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This chapter analyses Tacitus's narratives of natural and man-made disasters, with special emphasis on those perpetrated by the principes against their own people. Tacitus consistently shows compassion towards Romans of all classes and does not stress the breakdown of social order among the masses during such disasters. He repeatedly evokes the sack of cities, the quintessential man-made disaster, when describing the tyrannical behaviour of principes such as Tiberius and Nero. Through allusions to Aeneid 2, Tacitus creates a portable, repeatable sack of Troy during the civil wars of AD 69 to underline the gravity of the situation as Italy and Rome suffer serial abuse from various contenders; the common motives of all leaders and armies in making war on their own country; the vicissitudes of fortune during civil war, and the profanation of Rome itself.

Chapter three investigates Chariton's relation to other early novels and novelists as far as date and authorship are concerned. On grounds of language, style, and apparent borrowings from Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca should be put later. The fragmentary novels Metiochus and Parthenope and Chione (the latter transmitted on a late‐antique papyrus) can be assigned to Chariton because of many parallels in plot, style, and motifs. Ninus is more likely to have been written by a different author, who nonetheless seems to have been Aphrodisian: for nowhere in the Graeco‐Roman world was Ninus as significant to the construction of civic identity as in Aphrodisias. Some remarkable correspondences between Ninus and contemporaneous events around Nero suggest a date of this novel after Chariton's Narratives about Callirhoe, in the second half of the 60's AD.

This chapter offers a challenge to the classification of Seneca's tragedies as ‘rhetorical tragedies’ or declamations. Although the idea that Seneca's tragedies might have been partially danced had been suggested as early as the 1920s, the chapter argues that Seneca's tragedies contain several types of passage that point precisely to the character of a fabula saltata (‘danced story’), and that this suggests that even if Seneca did not write them specifically for pantomime performance, that is as libretti, he may have been influenced by the new aesthetics and conventions of the popular medium in the composition of these scenes. He may have been visualising, as he wrote, a theatrical performance with dance and music rather than a recitation. He may have hoped that his new kind of tragedy, suited to the taste of the Neronian period, could offer a substitute for the popular genres of theatre.

The chapter begins with an introduction to the life of Seneca (ca. 1–65 CE), who served as emperor Nero's tutor and advisor in the middle of the first century. As a rich moralist, Seneca has often been referred to as a shallow hypocrite, but it is argued here that this is a mistake. Seneca wrote extensively on ethics, and the chapter attempts to present an overview of his moral teaching. Seneca follows the basic idea of the Stoic theory of oikeiosis. According to him, people are by nature inclined to love their neighbour, whatever the identity of the neighbour. The Stoic doctrine of universal humanity runs like a red thread through the entire moral teaching of Seneca. It strongly guides his view and discussion of various topics, including social issues.

In an attempt to elucidate the social and political environment in which Josephus composed his works, this chapter tries to determine the extent to which the Judean writer was ingratiated with the imperial court and the local aristocracy at Rome. Prominent in their investigation is the hitherto unidentifiable Epaphroditus to whom Josephus’ final three compositions were dedicated. After parsing the relevant literary and epigraphic evidence, the identity of Josephus’ patron remains problematic. He cannot, with confidence, be identified as Nero’s a libellis (freedman in charge of petitions) or with the freedman M. Mettius Epaphroditus mentioned in the Suda, despite the fact that he was a grammarian and literary critic. The chapter argues that Josephus was excluded from the inner circles of the Roman elite during the first century CE, especially in the second half of his literary career under the Emperor Domitian.

This chapter explores in detail the role of the Flavian victory in Judaea in the physical transformation of the city of Rome. The triumph of Vespasian and Titus ex Iudaeis in June 71 CE was an event made more memorable by Josephus’ lavish description of it. The defeat of the Jews and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple were enshrined in the very fabric of the urban centre and hence in Roman public memory, reminding the inhabitants of the city of the decisive role played by Vespasian and Titus in that victory. The triumphal arches to Titus (erected in 81 and after his death), the Flavian Amphitheatre (inaugurated in 80), and the Temple of Peace (dedicated in 75) were all related to the Flavian victory in Judaea and helped give the dynasty a lasting legitimacy.

This chapter examines Tacitus' representation of the legacy of civil war in his history of the Julio‐Claudian period, the Annals, arguing that civil war persists during the pax Augusta as a kind of banalization of state violence against citizens, a political system that consumes its own. It studies Tacitus' multi‐episode account of Nero's paranoid, possibly cynical, and ultimately self‐defeating appropriation of civil war exempla to motivate the suppression of potential dissent.

The introduction argues that an examination of Seneca's death will demonstrate both the centrality of Seneca in Western thinking about death and the centrality of the death scene in the tradition on Seneca's life and various works. It explains the three distinct forms of representation through which Seneca's death is here analyzed: the historical narratives (Part I; Chapters 1–2), the writings of Seneca on death, especially in the consolations, tragedies, and letters (Part II; Chapters 3–6), and the tradition of reception in both word and image (Part III; Chapter 7). It also explains how these three forms of representation are considered together in three concluding case studies on the themes of forced suicide, Seneca's image, and the ruined villa (Part IV; Chapters 8–10).

