Classical Studies

The book is intended to show historically-minded readers how they should read Cicero's abundant writings: not only the letters, but the speeches and the theoretical texts on rhetoric and philosophy. Though neither a complete biography nor a history of the late Republic, it seeks to provide fundamental material for both topics, which are made both interesting and difficult to study by the wealth of evidence provided. It also seeks to serve as a corrective for interpretations of them based either on belief in what Cicero himself chose to say or on accounts circulated after the statesman's death, based on the bitterness of hindsight and the propagandistic exploitation of the past. It is divided into four parts: ‘Reading Cicero’, on the general problem of seeking historical evidence in his works; ‘Reading Oratory’, on the same problem with specific relation to his speeches down to his defence of C. Rabirius in his consulate; ‘History in Speeches and Letters’, covering the period between his earliest preserved correspondence and his return from exile; and ‘History and Ideas’, on the remaining portion of his life. Each part is subdivided into short chapters. There are eight appendices covering particular matters in more detail.

By developing a notion of civic obligation, this book attempts to re‐interpret the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. Its primary concern is to elucidate how the considerable obligations of the citizen to the city‐state (polis) and community (known here as civic obligations) were reconciled with ideas about individual liberty, and how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the oratory of the Athenian law‐courts, assembly, and through the publication of inscriptions. This work assesses the extent to which Rawls' model of liberty, consisting of his advocacy of renewed conventional modes of justice and liberty, might be used to elucidate the kind of liberty that existed in the ancient Greek city. The historical context is late 4th‐century Athens, during which period it is possible to observe a growing concern, expressed in the oratorical and epigraphical sources, for the performance by citizens of obligations, epitomized in the notion of good citizenship which emerges in Lycurgus' speech Against Leocrates. The core of the work analyses the ways in which the civic obligations were negotiated in oratorical and epigraphical modes of expression, examines comprehensively the substance of those obligations, and the ways in which their virtuous performance was recorded and used as a tool of self‐promotion. The final chapter measures the survey of Athens with that gleaned from the theory of Rawls: notwithstanding certain historical peculiarities, it is suggested that the model may be a useful one for thinking about city‐states and other organizations beyond fourth‐century Athens.

In this volume scholars of modern and ancient culture come together to explore historical, textual, material, and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. The contributors examine the multiple dialogues that developed between classics and colonialism in this period and argue that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at a number of important levels. Most at issue in the contexts where classics and empire converged was the critical question of ownership: to whom did the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre‐eminent ownership of the visual, literary, and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non‐European communities and powers—Africa, India, America—commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, the volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, it contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship, and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimized, and evaluated using classical models.

This book brings together nineteen scholars to rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. Speech was an integral part of decision-making in Republican Rome, and oratory was part of the education of every member of the elite. Yet no complete speech from the period by anyone other than Cicero survives, and as a result the debate on oratory, and political practice more widely, is liable to be distorted by the distinctive features of Cicero’s oratorical practice. With careful attention to a wide range of ancient evidence, this book shines a light on orators other than Cicero, and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the more familiar genres of forensic and political speech. In so doing, it challenges the idea that Cicero is a normative figure, and highlights the variety of career choices and speech strategies open to Roman politicians. The chapters in the book also demonstrate how unpredictable the outcomes of oratory were: politicians could try to control events by cherry-picking their audience and using tried methods of persuasion, but incompetence, bad luck, or hostile listeners were constant threats.

This book addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early 5th century bc. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaissance world.

This book argues that the Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers, Pope Gregory the Great's (590–604) most controversial work, should be considered from the perspective of a wide-ranging debate about the saints which took place in early Byzantine society. Like other contemporary works in Greek and Syriac, Gregory's Latin text debated the nature and plausibility of the saints' miracles and the propriety of the saints' cult. Rather than viewing the early Byzantine world as overwhelmingly pious or credulous, the book argues that many contemporaries questioned and challenged the claims of hagiographers and other promoters of the saints' miracles. From Italy to the heart of the Persian Empire at Ctesiphon, a healthy, sceptical, rationalism remained alive and well. The book's conclusion argues that doubt towards the saints reflected a current of political dissent in the East Roman or early Byzantine Empire, where patronage of Christian saints' shrines was used to sanction imperial autocracy. These far-reaching debates about religion and authority also help re-contextualize the emergence of Islam in the late ancient Near East.

