Spectacle and Authority

The Ludi Saeculares (or “Saecular Games”) celebrated after civil wars by Augustus in 17 BCE recreated Republican traditions in order to establish a series of religious festivals that would be held once in a lifespan, that is, once every saeculum of hundred and ten years. In 47 CE, Claudius assigned new significance to the Saecular Games, with celebrations calculated once every century from the foundation of Rome.

This paper will examine the role of personified divine rumor (Fama) and public opinion in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. It focuses specifically on passages in which Ammianus uses Fama, with all her literary trappings, to publicize Julian’s successes and his ultimate succession.

The letters exchanged between Cicero and Cato in 50 BCE (Fam. 15.4-6 = SB 110-112) are among the most memorable of Cicero’s epistolary corpus. Cicero’s initial request for Cato’s support for a supplicatio en route to a triumph, Cato’s refusal, and Cicero’s reply give the modern scholar an excellent resource for understanding the politics that went into such a request.

In 15 CE, a delegation from the province of Hispania Citerior traveled to Rome with a petition to erect a temple to Augustus in Tarraco. Notably, Tacitus describes the establishment of this cult as an exemplum for all the provinces of the Roman empire (Ann. 1.78). When delegates from Hispania Ulterior petitioned the emperor Tiberius in 25 CE to establish their own provincial cult to the emperor, they too cited an exemplum, Asia Minor's second provincial cult in Smyrna (Tact. Ann. 4.37).

Pompa diaboli: Christian Rhetoric, Imperial Law, and the Roman Games