Roman Elite Research Articles

Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley (review)

Reviewed by: Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley Stephen Harrison Keith Bradley. Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Phoenix supplementary volume 50. Pp. xviii + 397. US$75. ISBN 9781442 644205. Bradley here collects a series of important essays on the historical and cultural context of Apuleius, which forms a welcome counterpart to the largely literary study of this author in the last generation. His general claim is that the works of Apuleius, not only the forensic oration Apologia, which has an established date and place in Roman North Africa in 158/159 ad and the Florida, extracts from speeches made in Carthage in the 160s, but also the novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which he dates to the 160s, can tell us more about the cultural and social context of their composition than has previously been recognized. This is undoubtedly so, and Bradley, as a distinguished Roman social historian, is well placed to argue the case. The 12 essays in this book fall into three categories: those on the Apologia, those on the Metamorphoses, and those on the other works and the more general cultural context. The three essays focusing on the Apologia (Chapters 1, 3, and 8) rightly emphasize the importance of this speech as “a document of social and cultural life” (3) and give us a good idea of the kind of community for which the speech was written. In Chapter 1 Bradley (alongside others, at least for Apuleius’ wife, Pudentilla) is keen to flesh out the social positions of the characters involved in the court case and brings in some new and fascinating local evidence. Here and elsewhere Bradley makes good use of art and archaeology alongside literary sources, a key benefit of this book, as of his knowledge of ancient magic, a major element in the speech. Especially important is his insistence that Apuleius was perceived as a “hostile intruder” into the local elite: Bradley’s expertise in Roman family history allows him to tease out in Chapter 3 a tight local structure of property and marriage, which the interloper disturbed (in particular his suggestion that levirate [End Page 119] marriage was a local custom is attractive), and he rightly sees that Apuleius in the speech presents himself as a model of elite Roman culture in order to impress a provincial audience. Chapter 8 provides an interesting analysis of Apuleius’ presentation of his own dress and appearance in the speech as befitting a hard-working orator as well as an ascetic philosopher, pointing to “the code-like capacity of dress and demeanour” in the Roman Empire (151) and rightly suggests that Apuleius sought impact by claiming to embody the Roman tradition of the learned orator as established by Cicero and Quintilian. These essays are an important addition to the literature on the speech. The five essays focusing on the Metamorphoses (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 11, and 12) look at some important cultural and historical themes of Apuleius’ fiction. Chapter 2 argues that religious conversion to the cult of a particular deity, so often deployed in analyzing Metamorphoses 11, is a Christianising anachronism not really appropriate to polytheistic pagan antiquity, and points to the switch between Isis and Osiris in Book 11 as evidence; this is certainly worth thinking about, though some may think that it does not do justice to Lucius’ intense (if sequential) monotheism. Chapter 4 brings in another part of Bradley’s expertise, looking at the analogy between slaves and animals as subhuman in Roman culture and as recipients of bad treatment in the novel and elsewhere: Lucius-ass’s retention of human feelings and values is nicely seen as mirroring the retained human dignity of the resistant slave. Chapter 5 again employs Bradley’s family researches in arguing that “the diversity of family life on display in the Metamorphoses is to be regarded as an authentic representation of the diversity of family life in the Roman world of the high imperial age in which Apuleius lived” (88). Here one can agree that the cultural values and models deployed are indeed those of Antonine Rome, but the particular prevalence of adultery in the novel (for...

Fallax Imago: Ovid's Narcissus and the seduction of mimesis in Roman wall painting

In the late first century CE, the myth of Narcissus became one of the most frequently represented subjects in Roman wall painting. The well-known, often reproduced images from the House of Octavius...

The Gordian Knot of Interpretation: Roman written sources, the idea of socio-cultural evolution and the concept of Romanization

