Roman Cultural History

A remarkable number of Latin and Greek inscriptions from the first three centuries CE, some 915, mention slaves and liberti alongside Roman soldiers and veterans. About eight percent (80 texts) mention slaves, while the rest relate to liberti (835 texts). This starkly contrasts the literary evidence, which speaks of slaves rather than liberti in the company of soldiers.

This paper examines a previously overlooked coming-of-age ceremony for Roman males – the first shaving of the beard, or barbatoria. I argue that this ceremony, distinct from the legal assumption of the toga virilis, constitutes a parallel rite of passage. It was a formative socio-religious ceremony, not confined to Roman citizens, that marked a male’s transition into full adult manhood.

In this paper, I will present a new reading of Juvenal 9, in which I argue that the quotation of Vergil’s second Eclogue in line 102 (o Corydon, Corydon) is not an isolated reference but rather indicates a larger engagement with Eclogue 2, Vergilian pastoral, and ties into the satire’s concern with patron-client relationships. While previous scholarship has noted the link to Vergil in Satire 9, this borrowing has most often been taken at face value as a well-known literary reference to a homosexual relationship in a satire focused on male homoeroticism.

While several studies have investigated social relationships within the Republican city—including patronage (Hölkeskamp 2010), friendship (Konstan 1997, Burton 2004), and collegia (Liu 2016)—there has been a remarkable lack of research focusing on the social expectations and obligations of urban neighbors. When the social phenomenon of neighborliness is broached, it is typically in institutional or legal terms that privilege a static understanding of communal relationships (Palma 1988, Saliou 1994, Lott 2004, Bannon 2009).