The End of “Hellenistic” Athens

With Athens crippled after the Sullan sack, the city suffered greatly afterward and was without the financial means to repair buildings damaged or destroyed by Sulla’s men. Then a series of prominent Romans visited, donating money, which ironically helped to rebuild some things destroyed by the previous Romans. The first was Pompey the Great, who might have helped fund the Tower of the Winds; then Caesar, who gave money for the start of the Roman Agora. But then the Roman Civil War broke out. Athens was not part of it, although after Caesar’s assassination Brutus did spend time in Athens. After Brutus’ and Cassius’ defeats in Greece, the victor, Mark Antony, moved to Athens where the people showered honors on him to earn his favor. He spent time with Cleopatra in Egypt, but made Athens his home. Increasing tension with Octavian, especially over his relationship with Cleopatra, led to the showdown at the battle of Actium and their defeat; the following year Octavian conquered Egypt. Athens thus became subject to another Roman master: Octavian, the future Augustus, at which point the Hellenistic period is commonly seen as ending.

Demosthenes

This chapter discusses Cicero’s most successful co-option of a Greek figure, Demosthenes. Cicero primarily associated Demosthenes with his Philippics, in which he painted himself as an opponent to the tyranny of Philip II of Macedon and the saviour of democratic free speech—even though Demosthenes ultimately failed at both goals. Yet it was this very failure that made Demosthenes an appealing figure for Cicero after his defeat in the Roman civil war. This chapter demonstrates that Cicero implicitly and explicitly compared his own oratorical career to that of Demosthenes in his post-civil war rhetorical works (Brutus, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, and Orator), as well as in his speeches against Antony (Philippics) because he believed that drawing a parallel between Demosthenes’ noble failure and his own offered an attractive light in which he could cast his own mistakes and still survive as an object of classical veneration.

Acoustic Simulation of Julius Caesar’s Battlefield Speeches

History contains many accounts of speeches given by civic and military leaders before large crowds prior to the invention of electronic amplification. Historians have debated the historical accuracy of these accounts, often making some reference to acoustics, either supporting or refuting the accounts, but without any numerical justification. The field of digital humanities, and more specifically archaeoacoustics, seeks to use computational techniques to provide empirical data to improve historical analysis. Julius Caesar recalled giving speeches to 14,000 men after the battle of Dyrrachium and another to 22,000 men before the battle of Pharsalus during the Roman Civil War. Caesar’s background and education are discussed, including his training in rhetoric and oratory, which would have affected his articulation and effective sound pressure level while addressing his troops. Based on subjective reports about Caesar’s oratorical abilities, his effective Sound Pressure Level (SPL) is assumed to be 80 dBA, about 6 dB above the average loud speaking voice but lower than that of the loudest trained actors and singers. Simulations show that for reasonable background noise conditions Caesar could have been heard intelligibly by 14,000 soldiers in a quiet, controlled environment as in the speech at Dyrrachium. In contrast, even granting generous acoustic and geometric conditions, Caesar could not have been heard by more than about 700 soldiers while his army was on the march before the battle of Pharsalus.

The unexpected savior

In this chapter the author deals with the political implications of Statius’ account of Coroebus in Thebaid 1. He shows that certain traditional features of Roman narratives of political crisis (such as the idea of divine hostility and the notion of sacrificial substitution) are represented in the Coroebus episode to forge a connection with historical experiences of civil war. The author also shows that Statius builds on the ideological implications of Callimachus’ narrative of Coroebus to link the royal house of Argos to Imperial Rome, and that he turns to Virgil’s interaction with Argive mythology to transfer Callimachus’ story to a Roman civil war context. Thanks to this strategy, Statius can use the Coroebus episode as the mythical equivalent of a narrative, that of the providential outsider who comes and rescues Rome at times of crisis, which was particularly dear to both his patrons and the Flavian emperors.

VT ET HOSTEM AMAREM: JOCASTA AND THE POETICS OF CIVIL WAR IN SENECA'S PHOENISSAE

Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Jocasta's sons: the one who invaded her bed in the past, and the other who will soon invade his mother city. Seneca writes his Phoenissae to be an escalated return to the original sins of Oedipus’ incesta domus as another of Thebes’ native sons prepares to conquer his motherland.