Mark Antony’s Will and his Pietas (original) (raw)
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Creditur Vulgo Testamenta Hominum Speculum Est Morum: Why the Romans Made Wills
Classical Philology 84 (1989) 198-215
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Wills in the Roman empire: a documentary approach, JJP Supp. 23, Warsaw 2015
The present book deals with the testamentary practice as seen through papyri, tablets, doctrinal and literary sources, manuscript tradition, etc. mostly in the period after the constitutio Antoniniana. The aim of Wills in the Roman empire: a documentary approach is to reconstruct how people applied law and how testamentary practice looked like in everyday life: how wills were made and opened, what was the meaning of particular dispositions. These questions constitute a part of a wider discussion concerning the level of knowledge and application of Roman law in the provinces after the edict of Caracalla. The book is supplemented with four Appendices, where all wills from the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods are collected for the first time in scholarly literature.
(Book Chapter) Cicero's Personal Omens: Pater Patriae and Electus Diuorum
• Cicero’s personal omens: Pater Patriae and Electus Diuorum – Chapter in the book Trindade Lopes, H. (ed.) Images, Perceptions and Productions in and of Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2023). ISBN: 1-5275-9275-8. , 2023
Should the modern reader go through the works of Ancient Romans, he would be baffled by the several hundreds of omens narrated in those living words of the Roman World. Through those works written by and about men of whom we have more questions than answers, we are left with a series of omens, which told tales of signs from the gods about the future of Rome and its leaders. By the time of Cicero, and to his great distress, the Republic was in crisis as the consequences of the Empire’s expansion were felt. The political changes of the Late Republic also resulted in the rise of personal omens regarding the future of the city’s political leaders—omens showing their predestination to greatness or their looming death. Cicero was no exception. This paper provides a brief symbolic analysis and explanation of those omens and, more importantly, uses these omens’ constructed narratives to evince a better understanding of how Cicero’s image was conveyed, in what context, and by whom. Additionally, those omens are used as a case study for the dominant narrative constructions of Late Republican personal omens. Thus, the aim is to provide a better understanding of Cicero and his omens’ place in his time, how they are part of a broader phenomenon of Late Republican omens, and how the operation and manipulation of popular opinion, political propaganda, and Roman religion worked together to construct this portrayal.
Stratagems and Slip Ups - How Octavian Caesar Bested Marc Antony
This paper appeals to several primary and secondary sources on the history of the Roman Republic to argue that Gaius Octavian Caesar during the final years of the Roman Republic possessed significant political and military advantage over Marc Antony. This paper seeks to establish that by remaining in the city of Rome in the Western Republic, Octavian Caesar collected a series of advantages that are ultimately responsible for his victory and ascendence as the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
Virtue, Consensus, and Authority without Tradition: Cicero’s De imperio Cn. Pompei
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.
Roman Legal Tradition, 2012
This article gives a preliminary account of seventeen small parchment fragments, which have been the subject of detailed study by members of the team of the Projet Volterra since the end of 2009. The fragments have been identified as coming from a legal text in Latin, indeed possibly all from the same page, written in a fifth-century uncial book-hand, but with some numeration and glosses in Greek. The fragments contain part of a rubricated title, as well as the headings and subscripts to several imperial rescripts of third-century emperors (Caracalla, Gordian III and the Philips are explicitly named), organized in a broadly chronological sequence without intervening commentary.