Exemplary Biography

Moving away from the nineteenth century’s concern with Quellenforschung, serious study of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia in the twentieth century produced a variety of different approaches to this Tiberian text of exemplary tales. One of the most interesting projects in this regard was produced by T.F. Carney, who scrutinised a key exemplar, Gaius Marius, across the work. In constructing a ‘biography’ from the exempla themselves, Carney’s labour contributed much to Roman history generally, but also pioneered a novel methodology for reading Valerius Maximus—one that was taken up and imitated by later scholars. This methodology, however, is not without problems, particularly in relation to the way that Valerius has shaped, structured, and arranged his work at the level of chapter. By building upon Carney’s methodology, but also considering the context of the individual chapters themselves, I provide in this paper a case study of the way in which Valerius writes the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero—a figure unique in the Facta et dicta memorabilia in being both exemplar and a major source for the work. In doing so, this article elucidates the process of ‘exemplary biography’.

Taste

This article examines the confluence of cuisine and the culture of decadence by first describing the difficulty of identifying any type of food as inherently “decadent” in physiological terms. After acknowledging that the meaning of “decadence” depends on moral, social, and aesthetic contexts, the article focuses on the dissemination of aristocratic tastes in food following the French Revolution, when chefs who had formerly cooked for nobility opened their own restaurants; on the development of the idea of the gourmand subsequent to the publication of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1825); on Charles Baudelaire’s decadent response to Brillat-Savarin in Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860); on the role of Roman history in the development of popular conceptions of decadent cuisine; and on J.-K. Huysmans’s surprisingly limited interest in “decadent dining” in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), despite his use of elaborate food metaphors to describe the literature of decadence.

Conclusions

The conclusion sums up the findings of the book and addresses the question whether the political culture of conversations could be applied to previous and later periods of Roman history. The Roman political system ran on conversation and face-to-face meetings. The main objective of this book has been to offer an extra-institutional perspective on Roman politics through the proxy of conversations and meetings. Orality has long been identified as an important component for the analysis of Roman institutions and was also crucial for the circulation of rumours and public opinion. The present book has argued that in Rome, oral communication was the default mode in politics, especially for all politics carried out outside institutions. Only when they could not reach each other in person did Roman senators and their peers resort to letters.

THE BEGINNING AND END OF APPIAN'S MITHRIDATEIOS

This article deals with the structure of Appian's Mithridateios. All the manuscripts begin with two chapters (now numbered 118 and 119) that, in his 1785 edition of Appian, Johannes Schweighäuser argued could not represent the opening of the work: a folio had been removed from its proper place towards the end of the work and mistakenly placed at the beginning. All editors followed Schweighäuser until recently, when there has been a tendency to accept the manuscript order of chapters. This creates a very different start for the work, meaning that it begins with the Greek words ὧδε μέν, an impossibly compressed way of saying ‘The following book sets out how …’. By examining the issues involved, particularly the language of Appian and his general practice in structuring the separate works of his Roman History, this article seeks to demonstrate that the Mithridateios cannot have begun as the manuscripts set out. It also argues, however, that the two chapters in question do not fit well at the end of the work, either; and that the reason for this, and for the displacement of the chapters in the first place, is the repetitive summary material at the end of the work. In chapters 118 and 119, it is argued, Appian has used different source material without integrating it properly with what preceded and followed, thus leading to an untidy ending. This was made more orderly by removing chapters 118 and 119 and putting them at the beginning.

Roman History

After a focus on social and cultural history in the last issue, this issue's offerings return us to more traditional subjects – political institutions, and historiography. That spring review ended with religion, which is where we start here: an apposite reminder that religion pervades all aspects of the Roman world. It is precisely that principle which undergirds our first book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Divine Institutions. Padilla Peralta is interested, at root, in how the Roman state became such through the third and fourth centuries bce. That is a story usually told – in a tradition going back to the ancient historians themselves – via a swashbuckling tale of successive military campaigns. Padilla Peralta, however, sets that anachronistic narrativization aside, and instead builds a careful case that between the siege of Veii and the end of the Second Punic War ‘the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments’ (1). Specifically, he shows that the construction of temples and the public activities they facilitated were a key mechanism – one as important as warfare – by which the consensus necessary to state formation was generated: the Republic more or less stumbles into a bootstrapping formula that proves to be unusually felicitous: high visibility monumental enterprises are paired with new incentives for human mobility in ways that dramatically and enduringly reorganize the rhythms of civic and communal experience. (17–18) In particular, Padilla Peralta argues that output was greater than input; that the genius – whether accidental or deliberate – of this formula was that it facilitated a confidence game whereby the res publica appeared more capable – via the apparent support of the gods whom its visible piety secured – than was in fact the case.

Republican friendship and the fall of the Roman Republic in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama

This article synthesises historical scholarship on early modern friendship and classical republicanism to argue that Cicero, through the ideal of ‘republican friendship’, exerted a much greater influence over early modern understandings of Roman history than has previously been realised. Exploring Roman plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, with reference to other classical dramas, it examines how dramatists used the Ciceronian ideal of republican friendship to create a historical framework for the political changes they were portraying, with Jonson using it to inform a Tacitean perspective on Roman history and Shakespeare scrutinising and challenging the nature of republican friendship itself.

Unknown Ancient sources of Byzantine military treatises

The article is a preliminary attempt to attribute two lists of sources from Byzantine military treatises: the first one comes from the “Taktica” by the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise (886-912), and the second — from “Taktika” by Nicephorus Ura-nus, the Byzantine strategist and dux of Antioch (1000s). A num-ber of these sources are clear enough — they are the military treatises of Arrian (“Techne Taktike”), Aelian (“The Tactical Theory”), Onosander (“Strategikos”), Polyaenus (“Strategems”), Syrianus Magister, Maurice (“The Strategikon”), Nikephoros II Phokas (“The Praecepta Militaria”), as well as the unpreserved work of the great Carthaginian commander Hannibal. Also, there is no particular doubt about Uranus's use of the writings of the moralist Plutarch of Chaeronea. Mena, mentioned in the list of Leo's “Taktica”, can be compared with a participant of the dia-logue “Menae patricii cum Thoma referendario: De scientia po-litica dialogus” (first half of the 6th century). A further compari-son of this “Dialogue” with Leo’s “Taktica” can bring some clar-ity to this issue, because Uranus made only minor changes to the text of its original source. Uranus himself made extensive use of historical sources, and brought them into the title. In general, Uranus used the historical works of Diodorus Siculus (“Histori-cal Library”), Dio Cassius Cocceianus (“Roman History”) and Polybius (“The Histories”), as well as the works (letters, diaries) of Alexander the Great or a novel about him. A separate article will be devoted to the attribution of the work of Artaxerxes. Three sources from the lists are still unclear: Pelops, Alcibiades, and Heraclides. Some light on their attribution can be cast after the publication of the “Taktika” by Nicephorus Uranus, which is yet to be done, although the first 14 chapters were published four centuries ago (in 1617).