Clifford Ando

• 1. Introduction

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  Clifford Ando was born in 1969, and by the time he reached Princeton University as an undergraduate, he was already drawn to a world two millennia removed from his own. What kept pulling him back was a deceptively simple question: how does an empire hold itself together? Not through armies alone, but through law, language, and the shared fictions that people in far-flung provinces agreed to believe. That question would shape every major work of his career.

  Ando went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1996, and he eventually settled at the University of Chicago, where he holds the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics, History and the College. He also served as Chair of the Classics Department from 2017 to 2024. But the titles only hint at the scope of what he does. His work sits at the crossroads of Roman law, religion, and imperial government, asking how Rome built a legal system that could speak to citizens and non-citizens, believers and skeptics, across a vast and diverse world.

• 2. Law Across a Divided Empire

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  Roman law was never a single, uniform system handed down from the center. Ando's scholarship makes clear that the Imperial era was defined by something more complicated: legal pluralism, the coexistence of civil law, public law, and international law within a single political structure. His 2011 book Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition examines how the language Rome used to govern shaped the very possibilities of legal thought.

  His 2012 French-language volume Le Droit et l'Empire. Invention juridique et réalités politiques à Rome pushed further into the gap between legal invention and political reality. The question animating this work is not merely what the rules were, but how legal concepts were constructed, adapted, and sometimes improvised to meet conditions on the ground. Roman citizenship itself, who held it and what it meant, sits at the heart of this inquiry. Ando's research treats citizenship not as a fixed status but as a moving target shaped by negotiation between Roman authority and provincial populations.

• 3. Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty

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  In 2000, Ando published Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, a book that asked why Roman subjects so far from the capital accepted Roman rule as legitimate. The answer he developed was not primarily about coercion. It had to do with how shared symbols, rituals, and representations created a sense of participation in a Roman world, even for people who had never seen Rome. The book won the 2003 Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association, one of the most prestigious prizes in classical studies.

  That prize marked a turning point in his reception. The argument that ideology and loyalty were mutually reinforcing structures, not simply top-down impositions, gave scholars in Roman history, legal history, and political theory new tools for thinking about empire. His later volume Imperial Rome: The Critical Century (A.D. 193-284), also published in 2012, returned to this territory by focusing on one of the most turbulent stretches of Roman imperial history, a period of near-constant military crisis and political instability.

• 4. Religion, Government, and Rome

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  Religion and law are usually treated as separate domains, but Ando's career has been built on the conviction that in Rome they were deeply entangled. His edited volume Roman Religion appeared in 2003, and in 2006 he co-edited Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome with Jörg Rüpke, drawing together scholarship on how Roman governance and Roman worship shaped each other across centuries. The 2008 work The Matter of the Gods extended this inquiry into the ontological status of Roman divinities, the question of what gods were thought to be and how that belief structured religious practice.

  His 2012 French volume Religion et gouvernement dans l'Empire romain and the 2015 book Roman Social Imaginaries. Language and thought in contexts of empire both press into the same terrain from different angles. Social Imaginaries focuses on how language itself carried ideological freight, the ways that words used in imperial contexts created frameworks for understanding belonging, authority, and belief. Ando's position as a research fellow in the Department of Classics and World Languages at the University of South Africa reflects the international reach of these questions, which are not confined to European or Anglophone scholarship.

• 5. Fellowships and a Global Practice

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  Princeton in 1990, Michigan in 1996, Chicago as a permanent home. But Ando's intellectual life has not been anchored to a single country. He has held fellowship and visiting professorships in Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa, a range that traces the global dispersal of classical scholarship across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His ongoing research fellowship at the University of South Africa adds a further dimension, situating his work in a scholarly tradition shaped partly by the legacy of European colonialism and its legal systems.

  The fellowships, grants, and prizes he has received over the years have supported a prolific output of books, articles, essays, and reviews. The sheer range of his publication venues, including works in English and French, signals a scholar who writes for audiences across national and linguistic lines. His work on legal pluralism travels well precisely because the questions it raises, how legal systems manage diversity, how authority is legitimated across difference, are not questions unique to ancient Rome.

• 6. Chicago and Public Dissent

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  In 2008, Ando was among the faculty members who raised questions about the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. The debate touched on the university's identity, its intellectual commitments, and who should define them. That episode prefigured a longer arc of public criticism. More recently, Ando has charged that university administrators have sacrificed the historic values, teaching quality, and commitment to the humanities that once defined the institution.

  The critique is pointed and specific: not just that the humanities are underfunded in some abstract sense, but that the University of Chicago in particular has abandoned something it once stood for. For a scholar whose career has been devoted to understanding how institutions legitimate themselves through shared values and symbols, this is not a detached complaint. It is an argument from inside the tradition he has spent decades studying. His 2015 volume Roman Social Imaginaries, with its focus on language and thought in contexts of empire, sits closer to that institutional critique than it might first appear.