Roman World – serie

How is it possible for a poet to find his own individual voice, when he is writing in a tradition so venerable and so constrained by convention as Roman epic? How do poets working in related genres - particularly didactic - conceptualize their relationship to the main epic tradition? The eleven essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field of Roman poetry and its post-Classical receptions, consider some of the strategies which writers from Lucretius onwards have employed in negotiating their relationship with their literary forebears, and staking out a place for their own work within a tradition stretching back to Hesiod and Homer.

The philosophers of Late Antiquity have sometimes appeared to be estranged from society. 'We must flee everything physical' is one of the most prominent ideas taken by Augustine from Platonic literature. This collection of new studies by leading writers on Late Antiquity treats both the principles of metaphysics and the practical engagement of philosophers. It points to a more substantive and complex involvement in worldly affairs than conventional handbooks admit.

Asia Minor under Rome was one of the wealthiest and most developed parts of the Empire, but there have been few modern studies of its economics. The twelve papers in this book, by an international team of scholars, work from literary texts, inscriptions, coinage and archaeology. They study the direct impact of Roman rule; the organisation of large agricultural estates; changing patterns of olive production; threats to rural prosperity from pests and the animal world; inter-regional trade in the Black Sea; the significance of civic market buildings; the economic role of temples and sanctuaries; the contribution of private benefactors to civic finances; monetization in the third century AD, and the effect of transitory populations on local economic activity.

Latin poets and prose writers of the classical period and later used - and withheld - names subtly and to important effect. Here, in eleven new essays, an eminent international cast explore themes which include 'speaking' names, often involving bilingual Latin/Greek play; the ways in which persons and objects are named in contexts of invective or endearment; the significant suppression or changing of names; the religious and historical significances of names; the uses of names in literary catalogues; names as devices to structure a group of shorter poems.

In Search of the Sorcerer's Apprentice is the first book in English to be devoted to Lucian's Philopseudes or Lover of Lies (c. 170s AD). It comprises an extensive discussion, with full translation, of this engaging and satirical Greek text with its ten tales of magic and ghosts. One of these is the famous story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and this conveys the flavour of the rest. In other tales a plague of snakes is blasted with a miraculous scorching breath, a woman is drawn to her admirer by an animated cupid doll, and a haunted house is cleansed of its monstrous ghost. The Philopseudes stands at the intersection of three of the liveliest fields in the study of antiquity: magic, traditional narratives, and the Lucianic oeuvre itself. Ogden's cross-fertilising expertise in all three of these fields enables him to build sophisticated analyses for each of the tales and to place them sensitively in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. Among the themes of the work are Lucian's methods of adapting motifs from traditional narratives, and the text's overlooked Cynic voice.

Eight new essays, from a distinguished international cast, examine the techniques of Cicero's verbal aggression. Analysis includes political and forensic context but also Cicero's own formal theory of rhetoric and his debts to other genres, literary and dramatic.

This book locates the work of Virgil in the politics of his day. It examimes closely the logic and the literary genres of Virgil's poems. It rewrites, mainly from the Greek historians Appian and Dio, the political culture of a period frequently neglected or misunderstood, the decades following the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. And it argues that a guiding purpose in all three of Virgil's works, Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, was to address and to paliate the unpopularity, the weakness, of Caesar's heir, Octavian. Combining the literary analysis of Latin poetry with the criticism of Greek and Roman political writers in prose, the author offers numerous insights into the poetic values and the architectural achievement of Virgil.

The writings of Julius Caesar have beguiled by their apparent simplicity. Generations of readers have been encouraged to see them as a limpid record of positive achievement. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the appearance of simplicity is achieved by devious and accomplished art. In nine original studies, focussing mainly on the Gallic War, the contributors trace systems of justification and omission, of measured praise and subtle criticism, which served to promote Caesar and to leave Roman enemies empty-handed. It is shown that Caesar's writing has an ingenuity of description which might seduce the casual Roman sceptic, and an artfulness of focus which now recalls the cinematographic. Even the notorious regularity of Caesar's syntax and his economy of vocabulary are revealed as pointed elements of a political manifesto. Far from being a plain and traditional record of warfare, Caesar's Commentaries are here shown to illuminate the political thinking of a man on his way to reshaping the world.

The Aeneid may be considered a test case for diverging modern methods of criticism. Does the epic stand for the subordination of the individual in a hierarchically structured state, or is there below the imperial surface a cross-current of wider human appeal? Does the poet skillfully channel his readers' sympathies in directions helpful to the political authorities of his time, or did he devise human messages which are all-embracing and non-partisan? Is it misguided even to seek to discover the intentions of the poet in his work? The contributors to this volume were chosen both for their scholarship and as representing diverse critical methods. Each has selected a passage of the Aeneid to demonstrate his or her general approach. The examination of political references is to the fore. And each contributor uses their chosen passage to address the question of the Aeneid's message.

