This dissertation discusses the interaction of mythology and power in the Roman Republic and early Principate. It identifies a mythological paradigm that has not been recognized in previous scholarship ("pairs") and traces the use of this paradigm by Roman writers of the second and first centuries BCE. It argues that pair stories problematize the relationship between Roman elite ambition and the Republic's political ideals of equality and cooperation among magistrates. It further argues that these stories evolve over the course of the two centuries under discussion, from tales that are relatively optimistic about the potential of reconciling the tension between individual ambition and elite collegiality to tales that are extremely pessimistic. This evolution is tied to the political turmoil visible at Rome in this period. Several stories are identified as pair stories. The first and most well-attested is the foundation myth of the city, which is discussed at length in chapters two through six. In chapters seven and eight, the pattern is established through the analysis of Amulius and Numitor, Brutus and Collatinus, and the men known as affectatores regni. The historical development of these tales is discussed as thoroughly as possible. The argument throughout is that narratives from second-century writers depict pairs as representatives of productive rivalry. This rivalry encourages the elite to achieve beneficial results for the city, and can be set aside for the public good. Such depictions become less prevalent by the later first century, when the pair narratives instead tend to illustrate destructive competition. This destruction must be understood in the context of its times; the third quarter of the first century BCE saw the establishment of Rome's first monarchy in centuries. It is under the Principate that the tales again become clearly different: competition disappears. Soon afterwards, so does the use of these stories as a tool to think with.

Revision of thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California at Berkeley, 1977. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 144-148.

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Soixante auteurs latins, du troisième siècle avant JC jusqu’au cinquième siècle de notre ère, sont convoqués dans ce travail pour contribuer comme annalistes, historiens, généraux ou Césars à démêler l’écheveau des mythes, légendes, faits historiques attestés relatant un sacrifice humain à Rome et dans l’Empire. Bien peu de ces faits furent eux-mêmes reçus comme sacrifices humains par les Romains toujours prompts à les interdire dans les provinces conquises, affirmant ainsi la supériorité de leur civilisation. Notre regard de penseurs modernes, soutenu par la rémanence toujours actuelle de véritables sacrifices humains dans le monde, nous conduit à explorer la littérature latine et, nous appuyant sur les textes dans une approche comparative, à tenter de distinguer les meurtres, assassinats, châtiments, des pratiques rituelles de mises à mort sacrées d’êtres humains. Le recensement de ces sacrifices, au sens où notre conscience actuelle nous enjoint de les définir comme tels, aboutit à une typologie dans laquelle sacrifiés, sacrificateurs, divinités allocutaires prennent la place que des siècles de respect absolu de la Loi, de la tradition, de la religion ont désignée comme nécessaire à la pérennité des institutions et de l’imperium romains. Au cœur de ces pratiques, souvent maintenues pendant des siècles, la puissance du sacré émerge comme un fondement consubstantiel à l’Urbs, le substrat de croyances générées par l’époque archaïque et consolidées par une fidélité indéfectible aux prescriptions des patres conscripti. L’angoisse des Romains affrontés aux peuples italiques puis aux barbares du nord et du sud, le constat amer que leurs légions ne sont pas invincibles et furent souvent vaincues, génèrent au fil des siècles une psychose de pérennité et de domination imposant un recours constant aux dieux protecteurs. Confortés par l’enseignement des mythes, généreux dans la transmission des légendes et l’admiration des héros, tout imprégnés de la cruauté de récits sanglants, les auteurs latins ne conçoivent les sacrifices humains que comme la mise en œuvre de rites religieux légaux à valeur expiatoire ou propitiatoire dans les situations de danger extrême pour la Cité. Il faut attendre l’apparition des premiers apologistes chrétiens pour qu’émerge une condamnation définitive de toutes les pratiques sacrificielles tant animales qu’humaines, en parallèle au rejet des divinités et croyances ancestrales. Une ère nouvelle s’annonce pour Rome, ère qui ne verra pas la disparition totale de tout sacrifice humain dans l’Empire. / Sixty latin writers, over the period from 3rd century b.c, to the 5th of our era are summoned in this work to contribute as annalists, historians, generals or caesars to untangle the skein of myths, legends, historical facts reporting a human sacrifice in Rome and in the Empire.Very few of these facts have been received as human sacrifices by the Romans, always eager to forbid them in the conquered provinces, thus maintaining the superiority of their civilization. Our look as modern thinkers, sustained by the present perpetuation of true human sacrifices in the world, leads us to investigate the latin litterature and, learning on texts with a comparative approach, to try to differentiate murders, assasinations, punishments, from ritual practices of sacred executions of humain beings. The census of such sacrifices, in the sense our present consciousness binds us to define them, results in a typology in which sacrified ones, sacrificators, adressed divinities, take the place that centuries of absolute respect of law, tradition, religion have appointed as necessary for the permanence of roman institutions and imperium.In the heart of these practices, often maintained during centuries, emerges the power of sacerty as a foundation consubstantial with Urbs, the substratum of beliefs generated by archaic times and strengthened by an indefective loyalty to prescriptions of patres conscripti.The anxiety of the Romans facing italic peoples and then northern and southern barbarians, the bitter acknowledgement that their legions are not invincible and had often been defeated, generate along centuries a psychosis of permanence and domination requiring a constant turn to protective gods.Strengthened by the lesson of myths, generous in the transmission of legends and heros admiration, wholly filled with the cruelty of bloody stories, the latin writers do not conceive the human sacrifices but as the realization of legal religions rites with either an expiatory or propitious value. One has to expect the appearance of the first christian apologists so that emerges a definitive condemnation of all sacrificial practices as much animal ones as human, at the same time as ancient beliefs and gods are thrown out. A new era is on the way for Rome, era which will not see the total disappearance of human sacrifice in the Empire.