When Paul’s mission in Spain failed, he went back to Illyricum. After a year or so there he travelled via Troas to Ephesus, where he took over from Timothy, who had proved a failure as a leader. Paul himself did no better and moved to Miletus. There he got word of Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome. He went there to reinforce the decimated community. The gesture was not appreciated by the Roman church, which boycotted him when he was imprisoned. Those who had come with him from Asia drifted away.2 Tim reflects both optimism and fear. He was beheaded in the last quarter of a.d. 67.

Discusses the date and time when Revelation was written, and then considers the role of imperial cults in the generation of the text. The main argument concludes that Revelation was not written against alleged imperial cult excesses under Nero or Domitian; the evidence for imperial cults from Asia shows that these were not aberrant periods. Rather, Revelation should be interpreted as a critique of the dominant imperial discourse for which mainstream imperial cults were a crucial manifestation.

This chapter discusses the influence of Romanticism and Rome upon Italy's emergent film industry between 1908 and 1914. Specifically, it argues that production companies drew upon Romantic aesthetics and privileged narratives set in ancient Rome both to legitimize the artistic value of the new medium and to enhance cinema's commercial appeal. After providing an overview of the film industry, Italian Romanticism, and the concept of Romanità, the discussion focuses on three films (The Last Days of Pompeii, Nero or the Fall of Rome, and Cabiria), in which those elements that characterized Italian Romanticism (the appropriation of the classical tradition, nationalism, historicism, the Risorgimento, and art imbued with a civil, political, and moral purpose) are projected onto the screen. The box-office success of historical narratives ensured the industry's financial viability and established film as a relevant and popular art.

Paul's concern about his reception in Jerusalem is mentioned in his Letter to the Romans, the group that he needed to support him if he were to proceed to Spain. Luke described Paul's condition while he was incarcerated in Rome. The chapter speculates that in prison, however, it would have been difficult to receive visitors and make speeches such as those Luke attributes to Paul. The authenticity of the Three Pastoral Letters is also examined in this chapter. Paul was unsuccessful in Spain and returned to the Aegean and then to Rome, after Nero burned the Eternal City. Paul was beheaded in Rome—a manner of execution that is understood to imply that he was condemned by a regularly constituted court. The place of his execution and burial is not yet proven, but popular tradition tells that Paul's body was buried in Via Ostiense.

This chapter discusses how Eglisham's most infamous work continued to percolate through English and Scottish political culture during the 1630s. Discussion of James' murder had not ended with Buckingham's assassination in 1628. Contemporaries continued to circulate and read copies of The Forerunner, and other documents on the secret history, as they tried to understand what had gone so wrong under Buckingham's rule. In one particularly sensational case, elements of the secret history found their way into a play about the Emperor Nero, his favourite, and the problem of tyranny, a drama written, and perhaps even performed, in the English provinces during the 1630s. Despite the surface calm of the Personal Rule, the political culture remained frayed and, on some questions, deeply polarized; and memories of the 1620s remained dangerously contested.

This chapter argues that Nero, the last member of Augustus' family to rule in the early Roman empire, is represented as a negative mirror image of his ancestor: whereas the first Julio-Claudian made Rome into the image of a good home, the last constructs it as a bad one. Thus, Nero brings a fitting end both to his own dynasty and the kind of ‘domestic politics’ which characterised the early Roman empire. This picture of Nero serves not only to cast in a particular light the legacy of the Julio-Claudian emperors with regards to women and domesticity, but to mark explicitly a shift in the goals and nature of imperial rule. At the same time, however, Nero's transgressions, and the terms in which they are remembered, serve to underscore the gender and politics of Augustan private life. The succession of Nero comes to be understood as the triumph of the fundamental femininity of Julio-Claudian rule, in both practical and symbolic terms.

This chapter explores the textual relationship constructed in the extant epigrams between Loukillios and Nero. Like the preceding chapter, it points out the endemic shortcomings of skoptic epigram as a source for historical ‘facts’, instead developing and testing an ideological reading along Cultural Materialist lines. Previous scholarship has typically used perceived references to Nero as argumentative touchstones, assessing their tone in order to determine when Loukillios wrote and to what extent he benefited from imperial patronage. The chapter demonstrates that these methodologically vague appeals to taste can only produce circular arguments. Because jokes rely on omission and exaggeration, tying them to real-world events will always be hard: even when a joke can be firmly placed in a Neronian context, its exact point will typically remain a matter of educated guesswork. The chapter concludes that Nero's own talent in simulation and allusive display makes the task even harder.

Nero is reported to have returned in triumph to Rome from his Greek victories on a chariot through a breach in the wall. This remarkable picture has had more ideological influence than it deserves. It is argued that victors never returned through holes in the wall, that they often did not return at all; when they did, the central action was called ‘introducing the crown’. So-called ‘eiselastic’ = ‘drive-in’ victories in fact entitled one primarily to lifetime pensions, and are an invention of Trajan, whose impractical rulings caused trouble among victors demanding payment, and were modified by succeeding emperors. But the system of monthly pensions for ‘eiselastic’ victory can be followed accurately until 250 ad. Finally, it is argued that the old classical-hellenistic division of elite crown games versus cash games is replaced in the epigraphy by (sacred) eiselastic games versus cash games, and crowns cease to have real meaning save in the iconography, which tends obviously to focus on the crown, long after its elite meaning has ceased. A notorious inscription from Rhodes ca. 200 ad which speaks anomalously of ‘cash crowned games’ is examined and found on correction to fit with the usual division and the thesis proposed above.