Roman Life Research Articles

Women in Roman forts – lack of knowledge or a social claim?

The classic idea of the Roman army, especially of the legions, is that of a man's world, where discipline and military drill dominate, and where there is no room for women, whatever their social status or function. This idea has been fostered by the picture painted by the antique authors, in which fighting by women is reserved to goddesses (Athena/Minerva) and exceptional personages. The normal female is described as a mother or wife, whose chief occupations were confined to the organization of the household, the up-bringing of the children, spinning and weaving (Marquardt 1975, 58). This role model fits in excellently with the social structure of 19th-century Europe, where women were also absent from military camps. This, in turn, can be traced back to the to the Prussian view of military virtues, which would be diminished by the presence of women. Many concepts of Roman military archaeology have their origin in this period. In many ways these traditions still influence our views on Roman life, as analyses of the roles of women and children in archaeological illustrations have shown (Röder 2002; Becker and Hölschen in press). German archaeological research, especially, concentrates on questions of building-structures, military units or dating, whilst social aspects of life in the camps or on the frontier are normally neglected.

An urban-wide real-time monitoring system : the Real Time Rome project

In today's world, wireless mobile communications devices are creating new dimensions of interconnectedness between people, places, and urban infrastructure. This ubiquitous connectivity within the environment can be observed and interpreted in real-time through aggregate records collected from communication and transportation networks. The real-time acquisition can regard traces of information and communication networks, movement patterns of people and transportation systems, spatial and social usage of streets and neighbourhoods. This paper reports on the Rea ! Time Rome project, exhibited at the 10th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Italy. The Real Time Rome project is the first example of an urban-wide real-time monitoring system that collects and processes data provided by telecommunications networks and transportation systems in order to understand patterns of daily life in Rome. Observing the real-time city becomes a means to understanding the present and anticipating the future urban environment.

John R. Clarke: Art in the lives of ordinary Romans. Visual representation and non-elite viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315

John R. Clarke: Art in the lives of ordinary Romans. Visual representation and non-elite viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: California UP 2003. XI, 383 S. 156 Abb. 24 Taf. 4°. (The Joan Palevsky imprint in classical literature.) 42,95 £.

Constantine and the Christian Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Constantine and the Christian Empire Elizabeth Digeser Charles Matson Odahl Constantine and the Christian Empire New York/London: Routledge, 2004 Pp. xviii + 400. $104.95. In Constantine and the Christian Empire, Charles Odahl sets out to integrate material evidence for Constantine's reign (primarily public works and coinage together with details about his military campaigns and his itinerary) into a biographical account of the first Christian emperor. With so much recent interest in the social and cultural implications of public works and warfare, the author's goal is a worthy one with the potential to deepen our understanding of this perennially fascinating figure. He has chosen to do this in a "reader friendly" style (ix), clearly perceiving that the inauguration of a Christian Empire may have a certain appeal to contemporary readers. After an initial chapter on the ancient sources, Odahl proceeds chronologically, first addressing the third-century "crisis" and the rise of the Illyrian emperors and then discussing the first tetrarchy and Constantine's role in it. His effort to settle Constantine's accomplishments within the context of the third and fourth centuries is commendable. Older scholarship so often viewed this emperor as causing such a rupture in the fabric of Roman life that the many ways in which he built on the innovations of his forebears, the tetrarchy in particular, were often neglected. The next three chapters address Constantine's accession as a member of the second tetrarchy, his campaign against the usurper Maxentius in Italy, and the relationship between his conversion experience and support of the church in Rome. The second half of the book moves east with the emperor, describing his achievement of sole rule by conquest in 324, the scandal surrounding Constantine's execution of his son and wife, the establishment of Constantinople, the last campaigns, and Constantine's legacy. The book is replete with detailed descriptions of Constantine's public works. However, had Odahl drawn on the work of Paul Zanker and Jas; Elsner, his analysis of Constantine's building program in Rome, Constantinople, and Jerusalem might have pushed beyond recounting the number of churches built and the styles deployed to discussing the relationship between these structures and the citizens' perceptions of their emperor. A more serious problem, however, is Odahl's use of his sources. Any historian who wants to understand Constantine must directly confront both the paradoxes in his religious policy and the ambiguities in all of the ancient sources. Different portraits of Constantine result from different approaches to these problems, and [End Page 527] one can easily see this by comparing two of the more recent studies of Constantine, T. D. Barnes's Constantine and Eusebius (1981) and H. A. Drake's Constantine and the Bishops (2000). In the first Constantine is a religious reformer; in the second he is a pragmatic politician who unleashed religious forces he was subsequently hard pressed to control. Along this spectrum, Odahl's study is closer to Barnes's in perspective and in its deep reliance on Eusebius as a source. Barnes, however, saw that coming to grips with Eusebius' motivations, both in the Ecclesiastical History and the Life of Constantine, was a necessary prerequisite to his analysis of Constantine. Odahl almost always takes Eusebius at his word, never exploring the hagiographic elements of the Life nor addressing the possibility that the bishop intended his biography, published after Constantine died, more to craft a portrait of the ideal Christian emperor for Constantius II than to present an objective, factual narrative. The author has also overlooked recent developments that bear directly on how Constantine could reign as a Christian sovereign so shortly after the tetrachy's attempt to repress the faith through the Great Persecution. For the most part, Odahl treats paganism as synonymous with polytheism (even when discussing Iamblichus' potential influence on Licinius' court [170]) and thus naturally antithetical and abhorrent to Christianity. Yet a number of recent works, such as Pagan Monotheism, edited by P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede (1999), confirm the growing influence of a philosophically oriented monotheism among pagans, a perspective with strong and important similarities to Christianity. This evidence substantially alters the religious landscape of the late third and...

