Search Results

This chapter examines Roman attitudes towards the commemoration of those killed on campaign. In general, there is a lack in Roman public monuments recording the names of those who died in action, but two notable exceptions are explored here: Cicero’s proposal to commemorate the dead of the Civil War, and the monuments at Adamclissi in Dacia. The chapter goes on to discuss other ways in which war, and the casualties of war, were commemorated in Rome, in particular through the incorporation of the anniversaries of significant military events into the city’s religious calendar.

With his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), Walter Pater moved the focus of his interest from Greek to Roman antiquity. In his reflections on historiography, his ideal of the hero as a man of feeling and his exploration of the sentimental register, Pater made use of an extensive range of English and European Romantic sources, from Wordsworth to Goethe, Rousseau, and Madame de Staël. His portrayal of Imperial Rome was likewise based on early nineteenth-century representations of the city as, at the same time, museum and cosmopolitan stage. By means of these intertextualities, the historical novel in Pater's hands becomes a vehicle for the study of the relationship between Romanticism and Classicism, providing us at the same time with an important document of the legacy of Romanticism in late nineteenth-century England.

Women's lack of access to public life in Republican and Imperial Rome, and its effect on their use of language are discussed. Women's education and the evidence for women's verse-writing are examined. Cornificia's epigrams and her relationship with the circle of Catullus, Ovid's evidence for a poet called Perilla, Sulpicia's relationship to the circle of Tibullus, her social position, and a consideration of her surviving verse are also addressed. Evidence for women poets and scholars in the early Empire is presented, together with Martial's evidence for women as poets in his own social circle, above all for Sulpicia II, whose work was circulating down to the 6th century.

The imperial age of Rome begins with the death of Augustus and continues arguably until the fall of the western empire. The speeches of Seneca the Elder in Controversies attempt to argue both sides of a complicated legal question, often citing the opinions of famous rhetoricians of the past. The stories abounded concerning Nero's sexual excesses and his penchant for public performance is reported. The Moral Epistles applied Stoic ethical doctrine to a variety of specific situations. Musonius argues that a master having sex with a female slave is no better than a mistress doing so with a male slave. Martial was a prolific writer of barbed, satirical epigrams on the follies of his time. Silvae consoles the young jurist Flavius Ursus for the loss of his beloved slave Philetas, who died at the age of fifteen. Quintilian was a rhetorician who wrote on the education of an ideal orator.

This chapter explores the act of “crossing the pomerium” and how the distinction the pomerium created did not always correspond with lived realities. Although Republican Rome distinguished the urbs both legally and religiously from what lay beyond the pomerium, its fundamental boundary, the disintegration of this essential division was merely one of the many Republican traditions whose demise would gradually define the advent of empire. Here, the chapter provides three examples that have long been regarded as representations of the imperator, as all Roman imagery demands to be set in the context of those legal, political, and religious institutions that not merely shaped but defined it. What ensues is a sketch of the broader institutional background within which this chapter establishes what it meant to be represented in this fashion at Rome. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates what was, for the Romans of the dawning imperial age, the very real significance of “crossing the pomerium” and entering the city under arms.

This chapter details the causes behind the second retail revolution of the early Imperial period. It was at this time that we see a rise (once again) in the number of Roman tabernae, as well as a significant increase in their specialization. Essentially, the evidence from Pompeii and elsewhere shows us that a good deal of production associated with tabernae now gave way to retailing activities more exclusively; while street-front production still played an important role in the city, still many workshops now became shops. One noteworthy outcome of this move toward the specialization of retail space was the advent of the food and drink outlet—the bar—as identified by the arrival of the masonry sales counter. As with the first retail revolution, this one too can be connected to a series of urban developments at this time.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It outlines major problems areas that have not been addressed or have been addressed much too briefly, including the need for economic historians to take a long hard look at the recent proliferation of work about Roman technology; and the need for more environmental Roman history.

Seneca ends his preface to the seventh book of the Controversiae with the statement Video, quid velitis: sententias potius audire quam iocos (‘I can see what you want‚ to hear epigrams, not jokes’). However, laughter can be heard throughout Seneca’s text, not in the declamations themselves, the topics of which are rarely ever funny, but in the world of the declaimers where it is used as a very effective instrument of control: any breaking of the rules—whether aesthetic or ethical in nature—is punished by a burst of laughter or a harsh joke at the rule-breaker’s expense. By outlining instances in this category, this chapter demonstrates the seriousness with which laughter within the declamatory arena ought to be taken.