Domitian’s Palace on the Palatine and the Imperial Image

A Roman emperor was defined not simply by his own actions, but also by the manner in which he presented himself, the way he appeared in public, and the personal style he adopted in his interaction with the Senate and the people. A major element of that style lay in the manner of his domestic life and, closely related to this, how he handled the rituals associated with the imperial residence, such as the salutation and, above all, the invitations to an imperial convivium. Should the power of the emperor be put on display or concealed? In what kinds of settings should he carry out his duties? How could he simultaneously show off his status and power while playing the princeps in the manner of Augustus? It was evident from the very start that here was a fundamental flaw in the artful construction of Augustus. This is most evident in the honorific statues and other monuments associated with the worship of the emperor, in which Augustus and his Julio-Claudian successors, during their lifetimes, were represented both as civic officials in the toga and as nude figures with bodies modelled on gods and heroes. This chapter tries to understand better the new residence that Domitian built on the Palatine, at vast expense, to the plans of the architect Rabirius (according to Martial 7. 56), as a monument of imperial projection.

Sennacherib’s Siege of Jerusalem

Fergus Millar has been a pioneer among Graeco-Roman historians in appreciating the huge importance of Near Eastern societies and cultures within the ancient world. A continuous interest within this field has been the evolution of Judah/Judaea, cradle of two of the great world religions. The difficulties inherent in the sources for studying its history have provoked intense debates, which show no sign of abating. When did the Judaean state come definitively into being? What were the forces that shaped the political landscape within which its unique traditions began to crystallise? A significant element in the development of Israelite historiography was Judah's encounter with the Assyrian Empire. This chapter argues that a crucial stage in the emergence of the state of Judah was also closely linked to contact with Assyria. It focuses on a famous episode in Judah's history, which may, when set into the wider historical and archaeological context of Near Eastern history, yield some possible answers.

Introduction: Pursuing Democracy

This introductory chapter draws attention to Fergus Millar's uncompromising desire for fairness and cooperation in all the societies and all the activities that concern him, and to the generosity with his time, energy, and intellectual force from which all his contemporaries have benefited, and still benefit, so much. The discussion is also intended to raise some issues of intellectual history: the question of how political commitments on current issues intersect with historical research, even though there seems to be no strictly logical correlation between the two; and also the problems of making a comparison between two historical situations, profoundly different in most respects, which seem all the same to echo one another in quite tangible and, at least theoretically, interesting ways.

Imperial Administration and Epigraphy: In Defence of Prosopography

Administration produces documents. In that respect Roman administration does not differ from its modem counterparts. An identifying mark of Roman administration is the libellous, submitted to the emperor or to an official by a petitioner-even when the petitioner presents himself in person before the emperor, as so many embassies and legates of cities did. All appointments to senatorial and equestrian offices were made in written form, by codicilli, letters of appointment, although we can be sure that governors of the great military commands, if setting out from Rome (or from the emperor's place of residence at the time) received their commission personally and orally from the emperor. However, all this material, with some unique exceptions outside Egypt (and a few other localities in the Roman Near East), has vanished completely. To reconstruct the working of Roman administration from what has survived is difficult and only in part possible; if we persist against the odds in trying to do so, we are bound to stumble continuously against the limits of the available evidence and of our knowledge alike. This chapter discusses the administrators and prosopographical material; and the contested existence of rules governing patterns of promotion.

In Search of the Pontic Community in Antiquity

The geographical characteristics of the Pontus combined with the historical circumstances of the region's colonization by the Greeks were important factors which defined the nature of this ‘world apart’, and these have been the dominant themes of modern historical study. However, neither physical geography nor the colonial experience inevitably implied the emergence of a distinct Pontic world or a Pontic community. Nor do the facts of geography or the major developments of external political history help to explain the identities that the peoples of Pontus claimed for themselves, or that were ascribed to them by outsiders. Indeed, there is a need to ask in what ways, and at what periods, the inhabitants of Pontus themselves felt any sense of shared identity to correspond with the outside perception, that they inhabited a world of their own. Given the obvious problems of regional definition, this chapter is divided into four sections. The first and second look at the Pontic region defined in its earliest sense as the territories and communities associated with the Black Sea itself. The third is concerned with the Pontic regions of Asia Minor. The fourth deals more specifically with the kingdom of the Mithridatids, the so-called kingdom of Pontus. But the starting point, which has led to this structure, is an analysis of the region's name, and in particular of the adjectival form Ponticus Ποντικός, which was derived from it.

In arto et inglorius labor: Tacitus’s Anti-history

In his Todd Memorial Lecture given in Sydney in 1997, Fergus Millar not only questioned the value of Tacitus as a source for the Principate, but also professed difficulty in discerning ‘what the purpose and subject of Tacitus's Annales really is’. This chapter responds to some of the issues raised by Millar both in his undergraduate lectures on Tacitus and in his Todd paper. It argues that one of Tacitus's preoccupations, particularly in the Annales, is a profound concern with the task in hand, a self-referential preoccupation not so much with the history of the Principate as an explicit theme, though that is undeniably one of Tacitus's self-imposed tasks, as with the writing of the history itself, the task of the imperial historian, and the possibilities for and limitations on historiography at this period.

Lactantius and Augustine

This chapter puts Lactantius and Augustine side by side, compares their interests and preoccupations, and attempts to confront their contributions in certain key areas of Christian thought, in particular, ethics. It suggests that Augustine knew the Divine Institutes, perhaps as early as his Ciceronian phase, for Lactantius's prose was as Ciceronian as one could get outside the master's own corpus. Already in On True Religion, Augustine shows that he had read Divine Institutes closely enough, and recently enough, to have taken up its main theme — that religion and philosophy belong together under the banner of Christianity, that Christianity is the true religion and the true wisdom. In ethics Lactantius emerges as a serious and inventive theorist. He identifies the Final End as eternal life, and, more originally, redefines the classical virtues in Christian terms. Piety and devoted worship of the Christian God become a necessary condition of justice and the other virtues. These are precisely Augustine's views in City of God. In political theory there is a large gap between the two thinkers, which reflects above all the different contexts in which they lived and wrote.

Rome and the Jews: Josephus on ‘Freedom’ and ‘Autonomy’

In Ant. 14. 77, speaking of the Roman conquest and dismemberment of the Hasmonean state in 63 bce, Josephus complains that ‘we lost our freedom and became subject to the Romans’. That is, eleutheria and Roman rule are incompatible. Three books later, however, at Ant. 17. 227, referring to the deliberations concerning the status of Judaea following Herod's death, Josephus refers to Jews who ‘desired freedom and to be placed under a Roman governor’. That is, eleutheria goes along fine with Roman rule. It is evident that two contradictory notions of freedom are at work in these passages, and this chapter investigates how Josephus could have written them both.