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Starting from the end of the XVth century, Latin was the reference language for the study of vernaculars in many European countries.

Thomas More (1478-1535), the humanist scholar and practicing lawyer, describes in his Utopia (1516) an imaginary civilization where there are no lawyers and where the laws are easy for all citizens to understand. Debate over More's intention in writing the Utopia remains sharply divided, and the question whether Thomas More intended the Utopia to be a satirical criticism or a comical parody of contemporary European mores will never be resolved, given the inherent ambiguity in the way in which More presents Hythlodaeus’ account of Utopian society.

In view of current reconsiderations of the rather limiting ideas that the scholarly tradition has associated with terms such as Augustanism and Augustan literature (e.g., Farrell and Nelis 2013) the Harvard School's achievements can hardly be overestimated.

This paper seeks to explore the use of Vergil’s Aeneid in the formation and development of Russian national identity and literary consciousness. Vergil’s epic of national rebirth offered Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in political, religious, and cultural terms. As a result of that the reception of the Aeneid in Russia was decidedly and pointedly optimistic from its very onset in the 18^th century and up to the literary expressions of the 20^th.

As the so-called Harvard School celebrates its fiftieth birthday, this paper adds two thousand candles to the cake. ‘Pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ readings, I argue, gestated along with the Aeneid itself: its antecedent texts, internal representations of reception, and object biography conditioned even Vergil’s earliest audiences to interpret the epic dialectically.

In 1992, the static continental divide between the Harvard and the European readings of Virgil’s Aeneid was shut, rather than bridged, by Duncan Kennedy’s single – dynamic – dialectic twist.

Recent scholarship on Roman conceptions of courage has focused on virtus and its role in the dynamics of elite social competition. For example, McDonnell (2006) has demonstrated how virtus served as a locus for competitive, individualistic expression among the aristocracy of the late Republican and early imperial periods. Understood as martial prowess displayed in the service of the state, elites vied to advertise their virtus through funerary inscriptions, temple dedications, and images on coins.

One of the most enduring commonplaces about archaic Rome claims that until the third century BCE, the social and economic life of the city was characterized by a sort of unchanging “primitive” material simplicity (e.g. Mommsen 1866; Bang 2012). However, recent archaeological discoveries have shown that throughout the archaic age remarkable shifts in the material life of the Romans occurred (Smith 1996).