The Oxford History Of The Classical World

At the beginning of the Annals Ennius claimed to be a reincarnation of Homer: the ghost of Homer had revealed this to him in a d ...

Cicero And Rome (By Miriam Griffin) This chapter is devoted to the period which opens with the dictatorship of Sulla in 82 BC ...

M. Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman, whose speeches and letters are such a valuable source of information fo ...

For the critic Quintilian (below, p. 657), Cicero was 'the name, not of a man, but of eloquence itself. In what did the literary ...

history of Plato's school, who taught that certain knowledge was not to be had, but that probability was an intellectually respe ...

a firm follower in Seneca (below, pp. 663 f), and his ultimate heirs were the Latin Church Fathers. 'Latin philosophy, which bef ...

his consulship, and that he governed a distant province for a year and might even have attained a triumph for his military achie ...

ruthlessness with which he destroyed his enemies and rewarded his friends could, in the long run, jeopardize his constitutional ...

been replaced by the medieval Senatorial Palace. If Sulla had hoped that his confiscations would make his veterans prosperous an ...

Cicero's speeches give a vivid picture of a highly organized system for distributing largesse to the voters in various forms, fr ...

Right and a Left by the words 'Optimates' and 'Populares' could in fact be older than the days of Sulla, for the programmes and ...

dispensation to stand for the consulship without having held the lower offices. Now, after the popular measures of his consulshi ...

Cicero, Pompey's exact contemporary, presents a similarly complex, if less sinister, political image. By conviction he was a con ...

outclassed by Pompey and Caesar; he was rich, but hardly more so than Pompey when he returned home with his eastern booty. Like ...

C. Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul and dictator of 48-44 BC. He rose to power as a politician 'of the left', but achieved h ...

he prosecuted Rabirius, first by an obsolete procedure dating from the time of the kings, then by trial before the popular assem ...

they felt to be the increase in Rome's power and wealth. The enormous opportunities for ruthless self- aggrandizement by individ ...

Painting Of A Frightened Girl: detail of a mural frieze at Pompeii (c 60-50 B.C.). This famous composition, consisting of twenty ...

Tablinum Of The House Of M. Lucretius Fronto, at Pompeii (c. AD 40-50). The rich but delicate wall- decoration marks the break-u ...

The expediency of conciliating Rome's subjects, however, had been grasped by intelligent men of differing political complexion, ...