The Roman life course: a view from the inscriptions

Epitaphs inscribed on stone record biographical information about the deceased, and in certain cases, the age at death. However, it has been demonstrated that these ages on Roman epitaphs are not an accurate reflection of the demographics of death, but are subject to cultural bias. Using the idea of the ‘life course’, this article explores these cultural biases and their relationship to age and gender structures. Material from Italy suggests that these are tied into ideologies of gender, with adulthood defined by the transition to magistrate for men and wife for women. Material from other areas demonstrates different patterns, and in the case of Etruria, these are shown to be a negotiation between pre-Roman and Romanized customs. The phenomenon of ‘age-rounding’ is also argued to be part of these ideas of correct age.

The Romans: from village to empire

How did a single village community in the Italian peninsula eventually become one of the most powerful imperial powers the world has ever known? In The Romans: From Village to Empire, Mary T. Boatwright, Daniel Gargola, and Richard J.A. Talbert explore this question as they guide readers through a comprehensive sweep of Roman history, ranging from the prehistoric settlements to the age of Constantine. Vividly written and accessible, The Romans traces Rome's remarkable evolution from village, to monarchy, to republic, and eventually to one-man rule by an emperor whose power at its peak stretched from Scotland to Iraq and the Nile Valley. Firmly grounded in ancient literary and material sources, the book describes and analyzes major political and military landmarks, from the Punic Wars, to Caesar's conquest of Gaul and his crossing of the Rubicon, to the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony, and to Constantine's adoption of Christianity. It also introduces such captivating individuals as Hannibal, Mithridates, Pompey, Cicero, Cleopatra, Augustus, Livia, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and Shapur. The authors cover issues that still confront modern states worldwide, including warfare, empire building, consensus forging, and political fragmentation. They also integrate glimpses of many aspects of everyday Roman life and perspective--such as the role of women, literature, entertainment, town-planning, portraiture, and religion--demonstrating how Rome's growth as a state is inseparable from its social and cultural development. Ideal for courses in Roman history and Roman civilization, The Romans is enhanced by almost 100 illustrations, more than 30 maps (most produced by the Ancient World Mapping Center), and 22 textual extracts that provide fascinating cultural observations made by ancient Romans themselves.

