Roman Aristocracy Research Articles

Christianization in the Fourth Century: The Example of Roman Women

At the beginning of the fourth century the Roman aristocracy was, for the most part, pagan in its religious attitude. By the end of that century the aristocracy had undergone what Peter Brown has described as a “sea change”: its pagan values had become redefined within the context of Christianity. This “drift into respectable Christianity” was the result of the process of socialization in the households of the Roman senatorial class over several generations. Brown suggests that the fourth-century Christianization of the aristocracy was the achievement of those upper-class Roman women who, by continuing to practice their Christian religion in the households of their pagan husbands, established the syncretistic milieu which would influence the religious attitudes of the next generation. But the apparent calm of Brown's anonymous culture-bearers is disturbed by a small group of women whose religious extremism delineates them sharply from their peers. Rejecting wholly the society into which they were born, they fled the cloying Roman atmosphere for the harsh air of the desert. The “respectable Christianity” that Rome was adopting offered them no satisfaction.

A Consular Epicurean under the Early Principate

AI HAVE DESERTED to camp of my enemy Epicurus (Cic. Farm. 9.20.1). Cicero wrote in jest: no one could doubt his immunity to inlecebrae voluptatis. Still there were earnest converts to Epicureanism among his peers, for example L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58) and C. Vibius Pansa (cos. 43);1 and he made C. Cassius and C. Trebatius Testa butt of persiflage for defecting from virtus to voluptas.2 But heyday of Epicureanism, at least as a faith for Roman aristocrats, drew to a close with establishment of Augustan Principate, which propagated a state-serving rather than an individualistic morality, and in first century A.D. senatorial Epicurean must have been a fish out of water. Still, Syme has cautioned that the dearth of evidence may be deceptive,3 and in light of this warning it may be prudent to scrutinize a dim figure from reign of Gaius--an Epicurean senator known only by odd gentilicium Pompedius. Josephus recounts, among outrages of Gaius, ordeal of Pompedius (IIHo(iL&oP) and his mistress Quintilia, an actress celebrated for her

Cicero, Pompey, and the Rise of the First Triumvirate

Modern analyses of the course of Roman politics in the years 62–60 b.c. reveal a high level of agreement in comparison with the welter of conflicting theories that have emerged from studies of the political activity of the fifties.The dismissal of his army at Brundisium and certain seemingly conciliatory gestures toward the conservative elements of the Roman aristocracy have led most scholars to conclude that in 62 b.c. Pompey, at heart a conservative, was eager for closer ties with Rome's oligarchs, and willing to accept the notion of government by the senate if his immediate but modest needs were met.

THE PATRONS OF PELAGIUS: THE ROMAN ARISTOCRACY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST1

Journal Article THE PATRONS OF PELAGIUS: THE ROMAN ARISTOCRACY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST1 Get access PETER BROWN PETER BROWN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume XXI, Issue 1, April 1970, Pages 56–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/XXI.1.56 Published: 01 April 1970

Tradición y costumbres en la religión romana

El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar el papel central de la tradición como criterio esencial de aceptación en la religión oficial romana. Se pretende destacar la relevancia de la esfera religiosa en Roma que afectaba a todas las clases sociales y provocaba distintas reacciones. Además, subraya algunos argumentos filosóficos que apoyaban o rechazaban la creencia en los dioses. Sin embargo, la validez de la religión romana se basaba en la tradición y los aristócratas romanos vieron la fidelidad a las antiguas costumbres religiosas como la principal característica de su historia.

The Roman Friends of Ammianus

The ninth book of the correspondence of Q. Aurelius Symmachus contains a number of letters lacking the names of their addressees. Otto Seeck once suggested that one of these letters might have been written to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. This suggestion has been accepted and built upon by most subsequent writers on Ammianus, and it has come to be generally agreed that he had connections among the senatorial aristocracy of Rome; connections, according to some scholars, that led to serious distortions in his history. A. Alföldi, in an attempt to rehabilitate his fellow-Pannonian, the brutal emperor Valentinian, maintained that Ammianus, ‘body and soul on the side of the senators’ (who hated Valentinian), presented ‘his dear Roman aristocrats’ with a picture of Valentinian ‘as black as one-sided hatred can contrive’. W. Ensslin suggested that Ammianus was a supporter of the usurper Eugenius whom Theodosius crushed in 394, and that the letter in question was deliberately published without his name to protect Symmachus' family—in which he has been followed by W. Hartke, and, with added refinements, by R. A. Pack.

Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy

Perhaps the most significant feature of the end of paganism in Rome is that we do know about it; in the words of one of the earliest students of this death of a religion, Beugnot, ‘L'histoire n'a daigné qu'assister aux funérailles du paganisme.’ That this is so is due largely to the central position occupied in the religious history of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome.

A case of tuberculosis in the Roman aristocracy at the beginning of the second century.

A case of tuberculosis in the Roman aristocracy at the beginning of the second century.

VII.—The Villa d'Este at Tivoli and the Collection of Classical Sculptures which it contained

Among the most characteristic features of the life of the Roman aristocracy in classical times may be reckoned the habit of retiring from the noise and bustle of the city to a country house in the neighbourhood.We hear of it among the Greeks, but with them it never attained the same vogue; and in Rome it was a comparatively recent development, for the first mention we have of a villa is that of the country house of the elder Scipio Africanus at Liternum (before 183 B.C.), while the next is that of the various estates of the jurist M. Junius Brutus (about 150 B.C.). From that time, however, the practice increased, and at the end of the Republic, as is clear from the correspondence of Cicero, a wealthy man like Cicero himself would probably possess several country houses. Under the Empire, and especially in the second century A.D., which seems to have been the zenith of prosperity in the Campagna di Roma, the number of villas became far greater.