The fifteen papers in this volume discuss issues of Roman social, cultural and political history from the foundation of the Principate to the age of barbarian settlements of the west. Working imaginatively from within the diverse evidence, they show the institutional continuity of the Roman empire between its early and later periods, and reveal the roots of political behaviour in social practice. Five of the papers, including three of the most substantial, are previously unpublished; others have appeared in collections which are now difficult to find. The author has edited the whole to bring out thematic connections as well as for consistency of presentation.

Plutarch's Parallel Lives were written to compare famous Greeks and Romans. This most obvious aspect of their parallelism is frequently ignored in the drive to mine Plutarch for historical fact. However, the eleven contributors to the present volume, who include most of the world's leading commentators on Plutarch, together bring out many ways in which Plutarch invoked aspects of parallelism. They show how pervasive and how central the whole notion was to his thinking. With new analysis of the synkriseis; with discussion of parallels within and across the Lives and in the Moralia; with an examination of why the basic parallel structure of the Lives lost its importance in the Renaissance, this volume presents fresh ideas on a neglected topic crucial to Plutarch's literary creation.

Velleius Paterculus' short work is the earliest surviving attempt on the part of a post-Augustan historian to survey the history of the res publica from its origins to his own times. In a period from which no other contemporary historical narrative survives in more than meagre fragments, Velleius' work is uniquely important. It is a critical counter to the later accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, not simply because it offers a different view of Tiberius, but because Velleius saw continuity where later authors saw only radical change which destroyed the Republic and put monarchy in its place. For other reasons, too, Velleius occupies a unique position in Roman historiography. This collection of papers, by a distinguished cast of scholars, represents a wide-ranging re-examination of Velleius' work, of its place within, and contribution to, Roman historiography and the intellectual history of the early Principate.

Cicero, and others in the Roman Republic, were masters of both invective and panegyric, two hugely important genres in ancient oratory, which influenced the later theory and practice of rhetoric. The papers in this volume address strategies of vituperation and eulogy within the Republic, and examine the mechanisms and effects of praise and blame.

This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis in English of all the writings of Julian (r. AD 361-363), the last pagan emperor of Rome, noted for his frontal and self-conscious challenge to Christianity. The book also contains treatments of Julian's laws, inscriptions, coinage, as well as his artistic programme. Across nineteen papers, international specialists in the field of Late Antique Studies offer original interpretations of an extraordinary figure: emperor and philosopher, soldier and accomplished writer. Julian, his life and writings, are here considered as parts of the tumult in politics, culture and religion during the Fourth Century AD. New light is shed on Julian's distinctive literary style and imperial agenda. The volume also includes an up-to-date, consolidated bibliography.

Much of ancient history can only be written thanks to evidence supplied by Plutarch. The historical methods and qualities of this vital source were for long subjected to little systematic analysis. However, over the last two decades an authoritative and profoundly influential set of studies has appeared in the field, the work of Christopher Pelling. Dispersed until now in a wide range of international journals and symposia, these fifteen studies are here published in a single volume, revised by the author with up-to-date annotations and bibliography. Together with three new studies, they form an essential reference-work for serious students of classical Greece and Rome.

Since its first appearance in 2008, this book has changed the landscape of Virgilian studies. Analysing closely the logic and the literary genres of Virgil's three poems, it politely confronts the modern orthodoxy that Virgil signalled distaste for the methods of his ruler, Octavian-Augustus. It refreshes the study of Virgil's poetry by comparing it with the detail (normally neglected by scholars) of Rome's civil wars after Julius Caesar's death, when Octavian's survival looked highly unlikely. And it argues that Virgil wrote as a passionate - and brave - partisan of Octavian, who - like a good lawyer - confronted his patron's undeniable failings in order to defend.

Appian of Alexandria lived in the early-to-mid second century AD, a time when the pax Romana flourished. His Roman History traced, through a series of ethnographic histories, the growth of Roman power throughout Italy and the Mediterranean World. But Appian also told the story of the civil wars which beset Rome from the time of Tiberius Gracchus to the death of Sextus Pompeius Magnus. The standing of his work in modern times is paradoxical. Consigned to the third rank by nineteenth-century historiographers, and poorly served by translators, Appian's Roman History profoundly shapes our knowledge of Republican Rome, its empire and its internal politics. We need to know him better. This book studies both what Appian had to say and how he said it; and engages in a dialogue about the value of Appian's text as a source of history, the relationship between that history and his own times, and the impact on his narrative of the author's own opinions - most notably that Rome enjoyed divinely-ordained good fortune. Some authors demonstrate that Appian's text (and even his mistakes) can yield significant new information; others re-open the question of Appian's use of source material in the light of recent studies showing him to be far more than a transmitter of other people's work.