Today modern scholars only have few records left that discusses the plebeian women from the Roman society. One group that is known are females who appeared on the Roman stage as dancers and actresses. This paper serves to discuss those two groups. It will focus on the Roman authors attitudes towards female actresses and dancers during the 1 century BC from two points of views: terminology and descriptions. The study will prioritize text passages from three ancient Roman authors during the investigative time-period with focus on three women: Volumnia Cytheris, Dionysia, and Arbuscula. These women, could if successful, integrate the elite society and gain richness and reputation. They often had names and terminology that represented and identified them to a specific social class in the Roman society. These women’s lives, have mostly during the 21 centuries, been discussed and debated from different gender and class aspects with focus to increase our understanding about them. A discussion this paper tends to contribute to.

Historians, mostly engaging with written evidence, have argued that the Christianisation of the Roman Empire resulted in changes in both attitudes and behaviour towards children, resulting in a decrease in their maltreatment by society. I begin with a working hypothesis that this attitude-change was real and resulted in a reduction in the maltreatment of children; and that this reduction in maltreatment is evident in the literature. The approach to investigating this hypothesis belongs to the emerging field of digital humanities: by using programming techniques developed in the field of sentiment analysis, I create two sentiment-analysis like tools, one a lexicon-based approach, the other an application of a naive bayes machine learning approach. The latter is favoured as more accurate. The tool is used to automatically tag sentences, extracted from a corpus of texts written between 100 B.C and 600 A.D, that mention children, as to whether the sentences feature the maltreatment of children or not. The results are then quantitively analysed with reference to the year in which the text was written, with no statistically significant result found. However, the high accuracy of the tool in tagging sentences, at above 88%, suggests that similar tools may be able to play an important role, alongside traditional research techniques, in historical and social-science research in the future.

(in English): Curse tablets are interesting phenomenon in the Ancient world. The curses are usully written on the lead tablet. Totally there are about 1500 curses found, from which one third is written in latin and 309 from that amount were founf in Roman Britain. I focus on this countable group in my Diploma Thesis. Firstly I prefer the archaeological side of the artefact. The context is usually the only way to date and understand the curse tablet itself. I offer all the sites where information about them is given. We can talk also about the so called prayers for justice which are quite numerous in Britannia. They are of the same principle as curses, but they are not made for satisfied selfish ambitions. They ask gods for help. Most often they are made because of the robbery which has not been punished in the world of mortals, because the thief is not known or there are too many suspects.