In the Roman Empire, under the Greek influences, authors shared the idea of “the degree of humanity”, according to which the Romans formed value judgements about the “barbarian” societies. The framework of reference was constituted by the Roman society itself, taken as superior and predestined as the centre of the known world. The criteria for comparison were based upon the natural and climatic environment, socio-political organization, economy, religion, ways of life, warfare, marital practices, certain kinds of material culture and cultural practices in general. According to this view, the Mediterranean societies were “the most human”, and the level of humanity declined in direct relation to the geographical remoteness and other differences as compared to the centre. Although these speculations were not organized into a unified interpretive framework, like the modern social theories, they nevertheless were implicit assumptions of the Roman elite. This „naive“ or “common-sense anthropology” has had a strong impact on the formation of the premises of the modern anthropological theories, due to the general role of the ancient written sources in the processes of knowledge formation in modern Europe. It is therefore possible to assume that the ancient ideas, along with the later ones, played an important role in the shaping of the postulates of the early theory of socio-cultural evolution – the implicit base of interpretation of human societies during the 19th century. Consequently, the written sources have played a double role in the processes of formation of the concept of Romanization – directly, as well as through socio-cultural evolution, onto which the concept itself relied. In this way, the prejudices stemming from the discourse of Romanization gained the air of scientific interpretations, verified by two seemingly independent reference systems.

Ground‐penetrating Radar in the Regio III (Pompeii, Italy): Archaeological Evidence

ABSTRACTGround‐penetrating radar (GPR) investigations were performed in Pompeii, in an area of the Regio III that is not yet fully excavated but is bounded by areas where much is known about the ancient Roman city. At the site studied, large areas containing preserved archaeological features are buried under as much as 8 m of volcanic deposits. The GPR survey was conducted using perpendicular reflection profiles in a grid adjacent to a scarp parallel to Nola Street, which allowed a direct correlation between the exposed ruins and the radar reflection features. An analysis of the GPR reflection profiles clearly shows the layering of the volcanic materials, with the underlying Roman architecture clearly differentiated. Amplitude analysis of all reflections within the grid produced spatial maps of the ruins containing a particular distribution of Roman elite buildings inside a Classic insula, including monumental fountains, apses and villas (domus); such architectural features were commonly incorporated into residences (villas) of wealthy people. Typically suburban districts of Roman cities contain non‐elite houses, whereas wealthy persons lived are in the city centre. However, in this case because these features are found away from the central district of Pompeii, it is possible to argue from the GPR analysis for the presence an elite off‐centre district possibly documenting suburban growth that reresents a newly wealthy society produced by the growing economy at the time of the eruption. The importance of collecting GPR reflection data in different directions was apparent in this study, as many of the architectural features of interest were visible in some profiles but not visible in others, depending on the orientation of the antenna dipolar field orientations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A.1. Turia, Lepidus, and Rome's epigraphic environment

This paper discusses the episode in the laudatio 'Turiae' of an elite Roman woman's interaction with the triumuir M. Aemilius Lepidus (LT 2.13-17). Scholarship of the last century has discussed this element of the LT from a variety of standpoints. None of these treatments has approached the description of the experiences and actions of the laudata from the perspective of the ancient consumer of information and meaning within the complete epigraphic environment of the inscription. I will look at the ways in which a contemporary audience perceived and understood the details of this episode in the life-history of the laudata in relation to the wider sensorium of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic cues comprising the funerary monumentum.

‘Extraction from the Mortal Site’: Badiou on the Resurrection in Paul

This essay explores the heuristic force of Alain Badiou's theory of ‘truth-processes’ for an understanding of the psycho-social effect of Paul's gospel upon first-century inhabitants of the Roman Empire, both elite and lower class. Badiou's analysis of the ‘situated void’ around which existence is constructed directs attention to figures of the subject as ‘living death’ in the literature of the first century, illuminating the process by which a new, liberated self came forth, in response to Paul's message of the resurrection. An immanent critique of Badiou's singular emphasis upon the resurrection as the Pauline ‘truth-event’ gives rise to an hypothesis regarding Paul's description of his gospel as ‘Christ crucified’ in his later epistles: Paul dared to name the ‘situated void’ around which the existence of slaves was constructed in order to redeem the oppressed, whose identities were submerged in shame, from the annihilating power of the cross.

V Italy and the Villa Estate, or, of Cabbages and Kings

Luxury villas and working farms are crucial to Roman interest in what constitutes landscape, and they form the backdrop for this Survey's final two chapters. By the mid-first century BCE, lavishly designed and decorated villas represented not just a source of revenue qualifying their wealthy and educated owners for entering public life, but also an alternative performance venue to the traditional urban sites for political debate – Senate and Forum. Relationship with and management of land became a way of ‘defining what it meant to be a member of the Roman elite, in excluding outsiders from this powerful and privileged group and in controlling insiders.