Qualities receiving public cult in Rome have too often been understood simply as incarnating ‘Roman virtues’. This book presents a critical new account of divine qualities (often misleadingly called personifications, abstracts, or virtues) in the Republic, as a lens through which to explore how Romans thought about themselves. It contends that the existence of cults to clementia, concordia, felicitas, fides, honos, libertas, mens, ops, pietas, pudicttia, salus, spes, virtus, or victoria does not illustrate the ‘Roman‐ness’ of these qualities in any simple way. Cult rather gave these qualities a particular tone or resonance. The resources generated through cult served as springboards for claims, counter‐claims, appropriations, and explorations, and it was these interactions that made divine qualities ‘Roman’. Mediated through oral, visual, and written symbols and attributes, divine qualities are found in contexts ranging from consular speeches to graffiti, festivals to passwords, plays to prodigies, coins to horti, temples to tombs, aristocratic competition to plebeian struggles for recognition, board‐games to brothels, and from Rome itself to its colonies and battlefields. The resonant language of divine qualities was far from confined to élites: its lexicon was used by, familiar to, and could make meaning for a very wide social spectrum, from emperors to slaves. Exploring this range of engagements with divine qualities, and examining ways of using them to order and challenge perceptions of the world, this book presents as full a picture as is now possible of this aspect of ‘Roman‐ness’, created as it was lived.

Critics of Herodotus have generally shown unease in the face of the religious passages of the Histories, a sense that he ‘lets himself down’ by delving into matters irrelevant to the proper purpose of history. They have tended consequently to latch on to isolated instances of scepticism in an attempt to vindicate Herodotus from imagined charges of obscurantism. Historians of Greek religion, on the other hand, by their concentration on ritual as the central feature of Greek religious experience, have often neglected the value of literary sources as evidence of religious belief; indeed the term belief has become something of a dirty word. This book not only places Herodotus' religious beliefs at the centre of his conception of history, but by seeing instances of scepticism and of belief in relation to one another redresses the recent emphasis on the centrality of ritual, and paints a picture of Greek religion as a means for the explanation of events.

Dynamic Reading examines the reception history of Epicurean philosophy through a series of eleven case studies, which range chronologically from the latter days of the Roman Republic to late twentieth-century France and America. Rather than attempting to separate an original Epicureanism from its later readings and misreadings, this collection studies the philosophy together with its subsequent reception, focusing in particular on the ways in which it has provided terms and conceptual tools for defining how we read and respond to texts, artwork, and the world more generally. Whether it helps us to characterize the “swerviness” of literary influence, the transformative effects of philosophy, or the “events” that shape history, Epicureanism, as these essays demonstrate, has been a dynamic force in the intellectual history of the West.

This book challenges the idea that sanctuaries in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor were fully institutionalised within the cities that hosted them. Examining the forms of interaction between rulers, cities, and sanctuaries, the book proposes a triangular relationship in which the rulers often acted as mediators between differing interests of city and cult. A close analysis of the epigraphical evidence based on inscriptions illustrates that neither the Hellenistic kings nor the representatives of Roman rule appropriated the property of the gods but actively supported the functioning of the sanctuaries and their revenues. The powerful role of the sanctuaries was to a large extent based on economic features, which the sanctuaries possessed precisely because of their religious character. Nevertheless, a study of the finances of the cults reveals frequent problems concerning the upkeep of cults and a particular need to guard the privileges and property of the gods. Their situation oscillated between glut and dearth. When the harmonious identity between city and cult was disturbed, those closely attached to the cult acted on behalf of their domain.