Roman Politics and Culture

The earliest known representation of Marsyas at Rome did not depict the flayed victim of Apollo’s divine punishment for hubris, but rather a virile satyr bearing a wineskin on one shoulder, his right arm raised in the air. The statue of Marsyas is well documented in the ancient sources and in the material evidence though the statue itself does not survive. Servius twice mentions that Marsyas, as attendant of Liber, father of free cities, is set up in the Forum with his hand raised to bear witness to the freedom of the city (ad Aen. 3.20 and 4.58). Pliny (N.H.

In this paper, I analyze the ritual performance of the Lupercalia in 44 and make two related claims: first, that our sources for this affair draw primarily on Cicero; and second, that the festival had nothing to do with kingship. At this festival, Antony allegedly crowned Caesar with a diadem. This act has been the subject of intense scrutiny since antiquity. It has been seen as a coronation rite engineered by Caesar (e.g., Alföldi 1985) or by Antony alone (following Nicolaus of Damascus fr. 130.71-5), and more recently as a purposeful recusatio regni (Luke 2012).

In the summer of 43 BC Brutus wrote a scathing letter to Atticus about Cicero’s deplorable recent conduct, and then sent a similar missive to Cicero himself (Brut. Cic. ad Brut. 1.17 and 1.16)—or did he? Controversy over these letters’ authenticity has continued unabated since 1745, when Jeremiah Markland, in a spirited but misguided imitation of Bentley’s Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, condemned the entire Cicero–Brutus Briefwechsel as spurious.

While the removal of a tyrannical figure, historically and in the modern world, is often the portrayed as a formal process, the events that follow, particularly regarding the desecration of public monuments tend to be less ‘formal’ in nature. After the death of Domitian, Suetonius records both the formal decree of abolutio nominis by the Senate in Rome (Domitian, 23) as well as differing responses to the news: the insouciance of the Roman people, the loyal revenge vowed by Domitian’s army, and joyous trashing of his monumental shield and statues by senators.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Pompey was, in fact, elected, not appointed, to his third, sole consulship in 52 B.C.