Greek Verse Inscriptions in Roman Egypt: Julia Balbilla's Sapphic Voice

In 130 ce, Hadrian and Sabina traveled to Egyptian Thebes. Inscriptions on the Memnon colossus document the royal visit, including fifty-four lines of Greek verse by Julia Balbilla, an elite Roman woman of Syrian heritage. The poet's style and dialect (Aeolic) have been compared to those of Sappho, although the poems' meter (elegiac couplets) and content are quite different from those of her archaic predecessor. This paper explores Balbilla's Memnon inscriptions and their social context. Balbilla's archaic forms and obscure mythological variants showcase her erudition and allegiance to a Greek past, but while many of the Memnon inscriptions allude to Homer, Balbilla aligns herself closely with Sappho as a literary model. The main question raised here is what it means for Julia Balbilla to imitate Sappho while simultaneously honoring her royal patrons in the public context of dedicatory inscriptions.

Each Man's Father Served as his Teacher: Constructing Relatedness in Pliny'sLetters: In loving memory of Harry Bernstein (1913–2008)

Recent scholarship has examined Pliny's efforts to embed his acts of patronage in the rhetorical context of paternity. This paper examines how Pliny employs the discourse of paternity in representing himself as a mentor and exemplary model for young men, with particular focus on Book 8 of the Letters. Though he lacks a child or adoptive heir himself, Pliny embeds his work in a tradition in which Roman writers from the Elder Cato onward presented literary authority as coextensive with paternal authority. In Ep. 8.14, Pliny presents an idealized image of education by fathers or paternal surrogates that legitimates both his receipt of benefits from his mentors and his own efforts to instruct young men in the manner of a father. Pliny presents his published work as a model for Genialis in Ep. 8.13 and his personal life as an example for Junius Avitus in Ep. 8.23. Ep. 8.10, 11 and 18 provide further contexts for Pliny's discourse of paternity. Two additional examples of the creation of relatedness in elite Roman culture (interactions with caregivers and the experience of contubernium) are briefly discussed. I consider in conclusion how study of Pliny's Letters may contribute to the larger cross-cultural project of understanding how otherwise unrelated persons, through informal activities such as mentorship, may construct relationships more salient to them than their biological or legal kinships.

Festinatio (Haste), Brevitas (Concision), and the Generation of Imperial Ideology in Velleius Paterculus

Scholarly assessments of the two-volume universal history of Velleius Paterculus have long been caught up in the debate over its value or genre. This approach fails to appreciate the work as a cultural document demonstrating the crucial generation (or reproduction) of imperial ideology by average Roman elites. In particular, a reassessment of Velleius's references to the festinatio (haste) and brevitas (concision) with which he writes provides unique insight into the intersection between a competitive literary culture in elite circles and political power.