Art in the lives of ordinary Romans: visual representation and non-elite viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.- A.D. 315

Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Imperial Representation of Non-elites 1. Augustus's and Trajan's Messages to Commoners 2. The All-seeing Emperor and Ordinary Viewers: Marcus Aurelius and Constantine Part 2. Non-elites in the Public Sphere 3. Everyman, Everywoman, and the Gods 4. Everyman and Everywoman at Work 5. Spectacle: Entertainment, Social Control, Self-advertising, and Transgression 6. Laughter and Subversion in the Tavern: Image, Text, and Context 7. Commemoration of Life in the Domain of the Dead: Non-elite Tombs and Sarcophagi Part 3. Non-elites in the Domestic Sphere 8. Minding Your Manners: Banquets, Behavior, and Class 9. Putting Your Best Face Forward: Self-representation at Home Conclusions Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index

Death and burial of Roman children: the case of the Yasmina cemetery at Carthage-Part II, The archaeological evidence

Roman social structure is complex and subtly nuanced and the place of children within it is distinct from that of adults. In Part I we situated children within the social fabric of Roman life, concentrating on demographics and on the art and literary testimonia concerning their status, stages of life, rituals and burials. Part II marshals some of the archaeological evidence about the death and burial of children and demonstrates how children were often buried in ways that were distinct from those for adults, either in form or location or both. This paper focuses on the evidence for children's burials in the Yasmina cemetery at Carthage, excavated by the University of Georgia, where children are segregated in a distinct area of the necropolis, and places that material within its wider archaeological context by looking at evidence from other Roman cemeteries in North Africa. Across the province, the conceptualization of children is frequently reflected in the burial practices accorded them, practices that sometimes appear to allude to the Punic heritage of the region. These differences in burial ritual illuminate the general cultural distinctions that shaped the Roman concept of the child.

Plutarch and history: eighteen studies

The full-text of this book is not available in ORA. Citation: Pelling, C. B. R. (2002). Plutarch and history: eighteen studies. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth. Book contents: Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Plutarch's method of work in the Roman Lives; 2. Plutarch and Catiline; 3. The Apophthegmata Regum et Imperatorum and Plutarch's Roman Lives; 4. Plutarch's adaptation of his source-material; 5. Plutarch and Thucydides; 6. Truth and fiction in Plutarch's Lives; 7. 'Making myth look like history': Plutarch's Theseus-Romulus; 8. Dionysiac diagnostics: some hints of Dionysus in Plutarch's Lives; 9. Plutarch and Roman politics; 10. The moralism of Plutarch's Lives; 11. Plutarch's Caesar: a Caesar for the Caesars?; 12. 'You for me and me for you': narrator and narratee in Plutarch's Lives; 13. Aspects of Plutarch's characterization; 14. Childhood and personality in Greek biography; 15. Rhetoric, paideia, and psychology in Plutarch's Lives; 16. Synkrisis in Plutarch's Lives; 17. Is death the end? Closure in Plutarch's Lives; 18. The shaping of Coriolanus: Dionysius, Plutarch and Shakespeare; Bibliography; Index of names; Index of passages in other authors; Index of topics

Eric Moon as the Twentieth-Century Embodiment of Melvil Dewey?: A Review Essay

Life writing in the profession has been a constant genre, as a search through standard bibliographies and databases will verify.1 The years spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have occasioned a num ber of biographies and autobiographies of notable figures in American librarianship. As colleagues have retired in this pivotal period, the temp tation to look backward, to offer an explanation or perspective, or to make an apology?most efforts to establish significance?has seldom seemed more attractive than now. Among those lives recently celebrated autobiographically are Bill Eshelman, David Kaser, and Paul Wasserman.2 The scholarly biographies of Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) by Wayne Wiegand and of Louis Shores (1904-81) by Lee Shiflett have also appeared.3 Among these works, Kenneth Kister on Eric Moon is unique. Kister and his publisher regard Eric Moon (b. 1923) as the most significant personage in the American library profession in the last half of the twentieth century. The narrative of his life, in eighteen chapters and buttressed with sixty-three black-and-white photographs, is well told. It includes Moon's youth in Southampton, wartime service in Asia, student years at Loughborough, early professional experience at British libraries, escape to Canada and then on to Library Journal, activism in the library profession, leadership at Scare crow Press, presidency of the American Library Association (ALA), and retirement to Florida. Additional tidbits from Moon's inner thoughts about people, events, and trends and especially his roman tic life make this an arresting tale. Few contemporary biographical works present the detail and complexity of a life as does this nearly five-hundred-page, large-format work.

