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A bilingual epitaph found in Rome from the second century CE proclaims: “Traveler, do not pass by my epitaph, but stop and listen, and then, when you have learned the truth, carry on. There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon... All of us who have died and gone below are bones and ashes: there is nothing else. What I have told you is true. Now leave, traveler, so that you will not think that, although dead, I talk too much” (CIL 1.6298 = EG 646).

Augustus used his living quarters that stood on top of Palatine Hill as a statement of his political vision. As Cassius Dio indicates, Augustus chose the Palatine Hill because of its association with Romulus (53.16.5). The historical location coupled with Augustus’ position as Rome’s first princeps emphasized his role as a founder.

In this talk, I use Cicero’s Catilinarians as a case study for the applicability of recent scholarship on conspiracies and religion to ancient rhetoric. Cicero repeatedly accuses the conspirators of engaging in secret religious rites (see especially Cat. 1.16; 1.24; 2.13). At Catiline’s domestic shrine, they dedicate a dagger for murder and keep a perverted legionary standard. Their rites do not recognize traditional gods, and any blood spilled is that of humans.

This paper discusses the secrecy that surrounded some of the allegedly exclusively feminine forms of Dionysus’ cult. According to an inveterate scholarly tradition, which dates back to Rapp (1872) and became somewhat dogmatic from Dodds (1940, 1960) onwards, women who were in a state of maenadic frenzy performed their rituals a total absence of males (perhaps with the exception of a so-called “single male participant”, which, as Henrichs (1984) has shown, was a product of a scholarly misunderstanding).

In ancient Babylonia, political decisions were usually taken by support of an oracle procedure. When a king needed to decide whether to go to war, appoint an official or to give one his offspring to marriage, he would normally turn to an oracle expert, or a seer, who knew how to consult the decision of the gods on this matter.

This paper explores the record of Cato’s Origines in relationship to ancient scholarship as practiced at Rome in the second and first centuries BCE. The branch of scholarship in question is that high-stakes mode of inquiry which constructs relationships between present enigmatic phenomena (be they manifest in lexical form, in material remains, in the practice of cult and custom, or by any other means) and the past, purporting thereby to explain salient realities.

This paper demonstrates how the lives of bad emperors in the Historia Augusta (HA) expand our understanding of the rare rhetorical form, the self-standing invective. Riskier than panegyric, which catered to imperial sensibilities, invective invited censure or revenge. Despite being named in most guidebooks to rhetorical training, invective form was rarely discussed, added as a footnote to panegyric with the vague instruction to do the opposite (e.g. Quint. inst. 3.7; Nixon and Rodgers 1994).

This paper examines the surviving fragments of Fenestella and argues that Fenestella’s antiquarian interests should be interpreted alongside broader intellectual trends under Tiberius regarding the rhetoric of time and the periodization of history. Fenestella is often overlooked among the Roman writers of the early Empire, despite being widely read in antiquity and considered important enough to be epitomated.

Under Nero, Rome experienced a period of ongoing crisis, threatening oppression, and enduring trauma that challenged what it meant to be a Roman. In this atmosphere of upended social values, elite Roman women had to determine how to endure and survive. Disappear into dissoluteness? Detach in order to tolerate? Or participate, disrupting the traditional ideal of Roman womanhood?

In this paper I use the reception of Cato the Elder’s In Galbam to illuminate the effect on readers of Cato’s self-quotation of his own speeches in the Origines.