Critical Trends in Interpreting Sulpicia

Critical Trends in Interpreting Sulpicia1 Alison Keith University of Toronto akeith@chass.utoronto.ca The elegies of Sulpicia have long been held to constitute an enigma in Roman literary history and the author herself an anomalous figure: the feminists' Sulpicia, a female author in a masculine literary culture;2 the philologists' Sulpicia, a young lady in a literary establishment dominated by mature men of letters;3 the historians' Sulpicia, an apolitical author in the highly politicized aftermath of the civil wars.4 The only feature that she seems to share with her older and more famous Augustan contemporaries—the elegists Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, as well as Vergil, Horace, Maecenas, Livy, and Asinius Pollio—is her elite social status, as the daughter of the orator Servius Sulpicius Rufus (son of Cicero's friend, the jurist of the same name)5 and the niece of the senior statesman, orator, and literary patron M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Then again, perhaps even in this respect she may be supposed to constitute an anomalous figure, at any rate in the eyes of an earlier generation of literary critics who rated the Augustan poets as far superior to her in poetry as they were beneath her on the social scale. A more recent critical trend, however, has drawn attention to conventional features of Sulpicia's verse in order to assimilate her to elegiac poet-lovers and/or beloveds. It is this line of inquiry I wish to interrogate here, by reviewing what I shall characterize as two diametrically opposed types of "assimilationist" readings of her poetry that have emerged in late twentieth-century scholarship on Sulpicia. Matthew Santirocco, in his 1979 article "Sulpicia Reconsidered," inaugurated a new saeculum in Sulpician studies by eschewing biographical speculation for careful examination of the "technique and traditional features" of Sulpicia's poetry.6 Documenting in detail her [End Page 3] debt to the literary traditions of erotic elegy and elegiac epigram, he concludes that she drew "her themes, certain technical features, and several conventions from elegy, her form and much of her style . . . [from] another related tradition, elegiac epigram."7 In particular, Santirocco identified an important debt to Catullus' poetry in Sulpicia's small corpus. For N. J. Lowe, too, writing a decade later, Sulpicia's poetry is primarily Catullan in expression and form,8 though he also suggests that "we might see the Sulpician elegidia as attempting on the epigram scale what Tibullus explored more diffusely in his longer elegies."9 In exploring the generic affiliations of her poetry, both critics emphasized the formal artistry of the work and sought to contextualize the poet and her literary production in the same literary milieu that fostered the elegiac poetry of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Feminist critics have pursued the implications of these readings tenaciously. Judith Hallett's well-known paper on "Women as Same and Other in Classical Roman Elite"10 develops and complicates these findings to argue that Sulpicia represents herself not only as "Same" in her adoption of the elegiac conventions employed by her contemporaries in their poetic self-representations (e.g., as the victim of a blocking figure who conventionally separates poet-lover from beloved), but also, paradoxically, as "Other" in her self-differentiation from her fellow elegists (e.g., in her similarity to their mistresses). Thus, Hallett's Sulpicia works within the conventions of elegiac poetry but radically revalues them through her inversion of the genre's gender roles. Similarly Maria Wyke and Barbara L. Flaschenriem have explored the ways in which Sulpicia's "literary persona combines features which serve, in the texts of her fellow elegists, to distinguish or individuate the male and female protagonists, or which receive special emphasis in the case of one sex."11 Moreover, Emily A. Hemelrijk implicitly extends Hallett's conclusions about Sulpicia in her 1999 study of educated women from Cornelia to Julia Domna.12 Accepting the scholarly consensus that places Sulpicia's poetry in the tradition of "Roman 'subjective' love poetry," she explores the complications and contradictions...

False Fronts: Separating the Aedicular Facade from the Imperial Cult in Roman Asia Minor

When found in the central rooms of gymnasia of Roman Asia Minor, the multiple-column, multistory aedicular facade of the "marble style" has been thought to symbolize "the imperial cult." Yet that design is never used for actual provincial temples dedicated to the worship of emperors. This article shows how the theory that aedicular facades set the scene for worshipping emperors lacks any foundation; the inscriptions, sculpture, and furnishings of the so-called Kaisersäle honor the patron deities and benefactors of the cities in question as much as the emperors, and have been taken to signify cult when they in fact do not. The meaning behind this ostentatious decor is then pursued beyond gymnasia, to theaters, bouleuteria, temples, gates, libraries, nymphaea, and even tombs. It was a sign of the theater, of Roman elite status, and even a form of conspicuous consumption; but many gods, personifications, and civic donors, not just the emperors, were associated with it.

CONSTRUCTING ROMAN IDENTITIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY? MATERIAL CULTURE ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER

Following recent theoretical redefinitions of concepts such as ethnic identity, this paper explores the possibility of using archaeological evidence to investigate Roman identities in the 4th to 5th c. western frontier provinces. The difficulties of the evidence and the complexities of studying identity through material culture are discussed. Possible approaches to the archaeological material are illustrated through a case study of the Rhine-Danube frontier in the 4th and 5th c. The use of material culture to create military identities at death for Roman soldiers on the frontier line is discussed, together with an analysis of the relationship of this military culture to subsequent weapon burials, and the use, by Germanic societies, of elite Roman and Byzantine objects to create ruling, martial identities in the 5th c.

Roman Taste

Clearly a precarious topic, ancient Roman tastes were defined by a combination of ideological and sensory considerations. The ancient sources appear to lead to some confusion as to what defines good or proper taste, and this confusion could represent social conflict in Rome. Exotica and elaborate cookery certainly moved elite Romans away from the tastes and eating practices of their agrarian ancestors and sometimes the distance between those Romans who were able to eat elaborately was quite far over those who could not. Other times, elite culinary difference was expressed though simpler foods or subtle flavor notes. In addition, a number of Roman ingredients have been cited by ancient sources as having popular appeal regardless of their generally repulsive flavor characteristics.This article attempts at an understanding of what constitutes Roman elite taste consciousness, or how Roman taste was motivated by forces outside of physiology such as culture or status. This inquiry assumes that there were two criteria for elite food access. First, a Roman noble needed to have the proper “taste” for elite entitlement. Second, this person needed established culinary resources to sustain his or her elite position. Evidence is gathered from across antiquity, although the period of particular interest to this discussion is the late Republic and early Imperial eras, when social power was concentrating into the hands of a few.