In recent decades, international research on Virgil has been marked, if not dominated, by the ideas of the 'Harvard school' and similar trends, according to which the poet was engaged in an elaborate work of subtle subversion, directed against the new ruler of the Roman world, Octavian-Augustus. Much of Virgil's oeuvre consists prima facie of eulogy of the ruler, and of emphatic prediction of his enduring success: this is explained by numerous modern critics as generic convention, or as studied ambiguity, or as irony.This paradoxical position, which runs against ancient - as well as much modern - interpretation of the poet, continues to create widespread unease. Stahl's new monograph is the most thorough study so far to question modern Virgilian criticism on philological grounds. He bases himself on the internal logic and rhetoric of the Aeneid, and considers also political, historical, archaeological and philosophical subjects addressed by the poem.

The Ancient Lives of the poet Virgil, written in prose or verse, are of great, though controversial, influence. They have often been scorned by modern critics, for trying to construct biography of the poet from allegorical reading of his poems. Yet some elements of the Lives are trusted, and quietly adopted as canonical, such as the dating of Virgil's birth and death. Some vignettes in the Lives have been cherished for their image of an emotive poet (see jacket illustration). Less romantic detail in the Lives, as of Virgil's privileged material circumstances at the heart of the Augustan regime, has been less regarded. The present volume, from a distinguished international team, aims to revalue the Ancient Lives of Virgil in a variety of scholarly genres.Allegory in the Lives is here studied for its own sake, as part of a developed Graeco- Roman school of interpretation. The literary character of the verse Life attributed to Phocas is respectfully analysed. Certain political references within the best-known prose Life, the `Suetonian-Donatan', are shown to be apparently independent of allegory, and to be worth examining for new information on the poet's personal history. And ideas about Virgil received and developed with brio in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are here traced back to the Lives of the poet composed in Antiquity.

Coins of the best-known Roman revolutionary era allow rival pretenders to speak to us directly. After the deaths of Caesar and Cicero (in 44 and 43BC) hardly one word has been reliably transmitted to us from even the two most powerful opponents of Octavian: Mark Antony and Sextus Pompeius – except through coinage and the occasional inscription. The coins are an antidote to a widespread fault in modern approaches: the idea, from hindsight, that the Roman Republic was doomed, that the rise of Octavian-Augustus to monarchy was inevitable, and that contemporaries might have sensed as much.Ancient works in other genres skilfully encouraged such hindsight. Augustus in the Res Gestae, and Virgil in Georgics and Aeneid, sought to flatten the history of the period, and largely to efface Octavian's defeated rivals. But the latter's coins in precious metal were not easily recovered and suppressed by Authority. They remain for scholars to revalue. In our own age, when public untruthfulness about history is increasingly accepted – or challenged, we may value anew the discipline of searching for other, ancient, voices which ruling discourse has not quite managed to silence.In this book eleven new essays explore the coinage of Rome's competing dynasts. Julius Caesar's coins, and those of his `son' Octavian-Augustus, are studied. But similar and respectful attention is given to the issues of their opponents: Cato the Younger and Q. Metellus Scipio, Mark Antony and Sextus Pompeius, Q. Cornificius and others.A shared aim is to understand mentalities, the forecasts current, in an age of rare insecurity as the superpower of the Mediterranean faced, and slowly recovered from, division and ruin.

The Ciris is a small-scale epic poem which relates the myth of Scylla, daughter of king Nisus of Megara, who betrayed her homeland for love and was transformed into a sea-bird, ciris. It is one of the poems in the Appendix Vergiliana, a collection that has been ascribed to Virgil as his carmina minora. Earlier scholarship has mostly been concerned to prove that the Ciris is not by Virgil, and then to demonstrate that it is a late and derivative composition of little intrinsic merit. The present book aims to bring the poem to the attention of modern readers and to rescue it from ill-deserved neglect. It argues that the Ciris was composed by a contemporary of Virgil, a product of the golden age of Latin poetry. The introduction presents detailed linguistic, literary and historical arguments in support of this early composition date and also offers a state-of-the-art account of the textual witnesses and the manuscript tradition. The critical text and apparatus are based on a systematic first-hand analysis of manuscript evidence as well as the rigorous application of text-critical methods. The new text, as close to the original Ciris as can be achieved, includes over one-hundred and fifty changes from previous editions. By engaging with textual scholarship on the poem from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, the line-by-line commentary provides a comprehensive guide to the numerous textual problems, and is an important contribution to the stylistic and linguistic analysis of golden-age Latin poetry.

