Tag: Religion in the Ancient World

Articles

POMPEY’S POLITICS AND THE PRESENTATION OF HIS THEATRE-TEMPLE COMPLEX, 61–52 BCE

In spite of all this triumph Pompey also returned to Rome under unfavourable conditions. The majority of the senate did not respect the great general. He came from a recent noble family of late distinction, he did not rise through the ranks of the cursus honorum in the venerable Roman tradition, and he was not familiar with the protocol of the Roman senate…

Articles

THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF CURSE TABLETS [DEFIXIONES] IN BRITAIN AND ON THE CONTINENT

The tradition of writing curses on lead tablets appears to have originated in Greece, with the earliest examples having been discovered in Sicily, Olbia and Attica dated to the fifth century B.C., and by the second century AD they were being written throughout Western Europe, with this practice continuing throughout the Mediterranean until at least the sixth century A.D.

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Attire in Ammianus and Gregory of Tours

Ammianus (c. 330–c. 395) and Gregory of Tours (538–594) both wrote large-scale histories and, as a soldier and a bishop respectively, had first hand experience of many of the persons and events they wrote of. But they lived in very different worlds, the splendid Indian summer of the Roman Empire on the one hand, and the fragmented, perpetually feuding Germanic kingdoms of sixth century, sub-Roman, Merovingian Gaul on the other, where not only bodily coverings and adornments themselves changed but some attitudes towards them did too.

Articles

Vergil's Aeneid VIII and the Shield of Aeneas: recurrent topics and cyclic structures

An analysis of Book VIII of Vergil’s Aeneid will result in the observation that this book forms a cyclus in the way that it ends as it starts, the preparations being underway for the war against Mezentius. Inside this frame, two units, the first larger than the second, concentrate on the topics of Hercules’ connection with Rome and the shield of Aeneas.