P. Clodius, ses amis, ses partisans, sous le regard de Cicéron

P. Clodius, his friends, his followers, under Cicero’s gaze. Cicero, to win over his opponents, used to play on words and to resort to metonymy. The followers and friends of P. Clodius Pulcher, the popular tribune, were thus labelled as just out of slavery, or as foreigners. But if some of them belonged to the working classes, others came from the Roman elite ; others, at last, were enfranchised Italians, who had been waiting since more than thirty years to be inscribed in the Roman tribes.

The reader makes the text: model readers on the move

Plutarch and Seneca, with their works on anger, wanted to educate their readers onthe subject. But who were they, these readers? This article examines and confronts the “model readers” of both works. It argues that Seneca’s model reader belonged to the Roman elite, professionally busy with something else, but turning to philosophy in order to deal with anger in an appropriate way. Plutarch, on the other hand, wrote for Greeks and Romans who were or could be his friends, probably living an active life but interested in and familiar with philosophy throughout their lives.

Chronicle of the Roman Republic: the rulers of ancient Rome from Romulus to Augustus

From Romulus to Augustus, the Chronicle of the Roman Republic examines the succession of leaders who took Rome from a small fortified hilltop to the greatest empire of antiquity. Here we meet the builders of Rome - superstitious, brutal and utterly uncompromising, but often men of great honour and principle. They could stoop to the depths of depravity, but could also be unflinchingly, even suicidally, brave. This book describes 56 of the foremost Romans of the Republic, spanning the centuries from its birth to its bloody death. In this history we see the best and worst of the Roman elite. Some, such as Tarquin the Proud, Julius Caesar and Pompey are well known. Others are less familiar - men like Licinius Crassus, a kind father and a loving husband, who captured slaves in their thousands. Or Cato the Censor, upright and incorruptible, xenophobic and misogynistic. This is a highly readable and authoritative account, ideal for home or school reference, and as a companion to the bestselling Chronicle of the Roman Emperors.

L’atelier de Carthage et la diffusion de la monnaie frappée dans l’Afrique vandale et byzantine (439-695)

This article offers an update of numismatic research and monetary history studies on the Carthage mint in the Vandal and Byzantine period in which the author has been participating for the last three decades. It considers first the various problems in the dating of Vandal anonymous issues, many of which can still be debated in the absence of clear hoard evidence. The iconography and inscriptions of Vandal coinage illustrate the ambiguous status of the kings who never claimed more than the title rex and who respected de facto the imperial monopoly of gold striking, while advertising the provincial values of the Roman elite. It is thus unique among contemporary Germanic coinages which were less creative and imitated closely the Roman model by acknowledging the emperor’s supreme authority as federate or clients. The successive Byzantine coinage in Carthage took over part of the monetary tradition set up by the Vandals and developed one of the most original productions in the Empire as regards metrology, fabr...

Beyond the Rhetoric (Part 2): Juvenal and the Roman Elite in Satires 4-6

Beyond the Rhetoric (Part 2): Juvenal and the Roman Elite in Satires 4-6

Medical Challenges for the New Millennium: An Interdisciplinary Task

List of Contributors. Introduction S.N. Willich, S. Elm. I: Historical Perspectives. Developments in Ancient Medicine - Models for Today's Challenges? Contemporary Medicine and the Christianisation of the Roman Elite - a Parallel S. Elm. 'Dying Well' and the Doctors T.W. Laqueur. II: From Alternative to Integrative Medicine. Complementary Care in the United States D. Riley. Alternative Medicine in Germany - Personal Views from a Critical Observer H. Albrecht. III: Restructuring Health Care Systems. Rationing Health Care in Germany: Constitutional Opportunities and Limits M. Nettesheim. Structural Changes in Health Care Systems - the Advent of 'e-healthcare' S.N. Willich. IV: New Technologies. Minimally Invasive Robotic Telesurgery F. Tendick, S.S. Sastry. The Strange Case of Molecular Medicine - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Revisited? M. Paul. V: Ethical Reflections. Ethical Dilemmas in Medicine at the Beginning and the End of Life D. Koch-Weser. The Idea of Progress in Medical Ethics J. Glover.