Imperial Fashioning in the Roman World

For an epic that recounts the horrors of civil war, Lucan’s poem refers with surprising frequency to an enemy that is not domestic but external: the kingdom of the Parthians, a vast empire to the east of the Euphrates ruled by the Arsacid royal family. The Parthians, the poet says, have unleashed the strife between Caesar and Pompey by killing Crassus, the only man capable of suppressing the rivalry between the two commanders (1.98–108). They escape vengeance for Carrhae as Rome sinks into civil war (1.10–12, 7.431).

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.

Critics have long maligned Epistulae ex Ponto 4, the last book of Ovid’s career, for its incoherent structure (Evans, Helzle). Individual poems have attracted attention: 4.7 to Vestalis (Williams) and 4.8 about Germanicus (Fantham, Myers), but the book as a whole has not been evaluated. This paper shows that the book has a structure in which poems exploring the nature of the Roman consulship under Tiberius are contrasted with poems about other poets and their compositions. Ovid also juxtaposes his rise as a Getic poet with Tiberius’ ascension to emperor.

Frontinus’ De Aquaeductu has suffered from a limited range of critical engagement from scholars of ancient literature and history (notable exceptions: Baldwin 1994, DeLaine 1996, and Del Chicca 1995). This paper focuses on chapters 87-102, where Frontinus moves from describing the history of each aqueduct and the quality of the water it conveys to outlining the laws concerning the water supply and the history of the water administration (cura aquarum).