Time as an Organizing Principle

One of the chief attributes of Sallust’s historiographical style, across his corpus, is his emphasis on moral turning points in Rome’s history. This paper reconsiders our understanding of these turning points in Sallust, and argues that they serve as a literary and narratological device for conveying his particular interpretation of Roman history. Moreover, I illustrate that Sallust’s use of turning points as a literary tool finds both precedents in earlier historiographers and confirmation in his historiographical successors.

How is time represented and distributed in the Iliad? Interest in this question began very early in the history of Homeric scholarship. Zenodotus is credited with having written a calculation of the number of days in the Iliad, a matter which continues to spark debate now more than two thousand years later. It is not hard to see why readers are so consistently drawn to issues of time in the Iliad.

Pompey the Great and the Value of the Past in Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae

The will of Zeus, Dios boulē, is a concept of particular importance to the interpretation of the Iliad, not least because it implies that the poem results from a particular purpose and is therefore fundamentally interpretable. Beyond the certainty that it is important, however, we quickly encounter two related problems: What does the will of Zeus will, and how does it relate to the agency of fate which is also at work?

This paper examines Roman discourse on the saeculum during the Augustan period and argues that Roman poets use this language, typically associated with Augustan triumphalism (especially its connection to Golden Age mythology), to depict hypothetical futures in which Rome has been destroyed, calling into question the permanence of the Pax Augusta.