Violence and state response in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius

Bibliography: pages 197-202.This thesis examines the concept of violence during the transition from Republic to Principate. Many of the provisions against violence which evolved during the course of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius were a direct response to the violence of the Late Republic. They were to a large extent, new and revolutionary, but were not caused by the violence of the Late Republic: rather they were developed as part of the new political scenario to stabilise Roman society and secure the princeps' position. A by-product of these measures was to provide a new context in which violence (particularly institutionalised state violence) could occur, be monitored and controlled. In chapter one I attempt to define violence and to extract the contemporary Roman attitude, without which any conclusions drawn would be inaccurate and unrealistic. I have used Roman legislation - especially the lex Julia de vi (c 18 BC) and have examined the works of Cicero for the frequency and function of vis, the Latin word which most closely corresponds to the English word "violence." I conclude that the Romans had a sophisticated understanding of the concept: i) anything that was not conducted through the due process of law was considered vis, ii) violence was tolerated only in exceptional circumstances, when state security was threatened. In chapter two I explore in greater detail the attempts by goverment to legislate against violence in particular the lex Julia de vi and the lex maiestatis. Although the latter was not employed initially to remove political rivals from the scene, its abuse during the reign of Tiberius became one of the great themes of the historians to illustrate the decline and moral bankruptcy of the Principate and to look nostalgically at the Republic. Chapter three examines how the structure of the Roman criminal system changed, the gradual disintegration of the legal principle of self-help, and the growth and exploitation of the cognitio procedure in Roman courts. The state intruded more into the lives of citizens and therefore exerted more control. The role of three new jurisdictions, imperial, senatorial and that of the urban prefect, in the context of the minimisation and control of violence, is also discussed. The fourth chapter deals with punishment and considers the theory that there was a trend to greater severity in this form of state violence. It examines, against the background of Roman penal aims, the evolution of the symbols and rituals which accompanied different types of punishment. Chapters five and six discuss collective violence, its manifestations and explain the absence of revolution by the plebs. The introduction of new forces into the city (something which was anathema in the Republic) is discussed in the context of policing and law and order. They had a significant impact in the limitation of violence. In the Early Principate violence manifested itself in new contexts and was controlled more effectively than in the Late Republic

Equal rates of repair of DNA photoproducts in transcribed and non-transcribed strands in <em>Sulfolobus solfataricus</em>

The nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway removes bulky lesions such as photoproducts from DNA. In both bacteria and eukarya, lesions located in transcribed strands are repaired significantly faster than those located in non-transcribed strands due to damage signalling by stalled RNA polymerase molecules: a phenomenon known as transcription-coupled repair (TCR). TCR requires a mechanism for coupling the detection of stalled RNA polymerase molecules to the NER pathway, provided in bacteria by the Mfd protein. In the third domain of life, archaea, the pathway of NER is not well defined, there are no Mfd homologues and the existence of TCR has not been investigated. In this report we looked at rates of removal of photoproducts in three different operons of the crenarchaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus following UV irradiation. We found no evidence for significantly faster repair in the transcribed strands of these three operons. The rate of global genome repair in S. solfataricus is relatively rapid, and this may obviate the requirement for a specialized TCR pathway. Significantly faster repair kinetics were observed in the presence of visible light, consistent with the presence of a gene for photolyase in the genome of S. solfataricus.</p