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Nock’s observation that, “no one appears to have said his prayers or did sacrifice to the living Augustus or any other living king in the hope of supernatural blessings,” (1932) was reaffirmed by Fishwick’s (1990) examination of alleged votive offerings to the emperor. The conclusion that the emperor was most likely not a regular recipient of votive offerings in pursuit of personal salvation from illness and danger is consequential for our understanding of ancient popular perceptions of the emperor as a divinity.

The pompa circensis (the procession preceding the wildly popular chariot races in the arena) was both a prized moment of public visibility for the praeses ludorum who conducted the procession and, above all, one of Rome’s most hallowed religious ceremonies, hedged with ritual rules and regulations whose violation could lead to dire consequences (Gailliot).

Cicero’s penchant for self-praise has been a source of amazement (and sometimes scorn) since antiquity. As is well known, he rarely fails to insert a reference to his consulship into a dialogue, legal case, or political speech (e.g., Kurczyk 2006). In this paper, I analyze a more surprising instance of Cicero’s aggrandizement: calling himself a god. This accusation, and Cicero’s defense against it in De Domo Sua 92 is an opportunity to explore Roman, and especially the political elite’s, thoughts on the gray area between great human achievements and divine providence.

The Epistula ad Tiburtes (CIL I2 586) is an inscription on a bronze tablet, recording a letter sent to the people of Tibur by a Roman praetor that summarizes the Senate’s response to an embassy of the Tiburtines defending themselves against unknown accusations. The inscription, found in modern Tivoli in the early seventeenth century but now lost, is exceptional both because of its material and its date: very few large public inscriptions, and even fewer in bronze, survive from the 2nd century BCE date scholars now generally assign this inscription.

      The Epicureans, like other ancient philosophical schools, offered a detailed and comprehensive account of physics, including perception.  This branch of philosophy was especially important for Epicureanism due to its crucial role in dispelling fears about the gods, death, and celestial phenomena—fears which Epicureans believed caused mental anxieties and threatened our acquisition of happiness (see e.g. Epicurus, Ep. ad Hdt. 79, Ep. ad Pyth. 85, KD 10-11; Lucretius, 4.33ff, 5.110ff).

In the Bellum Civile proem, Lucan criticizes the citizens of Rome for their excessive love of war (tantus amor belli, 1.21) arguing that they have become distracted from their imperial potential by neglecting foreign enemies and turning against themselves.

Bithynia-et-Pontus is a double province that originated from Pompey’s organisation of the kingdoms of Bithynia and Mithridatic Pontus. Six coastal cities, being naval bases and ports of trade, remained attached to Bithynia despite successive restructuring of Anatolian lands. Few literary attestations concern this coastal strip: only four of Pliny’s letters briefly discussed Heraklea, Amastris, Sinope, and Amisos (Sherwin-White 1966). Lucian’s Toxaris and Alexander contains short stories that have snippets of Amastris and Abonuteichos (Jones 1986).

The last few decades have witnessed a significant increase in scholarly attention to contiones, non-voting public meetings at which magistrates addressed the Roman populus. Much of this work has focused on the role of the contio in Roman politics, as a primary locus for interaction between senate and people (Millar 1998, Hölkeskamp 2000 and 2004, Mouritsen 2001, Morstein-Marx 2004). With few exceptions (e.g., Tan 2008), the corpora considered have (understandably) consisted of the extant contional speeches in Sallust and Cicero.

           Nietzsche's youthful lucubration on Greek tragedy is one of the most familiar of all the moments of the modern reception of the Classics.  But lost under the Dionysiac frenzy are the details of a very particular obsession with Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.