Hidden Transcripts

Josephus’ mention of the golden menorah from the Jerusalem temple - an artifact whose detached description has led to much unease among scholars - stands out in his passage on the Flavian triumph in the Bellum Judaicum.

This paper argues that Homeric quotation in Suetonius’ Caesars constitutes a parallel discourse of leadership within the text, which functions as a discrete index of defective autocratic rule at Rome. In ten instances over the course of the biographies (Suet. Aug. 65.4; Tib. 21.6; Calig. 22.1, 22.4; Claud. 42.1; Ner. 49.3; Galb. 20.2; Vesp. 23.1; Dom.

Studies on the literary elements of the Caesars have increasingly argued for the importance of Suetonius’ use of form (Lounsbury 1987, Murphy 1991, Damon 2014, Dunsch 2015, Ash 2016).

The Laureolus-mime concerned the capture and public execution of a notorious bandit leader. Its first known performance was mere hours (and steps) away from Caligula’s assassination in 41 CE, and it was performed through the second century CE. This paper will suggest that the Laureolus-mime’s surprising longevity was due to a possible subversive interpretation of the mime in which Laureolus was a folk hero to the disenfranchised in Roman society.

By comparing Quintilian’s treatment of Cicero as a paradigm for political speech and action (Quint. Inst. 12.1.14-22) with Piny’s, this paper seeks a way through what Joy Connolly calls “one of the limits of working with rhetorical treatises… the silence of the student” (Connolly, 140).