Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King

When the emperor Claudius decided, at the instigation of his freedman Pallas, to make a highly unconventional marriage with his niece, he manoeuvred the senate, through the agency of his staunch amicus Vitellius, into passing an ‘unsolicited’ request that he marry Agrippina. He declared that his hesitations would be overcome if the senate put pressure on him: who was he to resist the will of the community, being but a citizen like the rest? Some senators even rushed to the palace promising to compel him by brute force. The incident encapsulates an ambivalence in the emperors role familiar to all readers of Tacitus. On the one hand the autocratic reality: a decision of high political moment (it was no surprise that Agrippinas son subsequently acceded to the throne) taken in the palace on the counsel of freedmen, potent and resented, involving a violation of the mos maiorum . On the other hand the elaborate and yet transparent republican facade: the senate decrees, the princeps submits to the will of the citizen body.

Image and Authority in the Coinage of Augustus

Epictetus speaks: Just as it is not open to the banker or the greengrocer to reject the value of Caesars coin, but he is obliged, whether he likes it or not, when you offer it, to hand it over for what he has for sale in exchange for it, so it is with the soul. The good on its appearance instantly attracts to itself, the bad repels. The soul will never reject the worth of something with the manifest appearance of goodness, no more than one would reject Caesars coin.

Pliny The Elder and Man's Unnatural History

Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the elder Pliny. We all have a nodding acquaintance with the Natural History , but few wish to pursue the relationship to the level of intimacy. Critics who care for the purity of Latin prose take a particularly dim view of him. Eduard Nordens verdict in Die antike Kunstprosa (i.314) is much cited: ‘His work belongs, from the stylistic point of view, to the very worst which we have’. This negative judgement was firmly endorsed by Frank Goodyear in the Cambridge History of Latin Literature :

The imperial court

The work of the last generation of historians has represented a large step towards a better understanding of the early imperial court. Several major studies have extended the detailed knowledge of the freedmen personnel, the equestrian amici principis, and of links among the senatorial elite. Above all, study of contacts between emperors and their subjects, the decision-making process and the distribution of resources and patronage, show the network of imperial personnel in operation and reveal something of the structures within which they operate. In discussing the nascent court of the Julio-Claudian period, it is necessary to generalize more broadly about the function of the court in the structure of imperial power. The social rituals of a court may act as a facade to screen the realities of power. Between Augustus and Nero the patterns of court life were developing, and still far from fixed. The court was a system of power which tended to its own perpetuation.

Roman arches and Greek honours: the language of power at Rome

It was decided that a marble arch (Ianus) should be erected in the Circus Flaminius at public expense, positioned by the spot where statues have already been dedicated to Divus Augustus and the Augustan household by G. Norbanus Flaccus, together with gilded images of peoples conquered, and an inscription on the face of that arch stating that the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this marble monument to the memory of Germanicus Caesar, since he … (account of achievements follows) … unsparing of his labours, until an ovation should be granted to him by decree of the senate, had died in the service of the republic; and above the arch there should be set a statue of Germanicus Caesar in a triumphal chariot, and at his sides, statues of his father Drusus Germanicus, natural brother of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, of his mother Antonia, his wife Agrippina, his sister Livia, his brother Tiberius Germanicus and of his sons and daughters.

Family and inheritance in the Augustan marriage laws

“Finally in his sixth consulship Caesar Augustus, securely in control, cancelled the orders he had issued as triumvir and laid the legal foundations for use in peace under principate. The bonds were more bitter from then on; watchers were set over us, with the inducement of rewards from the lex Papia Poppaea ; the aim was that if men shirked the privileges of parenthood, the state as common parent should lay claim to their vacant possessions”. Tacitus Annals 3.28.

The Herculaneum Conservation Project: Introduction

Abstract This short text places the archaeological site of Herculaneum, Italy and the Herculaneum Conservation Project in context, and introduces the volume of articles on this subject. The author outlines the importance of the site, and the public/private partnership that was launched in order to tackle the problems of decay there.

The monumental centre of Herculaneum: in search of the identities of the public buildings

This paper arises from recent work on site, under the aegis of both the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) and the Soprintendenza Speciale per i beni archeologici di Napoli e Pompei, particularly preliminary explorations in the area of the basilica designed to assess the feasibility of further excavation. It will focus on the problem of the identity of the three public buildings at the centre of the town mapped by the 18th-c. excavators, and the problem of the location of the forum. It forms a companion piece to the publication of the new work in the area of the Basilica by D. Camardo and D. Esposito (forthcoming in JRA 24)

Domestic Space in the Roman World: Pompeii and beyond@@@"Domus": Edilizia privata e societa pompeiana fra III e I secolo a. C.

B: POMPEII: A CASE STUDY 91 Salvatore Nappo The urban transformation at Pompeii in the late third and early second centuries B.C. 121 Jens-Arne Dickmann The peristyle and the transformation of domestic space in Hellenistic Pompeii 137 Mark Grahame Public and private in the Roman house: investigating the social order of the Casa del Fauno 165 Felix Pirson Rented accommodation at Pompeii: the evidence of the Insula Arriana Polliana VI 6 183 Joanne Berry Household artefacts: towards a re-interpretation of Roman domestic space 196 Pedar Foss Watchful Lares: Roman household organization and the rituals of cooking and dining 219 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill Rethinking the Roman atrium house