Bibliography: pages 170-180. / The territorial expansion of Rome in the second and first centuries B.C. was accompanied by an influx of foreign luxuries and fashions into Italy. Roman,society and literature responded to this influx ambiguously, but the overall tone was one of disapproval. The association of luxury with women, attested dramatically at the rescinding of the lex Oppia, was firmly established in erotic literature by the latter part of the first century B.C. Latin Love Elegy provides an opportunity for studying the response of a particular genre to the phenomenon of luxury in an erotic context. After a general introduction to the role of luxury in the economic life of Republican Rome, the literary response to luxury is investigated with special emphasis on erotic literature. Following this, the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid are analysed sequentially and in detail with respect to how these poems treat luxury. It is found that luxury in Latin Love Elegy retains the ambiguity associated with it outside erotic literature, and functions as a rhetorical tool in the process of seduction. ,The attitude of the elegiac persona to luxury sheds light on the fictional lover, and demonstrates how the elegists accommodate in their poetry traditional and contemporary views of a real phenomenon.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-158). / In writing a biography on Themistocles, Nepos consulted Greek sources, mainly consulted Thucydides. Nepos often paraphrases and quotes Thucydides, while also expressing his opinion on the death of Themistocles. When he departs from Thucydides' account, he uses Ephorus. The other extant, ancient sources on Themistocles are predominantly Greek, namely Plutarch, Herodotus, and Diodorus. Justin's Latin epitome of Trogus also covers this period.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the following thesis I examine the experience and etiology of madness in Epicurean philosophy and focus on Lucretius’ accounts of epistemology, disease and emotion in De rerum natura. I situate my general argument within Lucretius’ accounts of the physical and cognitive aspects of emotional disorder.

"Captatio and the captator are stock elements of literature and undoubtedly existed in life, but as actual practice and figure in Roman society they are nearly impossible to identify" (Champlin 1989: 212). Captatio (inheritancehunting), as it appears in Latin literature, can be defined as the systematic courtship of elderly, preferably sickly or dying, childless wealthy people by social adventurers known as captatores, with the aim of gaining inheritances from these people by will. The methods by which this is shown to be achieved include gift-giving, salutatio, sexual favours, flattery etc. Roman literature suggests that this practice often took place within the exchange network of amicitia. This thesis examines captatio, as presented in the Latin literature of the early Empire, in the context of definable legal and social structures. It is not so much the purpose of this study to decide whether captatio existed or was a purely literary conceit, as to examine this literary topos in its broader context.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide an in-depth study of the goddess Roma and the development and spread of her cult across the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire from the second century BC to the reign of Augustus. In the east the institution of her cult was the result of expanding Roman influence in the region, and served as a means for people to conceptualise the presence of Roman power. In contrast to this, her worship in the west, as part of the imperial cult, was mandated by the emperor Augustus. In order to better understand the place of Roma in the context of the western empire, I argue that it is best to view her as a deified abstraction. The deified abstractions were a group of divinities in Rome that embodied a specific ideal or concept (the goddess Concordia embodying concord, Pax embodying peace etc.). In order to view the goddess in this manner, I examine what it meant for Roma to embody "Rome", and what this would have meant to the people who worshipped her. This examination also takes into account the views of scholars such as Mellor, who view Roma as little more than a political tool and a by-product of Greek sycophancy, as well as those scholars who view the deified abstractions in Rome as a carry-over of archaic Roman religion that held little importance to the people of Rome. Such opinions, I argue, are both erroneous and untenable.

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