Men and War

The notion of a firm history/myth polarity is in large part a modern construction, since to the Greeks, the body of their traditional tales was their past, and one that formed a powerful and ever-relevant continuum with the present.

The most famous battle in the Argonautica is the tragic scene in which the Argonauts mistakenly fight and kill their former hosts, the kindly Doliones (1.1025-52). This episode is generally taken to exemplify Apollonius’ response to the warfare of the Iliad: scholars have found in it a criticism of the traditional martial ethos (e.g. Hunter 1993, 43-44; Goldhill 1990, 317-19), or even a condemnation of war itself (e.g. Effe 2008).

Cicero’s Post-Exile Recovery of Masculinity

In recent years, scholarship on heroism in the Punica has expanded its focus beyond Hannibal (Stocks 2014) and Scipio (Marks 2005) to undertake a sustained engagement with the plethora of other heroic figures in the epic, including, most notably, Fabius and Marcellus (Ariemma 2010; Fucecchi 2010; Tipping 2010; Marks 2014). In broadening the horizons of this investigation into heroism in the epic, scholars have come to appreciate much better how well Silius complicates (even eradicates) the many purported dichotomies between Roman and Carthaginian.

A surge of interest in the invective in Greek and Roman authors has surprisingly ignored the only extant study on the invective written in antiquity by the prolific Roman biographer and scholar Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (late 1st – early 2nd c.). From the perspective of a social historian this study preserves a subliminal, authentic voice for the attitudes, perceptions, values, norms, and stereotypes which generated this invective.