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Catullus, Nepos, and the Three Hearts of pater Ennius

It is generally accepted that the epistemological views advocated by Lucullus in Cicero’s Academica belong to a Stoic framework. In this paper I argue that, though this is true, there are also elements that do not belong within the epistemology of the Stoa, or at very least the Stoa of Chrysippus, and are best understood as innovations on the part of Antiochus of Ascalon, who broke from the Academy’s sceptical epistemology in favour of the Stoa but nevertheless, it seems to me, retained some features of the Academic approach (cf. Polito 2012).

Platonic Sights / Ciceronian Insights: Philosophical Artistry in the Orator

Life is a play, and has been since antiquity. Although the “theatre of life” trope is today best known from Shakespeare, it had a rich history in Hellenistic and Roman moral philosophy. Originating in the Hellenistic period, probably with the Stoic Aristo (D.L. 7.160), the theatre of life metaphor had its heyday in Roman-era writers like Cicero, Horace, Seneca, and Epictetus. This paper proposes a threefold taxonomy of the metaphors with close reading of key passages.  

From the vantage of the Lucullus, written in early 45 BCE, the end of the Platonic Academy no less than the demise of the Republic threatens the termination of two historical traditions with which Cicero identifies strongly. As he is writing in the midst of personal desuetude and social breakdown, Cicero “cross-pollinates” these failing lineages in order to locate himself and his work in relation to the traditions of the past, and, more importantly, to develop a new genealogical mode for an uncertain future.

    Metrological standardization in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East has often been understood as a gesture of political domination (e.g. Cuomo 2007; Chambon 2011; Fanton 2019).  Alternatively, it has been treated as a quasi-natural trend towards increased economic efficiency (e.g.

In 58 BCE, aedile Marcus Aemilius Scaurus minted a coin which named “Rex Aretas” and depicted him in a submissive posture. The image includes a camel standing in the background, confirming the foreign and exotic nature of King Aretas and his Nabataean Arabs (Figure 1).  The intent of this iconography was to illustrate the victory of Pompey and Scaurus over the Nabataean King, Aretas III, during their campaigns in the Near East in the late 60s BCE. However, the supplicandus is absent, leaving viewers unclear as to whom Aretas is supplicating. 

Portoria or customs duties are well attested throughout the Roman principate as is their operation at various levels across the empire (De Laet; Matthews; Ørsted; France; Kritzinger). This research has established that while there does not appear to have been a universal customs regime for the whole empire, there was some standardization of practices and rates, which varied internally between 1% and 5% (typically 2.5%) and externally at 12.5% or 25%.

Modern scholarship often presents the ancient Cisalpine region, between the Alps and the Apennines, as a controlled and rationalized space. According to this standard narrative, from the second century B.C. Rome transformed a wild, Gallic world of forests and marshes into drained, arable, and geometrically ordered land through processes of colonization and centuriation (e.g. Purcell 1990). This narrative, however, sits in tension with the local literary record. None of the Po Valley’s many significant first century B.C.

From Parthica Capta to Rex Parthiis Datus: Crisis and Flexibility in Trajanic Imperial Ideology