148

In this paper, I will reconstruct the three groups of citizens who were eligible for selection into the Senate at the time of the Hannibalic War. In the face of catastrophic senatorial casualties during the war’s opening years, so Livy tell us at 23.22.1, the surviving patres reflected upon the ‘solitudinem curiae’ which had enveloped the Senate House, and deliberated the potential solutions to this urgent political crisis. Eventually, the patres empowered M. Fabius Buteo in 216 BC to hold an emergency adlection.

Virtus, and the idealized masculinity that it represented, remained an important and frequently negotiated concept throughout the Roman Republic and Empire. However, its primacy and meaning did not remain static. As performance was a key aspect of virtus and masculinity in general, examining one method of displaying virtus provides an opportunity to track these changes and contextualize the conversation that they reflect (Gleason, xxii).

L. Verginius Rufus, a lifelong friend and mentor of Pliny the Younger, is featured in three letters of Pliny’s Epistulae (Ep. 2.1, 6.10, and 9.19). Notably, Verginius’ most singular deed took the form of a refusal: in the early months of civil war in 68/69 CE, Verginius rejected multiple troop acclamations, effectively declining the principate. Nevertheless, Pliny defines Verginius’ restraint as a glorious, exemplary action, in effect lauding a man who could have been emperor in terms of Republican glory.

Age roles were fixtures both on the stage of Roman comedy and in the hierarchies of Roman society after the Second Punic War. The comic plot frequently turned upon tensions between the age roles of the adulescens and senex. Scholars have long recognized the “stock” quality of the adulescens in Roman comedy, among a host of other roles (Duckworth 1994). Metatheatrical commentary within the comedies themselves reveals that Roman audiences could expect to see certain types of characters appear in a comic plot (Plaut. Capt.

It is generally recognized by hermeneutists today that St. Augustine argues for a multiplicity of meanings in Scripture beyond what any of its human authors intended, and that he grounds these interpretations in the intention (voluntas) of the Holy Spirit, who also inspires such interpretations in readers. These ideas are particularly appealing to literary scholars who welcome the multivalence of texts.

In the early 1780’s, the Austrian composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799) composed a set of programmatic symphonies depicting Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dittersdorf’s original plan called for a set of 15 symphonies, one representative of each book of Ovid’s poem; however, the constraints of publication and convention prevented him from fully achieving his ambitions.

Scholarship on ancient discussions of the value of poetry tend to focus primarily on Plato and Aristotle, or then jump ahead to later authors such as Philodemus, Longinus, Horace, and Quintilian (see Halliwell 2002, Ford 2002, Porter 2010). The weighty and complicated ideas of these authors have been discussed at length, but little attention has been given to the intervening time period.

Normative Legal Interpretation in Lysias

The Roman triumph is often read as an honor chiefly for the triumphator himself (e.g. Rüpke, 2012). The affinities between the triumphing general and Jupiter are primarily thought to be a means by which the triumphator is able to accrue prestige. In this paper, I seek to re-emphasize the religious aspects of the triumph, and specifically the ways in which the triumph and the rituals that follow serve to honor Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the Capitoline temple.

Although handbooks on Roman freedmen deny that libertini could hold a political magistracy except in Caesarian colonies (e.g. Mouritsen 2011), freedmen outside of such colonies occasionally achieved civic office through the High Empire. This paper argues that these extraordinary individual achievements demonstrate that imperial laws were not uniformly enforced everywhere and in perpetuity after they were enacted.