Roman History and Early Stuart Drama: Thomas Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece

If wee present a forreigne History, the subiect is so intended, that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the vertues of our Country-men are extolled, or their vices reproved.

Punishment after death: mutilation of images and corpse abuse in ancient Rome

Representations of the emperors were ubiquitous elements in the lives of Romans at every level of society. As both artistic and literal embodiments of the imperial presence, these images functioned as effigies. When a 'bad' emperor was overthrown or assassinated, his images were often mutilated or destroyed. The disfigurement of imperial portraits is closely linked to the abuse of corpses of condemned criminals and arena victims. This article explores the relationship between mutilated images and corpses in ancient Rome and elucidates the communicative aspects of intentional disfigurement.

Punishment after death: Mutilation of images and corpse abuse in ancient Rome

Representations of the emperors were ubiquitous elements in the lives of Romans at every level of society. As both artistic and literal embodiments of the imperial presence, these images functioned as effigies. When a 'bad' emperor was overthrown or assassinated, his images were often mutilated or destroyed. The disfigurement of imperial portraits is closely linked to the abuse of corpses of condemned criminals and arena victims. This article explores the relationship between mutilated images and corpses in ancient Rome and elucidates the communicative aspects of intentional disfigurement.

Among the dead in ancient Rome

Despite strong prohibitions concerning contact between corpses and the living, the dead occupied an important position within the physical and literary life of Rome. This paper explores the metaphorical importance of certain rituals and literary allusions to death and the dead, in which Romans found themselves symbolically among the dead. I focus on literary and epigraphic evidence of the middle to late Republican and early Empire periods. By reading death in ancient Rome, we can reconstruct the extent to which the dead were reintegrated into society and how the deceased ancestors, in turn, welcomed the newly deceased back into the family in funeral ritual.

Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome

Life in Rome was relentlessly public and oratory was at its heart. In this in-depth study of oratorical gestures and crowd acclamations as methods of communication at public spectacles, the author seeks to recapture the original context of these interactive, dramatic and contentious public performances. At the most basic level, the book is a study of communication - how Roman speakers communicated with their audiences and how audiences in turn were able to reply and convey their reactions to the speakers. Aldrete begins by investigating how orators employed an extraordinarily sophisticated system of hand and body gestures in order to enhance the persuasive power of their speeches. He then turns to the target of these orations, the audience, and examines how they responded through the mechanism of acclamations, that is rhythmically shouted comments. The author finds that much in these ancient spectacles that is relevant to modern questions of political propaganda, manipulation of public image, crowd behaviour and speechmaking.

J. F. Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. X + 305. ISBN 0-19-815217-5. £45.00.

J. F. Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. X + 305. ISBN 0-19-815217-5. £45.00.

Plutarch's Lysander and Sulla: Integrated Characters in Roman Historical Perspective