The Tiber has been joined by the Orontes'. So wrote the Roman satirist Juvenal, in a complaint about immigration to the Empire's capital. Rome was constantly sustained by immigrants. Some were voluntary - craftworkers, soldiers, teachers and intellectuals. Countless others came as slaves. What happened to them after arrival? Did they try to keep contact with their homelands? Did they form distinctive communities within Rome? This book is the first comprehensive study of Rome's foreign-born element. The author uses inscriptions and literature to explore the experiences of newcomers to the capital. The results are compared with the colourful Roman stereotypes of different immigrant groups.

The plays of Seneca the Younger, minister and philosopher under Nero, are today increasingly studied, appreciated and performed. Here, in twelve new papers from a distinguished international cast, scholars explore established questions, such as whether the plays were written for the stage, and newer topics such as the playwright's subtleties of characterisation, his relation to contemporary Roman spectacle and art - and the problems arising in translating him to modern text or stage.

Sextus Pompeius Magnus Pius, son of Pompey the Great, fits uneasily - or not at all - into the grand narrative of the civil war of 49-31 BC. Modern scholars tend to exclude him or mention him without asking what or whom he represented. Ronald Syme, the father of international orthodoxy in this field, famously remarked that Sextus was 'in reality an adventurer' who was 'easily represented as a pirate'. He was wrong. Sextus Pompeius plays havoc with key elements of the accepted narrative. His military success destroys the myth of continuous Caesarian victory. His commitment to rescuing the victims of Triumviral violence belies claims that only the Caesarian side represented clementia and justice. The naval strategy by which he conducted the war demonstrates his commitment to the same cause and ethics as his father and his father's allies. Welch argues that, far from being a 'side-show' or a 'bit player', Sextus Pompeius was integral to the fight for the respublica. She solves the 'problem' by placing him at the centre of the story of Rome's transition from Republic to Empire and so reveals a very different landscape that emerges as a result.

The Dirae is a curse uttered, in bucolic hexameters, by an Italian farmer against his former estate – confiscated to enable the settlement of Caesarian veterans in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi: this commentary is the first work, in eighty years, to offer a systematic exploration of the poem within the literary and historical context of the Late Republic. At the heart of the volume is a freshly edited Latin text, based on a thorough reappraisal of manuscript evidence and earlier textual scholarship, which in particular aims to restore the poem's stanzaic organisation, gravely distorted in the course of transmission. Besides providing an account of the manuscripts and an overview of the poem's structure and contents, the introduction discusses at length the Dirae's engagement with other poetic texts and traditions, first of all with its 'sibling' the Lydia, but also, crucially, with Greek bucolic, before considering its reception in Virgil's Eclogues and later Augustan poetry; it sheds new light too on the Dirae's links with Hellenistic curse poetry and with the ritual tradition of inscribed curses. Endorsing a composition period shortly after the poem's dramatic date (spring–summer of 41 BC) and tentatively reviving the old attribution to Valerius Cato, the introduction also explores the Dirae's engagement with the political events and narratives of one of the most dramatic moments of Roman history. The line-by-line commentary provides exegesis of the poem's textual, linguistic, literary and historical aspects, with the English translation offering a further point of orientation.

Plutarch's writings, for long treated in a fragmentary way as a source for earlier periods, are now increasingly studied in their own right. The thirteen original essays in this volume range over Plutarch's relations with his contemporaries and his engagement in philosophical debate, his views on social issues such as education and gender, his modes of expression and his construction of argument. Also treated here are Plutarch's understanding and use of his antecedents, literary and historical, and the sophisticated techniques with which he conveyed his own vision. It is a theme of the present book that the writings of Plutarch should be seen as the product of a single, extraordinarily capacious, intelligence.

The poems of Catullus have notoriously been subjected to numerous accidental corruptions. This work represents a radical reappraisal of his text. It recommends some six hundred changes to the Oxford Text of R.A.B. Mynors; many of these proposals are easily accessible elsewhere, but many are either original or else more or less forgotten. Students of Catullus will certainly wish to take account of the arguments here advanced, even where they find themselves in disagreement with the conclusions. It is suggested here that Catullus' text was also subjected to significant deliberate change, much of it probably dating back to classical antiquity. These changes consist in part of around seventy interpolated lines, often designed to explain or paraphrase what Catullus had written, and in part of modernizations designed to adapt a Republican poet, the near contemporary of Cicero and Lucretius, to the poetical norms of the early Empire.