A pesquisa analisa a construção do êthos do general cartaginês Aníbal nas obras de Cornélio Nepos e Tito Lívio, tendo em vista procedimentos retóricos. A primeira parte da pesquisa consiste no estudo do gênero historiográfico antigo, e sua relação com a Retórica, e ainda o estudo dos conceitos de êthos, écfrase e enárgeia. Analisamos então as estratégias discursivas de Tito Lívio para compor um caráter do inimigo adequado ao seu projeto historiográfico. Na segunda parte, discutimos os limites entre a bíos e história, e analisamos o êthos de Aníbal construído por Cornélio Nepos, o que permite discutir também as diferenças entre os gêneros, e outras questões gerais da obra do biógrafo. / The research analyzes the construction of Hannibal\'s êthos in the works of Cornelius Nepos and Livy, considering rhetorical strategies. The first part is a study of ancient historiographical genre, and its relation to Rhetoric, and also of the concepts of êthos, ékphrasis and enárgeia. Then, we reflect about the discursive strategies used by Livy to compose a character convenient to his historiographical project. In the second part, we discuss the boundaries between bíos and history and analyze the êthos of Hannibal built by Cornelius Nepos, what also allows us to discuss the differences between these genres and other general issues of Nepos\' lives.

A pesquisa analisa a construção do êthos do general cartaginês Aníbal nas obras de Cornélio Nepos e Tito Lívio, tendo em vista procedimentos retóricos. A primeira parte da pesquisa consiste no estudo do gênero historiográfico antigo, e sua relação com a Retórica, e ainda o estudo dos conceitos de êthos, écfrase e enárgeia. Analisamos então as estratégias discursivas de Tito Lívio para compor um caráter do inimigo adequado ao seu projeto historiográfico. Na segunda parte, discutimos os limites entre a bíos e história, e analisamos o êthos de Aníbal construído por Cornélio Nepos, o que permite discutir também as diferenças entre os gêneros, e outras questões gerais da obra do biógrafo. / The research analyzes the construction of Hannibal\'s êthos in the works of Cornelius Nepos and Livy, considering rhetorical strategies. The first part is a study of ancient historiographical genre, and its relation to Rhetoric, and also of the concepts of êthos, ékphrasis and enárgeia. Then, we reflect about the discursive strategies used by Livy to compose a character convenient to his historiographical project. In the second part, we discuss the boundaries between bíos and history and analyze the êthos of Hannibal built by Cornelius Nepos, what also allows us to discuss the differences between these genres and other general issues of Nepos\' lives.

This study examines the practice of restoring public buildings in ancient Rome and attendant attitudes towards them in order to develop an understanding of the Roman concept of built heritage. Drawing on a combination of archaeological and textual evidence and focusing primarily on six decades from the Great Fire of AD 64 to the AD 120s, a period of dramatic urban transformation and architectural innovation, it explores the ways in which individual structures and the cityscape as a whole was rebuilt. With specific reference to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, it is shown how buildings developed through successive reconstructions and that the prevailing approach was to modernise the aesthetic and materiality of structures, rather than to restore them to their original appearance. Furthermore, by recognising the importance of religion as a potential agent in the restoration process, a new interpretation of the exceptional treatment of the casa Romuli is proposed. With the intention of uncovering attitudes to built heritage in society more widely, the study goes beyond analysing the physical treatment of buildings to consider also how changes to the urban fabric were received by those who experienced them firsthand. Through examining descriptions of destruction and restoration in literature of the period, particularly in the works of Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder, Martial and Tacitus, an insight is gained into the ways that Rome’s inhabitants responded to the redevelopment of their historic built environment. This thesis argues for a Roman concept of built heritage that is dramatically different from many modern ideas on the subject. The findings question the extent to which the historical value and identity of a structure resided in its physicality, and demonstrates that the Roman concern for historic buildings did not equate to preservation of historic architecture.