The term ritratto paradossale has been used to describe a formula of character portrayal seen in Latin literature of the first centuries B.C. and A.D. whose basic process consists in combining in one character apparently contradictory traits (La Penna 1976). To be precise, the formula produced a type of man who in his moments of action shows energy, diligence, and constancy but exhibits licentious feelings, allows himself to be taken in by indolence, and succumbs to pleasures when his negotia are finished. This model may already have been present in Greek historical literature of the fourth century B.C., as the portrait of Philip II that the historian Theopompus delineates seems to bear this stamp. The public image of Maecenas and the Petronius of Tacitus are two clear examples of ritratto paradossale. The figure of Sulla also falls under this influence; in fact, according to La Penna (1976, 284), Plutarch's biography of Sulla often exhibits these same characteristics. The terms "paradox" and "paradoxical" also occur frequently in works devoted to Plutarch's Life of Lysander. Its paradoxical features are the central point of Pelling's comments (1988a, 268-74) on that biography. Pelling explores aspects of "integration" in the Parallel Lives, a technique of portrayal which he defines as follows: "a man's qualities are brought into some sort of relation with one another, and every trait goes closely with the next." 1 An almost universal literary habit in the [End Page 453] ancient world, integration appears even in a figure as complex and full of contrasts as Plutarch's Lysander. Arrogance and cruelty, incorruptibility and a capacity for adulation, duplicity, ingenuity, ambition, treachery: all the contradictions that coexist in him are seen to be unified through philotimia, a central trait that dominates Lysander's other characteristics and gives his portrayal a unified appearance. But Plutarch's interests in his Life of Lysander do not impel him to explain or reconstruct the traits of its protagonist. It is the contrasts and the paradoxes in Lysander that have drawn the author's attention and lend the biography its particular flavor. Plutarch shows how these diverse character traits work against the individual and end up destroying him. In this way, the biography of Lysander is similar to tragic works in which a character's potentialities unleash forces that ultimately defeat him, and Plutarch explicitly plans on parallelisms with the tragic genre. From this standpoint, Pelling concludes, Lysander offers a moral that is similar to that of tragedy and different from that of other biographies: human nature can produce a figure such as Lysander, and such figures tend to bring about their own destruction through appropriate tragic processes. Stadter (1992) has recently analyzed from start to finish the paradoxical character that Plutarch assigns to Lysander and also to Sulla, the protagonist of the Roman Life presented as his parallel. In Stadter's view the contradictions in each character--that is, the combination of admirable and repulsive traits--form the basis of the portrayal of both subjects. The biographer also contrives to cross the two Lives so as to convey that they form an ensemble. Among other things, we see a type of progression whose upper limit is delineated by the harshest components of the portrayal of Sulla: his destructive nature, bloodthirsty and implacable, his tyrannical and frequently arbitrary conduct, his arrogance and lack of humanity. These traits are only sketched in the parallel Greek Life; yet their presence there evokes sinister dimensions which horrify when they appear, full-blown, in the Roman counterpart. From this interplay of traits and personalities our understanding of the human type treated in the biographies becomes increasingly deep. The final result in the present instance is that we are enabled to recognize the true traits of Lysander's character, and so escape the difficulty that Plutarch alludes to in his prologue through a cryptic...

A Blessing in Disguise? Empowering Catholic Health Care Institutions in the Current Health Care Environment

Health care institutions, including Roman Catholic institutions, are in a time of crisis. This crisis may provide an important opportunity to reinvigorate Roman Catholic health care. The current health care crisis offers Roman Catholic health care institutions a special opportunity to rethink their fundamental commitments and to plan for the future. The author argues that what Catholic health care institutions must first do is articulate the nature of their identity and their commitments. By a renewed commitment to the praxis of health care on their own distinctive terms, Roman Catholic health care institutions may reestablish a vision of human nature and human service in an increasingly secular society. Health care could then reclaim its place as a powerful setting for the expression of Roman Catholic faith, life and witness.

Familia

Familia

Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris

In this article I shall republish a small corpus of epitaphs from the Roman imperial household, with apparently Christian features. These texts have not previously been published together. The dating of these inscriptions will be discussed, and inferences about the Christian community in the imperial service during the Severan period will be drawn from the points of comparison which can be made between the texts.It has long been known from literary sources that there were Christians in the emperors' service in these years. For the generation after Justin Martyr's death, Christian literature provides three references to Christianity in the familia Caesaris. Hippolytus says that Callistus, later to be bishop of Rome, was the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian ‘of the emperor's household’ during the reign of Commodus (180–92). Irenaeus, writing in that reign, refers in the course of a theological argument to ‘those in the royal palace who are believers’, without giving any hint about the number of Christians involved. Then in the 190s Tertullian's Apologeticum lists the palace along with other commanding heights of Roman life in which, he asserts, Christians have established a presence. By this time it was evidently well-known in Christian circles, including in the provinces, that there were Christians in the familia Caesaris: of these three authors, only Hippolytus was based in Rome where the imperial household was centred.