenship ended in 212 ce, when the emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free-born residents of the empire. This moment subsequently came to be understood as inevitable, as though the juridical unification of the world had been the project of empire all along—and virtually all subsequent European empires have been implicated in the legacy of that tradition. But the history of Roman citizenship is neither unitary nor continuous. This article interrogates processes of juridification in the relationship between citizenship and empire. Some of these concern the Roman citizen body itself, which on one reading was gradually transformed from a collective of self-ruling agents to a community of economic actors. Others concern the effects on alien political and religious communities of the appearance of Roman tribunals as courts of the second instance. The legacies of Roman citizenship in modern forms of subjectivity should be understood against this complex history.

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• Introduction

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 20 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This chapter offers a synoptic perspective on the significance of Roman citizenship in the long century between the Flavians and the Constitutio Antoniniana. It opens with a discussion of personal and collective statuses in Roman public law and the question of the number and distribution of Romans. It proceeds to survey the different ways in which Roman citizenship was experienced in the second century: the juridical and fiscal effects of legal difference; the effects of Roman law on the behavior of Romans in the family sphere; the links between citizenship and cult; a variety of other practices often entailed by possession of Roman citizenship, including distinctive civic rituals and the use of a distinctive onomastic form; and the complex relationship between citizenship and belonging.

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• Romans, Aliens, and Others in Dynamic Interaction

  2022-03-24

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  Abstract This chapter examines structures, policies, and situations in which the citizen–alien distinction was regularly confounded, as well as persons whose lives the discourse of citizenship systematically effaced. Particular attention is given to minority populations within city-states that were granted limited rights to observe their own norms. The best attested such populations are local communities of Judaeans. Also examined are rituals that Romans and locals performed alongside one another, most particularly the swearing of the annual loyalty oath to the emperor, as well as court systems, where Romans and others often found themselves on the opposite sides in a dispute—and also together constituting single juries.

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• Roman Social Imaginaries: Language and Thought in the Context of Empire

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2022-01-01 · 11 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology, *Roman Social Imaginaries* considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct. Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin's extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire. Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in *Roman Social Imaginaries* constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.

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• Performing justice in republican empire, 1-565 CE

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This paper investigates the performance of trials by Roman magistrates outside the borders of the empire. It is contended that these occasions induced heightened reflection on the part of Roman authors about the ideological work performed by judicial rituals. The fulsome accounts of such trials grant interpretive insight into the work that Romans understood legal institutions to perform in provincial contexts, albeit their routinized nature in those contexts occasioned much less commentary from ancient authors.

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• Religious affiliation and political belonging from Cicero to Theodosius

  Acta Classica · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The essay analyzes the language used by Classical and Christian Romans to describe individual religious affiliation. It contends that the dominant language employed to describe membership in a cultic community was that of citizenship. The Romans' mapping of the one domain (religious affiliation) by means of their understanding of the other (citizenship) has substantial implications for histories of Roman religion. Most significantly, it implies a broad understanding that political belonging had significant and universal entailments in matters of cult. The essay then traces the continuity of this language across eras of considerable change, as regards both the meaning of citizenship but also the radical diminution in life and politics of Classical religion and the rise to prominence and power of Christianity.

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• Roman Law and Roman Jurists in American Legal Culture

  2021-09-20

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Frequent coauthors

• Christopher A. Faraone

  University of Chicago

  9 shared

• Claudia Rapp

  5 shared

• Albert Henrichs

  Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

  2 shared

• John Scheid

  2 shared

• Fara Nasti

  2 shared

• Jill Harries

  2 shared

• Emily Albu

  2 shared

• Bruce Lincoln

  University of Chicago

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Classical Studies

  University of Michigan

  1996

Awards & honors

• Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor