Learning from the Capitol’s Deliverance

Author(s):  
Jason Moralee

Chapter 5 asks what Christians were supposed to learn from the stories about the Capitoline Hill’s special status in Roman memory as the inviolable citadel of Jupiter’s people. Christian intellectuals such as Tertullian, followed by Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Lactantius, and Arnobius, ridiculed Roman history and mythology. Jerome, Ambrose, Prudentius, Augustine, and others pursued the same agenda into the fourth and fifth centuries. For these apologists, the ways of knowing the Capitol could be flipped to suddenly make clear that the beloved traditions at the heart of the Capitol’s symbolic status could not stand up to scrutiny. Of particular importance to these men was the belief that Jupiter lived in his house on the Capitoline Hill and was especially interested in protecting the Roman people through the long history of their state, a series of arguments reanimated with significance in the years following the Gothic king Alaric’s occupation of Rome in 410.

The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. Once antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance? This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.


Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Loughlin

In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels. It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, “the gospel,” and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in hisDiatessaron— as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon, even when they could not understand it. Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly.


1938 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 98-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. V. D. Balsdon

The available evidence concerning the history of the Extortion Court, the quaestio repetundarum, at Rome is tabulated opposite page 114. In view of the bulk of this evidence, it is at first sight surprising that this should be one of the most confused chapters of Roman history. Indeed, it is improbable that all Roman historians would agree upon any more precise statement of certainty than the following: that C. Gracchus, whether by a lex Sempronia iudiciaria, or by a lex Sempronia de repetundis, or by a lex Acilia de repetundis which may, or may not, be reproduced in the lex repetundarum, fragments of which are preserved at Naples and at Vienna (CIL i, 583), established equites (selected either from owners and past owners, within certain age limits, of the equus publicus, or from all those who possessed the equestrian census) either in place of, or in association with, senators as jurors in the quaestio de repetundis; that Q. Servilius Caepio, probably in his consulship in 106 B.C., proposed, and perhaps carried, a judiciary law in the interest of the Senate; that C. Servilius Glaucia either in m (Mommsen), 108 (Carcopino) 104 (Last) or 101 B.C. (Niccolini) carried a lex repetundarum and perhaps other judiciary laws in which he possibly either gave for the first time, or restored, to the equites complete possession of the juries and certainly effected two reforms in procedure, (a) by legalising the prosecution not only of recent magistrates and pro-magistrates, but also of their accomplices and (b) by introducing the form of ‘double action’ known as comperendinatio; that M. Livius Drusus, as tribune in 91 B.C., endeavoured unsuccessfully to establish, or to re-establish, as the case may be, mixed juries of senators and equites, and to make equestrian as well as senatorial jurors liable to prosecution for accepting bribes; that in 89 B.C. by a lex Plautia of the tribune M. Plautius Silvanus mixed juries were established, certainly for trials of maiestas, and perhaps for repetundae too. After this, the way is clearer, Sulla re-established senatorial juries, which survived until 70 B.C., when, by the lex Aurelia, jurors were selected from three panels—from senators, equites and tribuni aerarii.


Author(s):  
Cody Smith

In the terms of this essay we discus the economic and societal shift that would be shown in Roman History, mainly in the vain of economic differences in the Republic and Empire rule of the Roman people. The two events that are compared are the economic strategies in the 2nd Punic War and the Catiline conspiracy, and how the different economic strategies would affect the societal rule of the Roman classes. This also explores the laws that where implemented by the senate and the new tax reforms that would then give the Roman society a new way of life with the raising of taxes and the increased need for Raw materials and chattel.


Author(s):  
Augustine

This edition of St. Augustine's The City of God (De Civitate Dei) is the only one in English to provide a text and translation as well as a detailed commentary of this most influential document in the history of western Christianity. In these books, Augustine offers a Christian perspective on the growth of Rome, which its pagan apologists attribute to the providential protection of its gods. Book III spotlights both the injustices inflicted and the privations endured by the Romans, thus rebutting such claims. Book IV offers a withering account of the Roman deities, basing its analysis on the researches of Terentius Varro. This section of The City of God is a vital document for students of Roman history, and especially of Roman religion, for it provides the most detailed evidence of Varro's learned works. The volume presents Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.


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