Tom Hillard

Popilia and laudationes funebres for women

This paper falls into two parts. The first explores the nature of the honour (if not unprecedented, outstanding) paid to Popilia circa 100 B.C.; the second speculates about the content of the panegyric pronounced on that occasion. In 390 B.C., according to Livy, the Roman senate, in recognition of female generosity during the preceding Gallic siege, declared that women were to share with men the rights to funeral laudationes: matronis gratiae actae honosque additus ut earum sicut virorum post mortem sollemnis laudatio esset. The record is straightforward but the item is suspect because of the variant traditions which parallel it.

Plutarch’s Late-Republican Lives: Between The Lines

A great deal of modern scholarship has been expended on the subject of Plutarch’s sources and on the manner in which he composed his Lives . As a result of the painstaking analyses of the fifty or so cross-references in the Lives , a rough order in which they were probably written can now be descried and this has been a great boon for those who would use the information therein for historical purposes. As regards those Lives dealing with the luminaries of the late Republic, it can be said that the Lucullus and probably the Sertorius were among the first four sets to be written, that the Cicero appeared with the Demosthenes in the fifth set, then came the Sulla , the Brutus , the Caesar , the Pompeius , and subsequently the Crassus, Cato minor, Antony and Marius . (The order of the last four cannot be fixed, nor can the place of the Lives of the Gracchi.) A knowlege of this sequence explains the differences and occasional contradictions between individual Lives by exposing Plutarch’s earlier unfamiliarity with certain traditions and suggesting divergent source traditions which surfaced only when Plutarch was researching a particular character. (This, of course, makes the material even more valuable.)

Blending two virtual realities: Using Google Glass to explore a virtual reality model of the Villa of Good Fortune at Olynthus

In cultural heritage contexts, augmented reality offers the benefit of superimposing information or a recreation of a historical site or event on the view of the current site to add detail or bring it to life by restoring it to its original state or a selected time period. However, this still requires one to visit the site. An alternative to being there is a virtual reality recreation of the site that can be viewed via head mounted displays such as the Oculus Rift or life size display systems. However, what if one wants to clearly separate the past from the present or separate the information about the item from the item itself. In this study we have recreated a Virtual Reality model of a two-storey Greek Villa, the Villa of Good Fortune at Olynthus, which can be explored using Unity 5 Game technology. To enable the villa to be visited in a museum-like fashion, we provide information about the objects and villa through the additional use of Google Glass. As a result we have two layers of virtual reality: the virtual villa and the information about the villa in the Google Glass. We conducted a pilot to test the technology in use with novices and to look at the effectiveness of the Glass in helping users remember information it supplies compared to reading text on information cards in the virtual world. The pilot study found that 83% of participants preferred receiving the information via the Google Glass than in the virtual world, even though half of them found the information hard to read using the Glass. Further research is needed to determine whether either method improves cognitive function, memory recall or long-term understanding of the content.

The ancestry of nerva

It will be noticed that, in the stemma above, no line of descent is marked from the first generation registered therein to the following generations. The genealogy of the Emperor Nerva is customarily traced back to the consul of 36 b.c., M. Cocceius Nerva (above, right). This short note will underline the ancient testimony found amongst the Pseudacroniana tracing his descent from the latters brother, the consummate diplomat (above, left). There are ramifications. Amongst the items of interest will be the light shone upon what Dio and Eutropius (and/or their sources) understood to be Nervas standing at the time of his accession. Before passing on to Pseudacrons datum, it might be worthwhile pausing on that point, as well as briefly contemplating the factors that actually bore upon the emperors ancestral training.

Insulting Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi*

Abstract Plutarch records calumny directed at Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, though he offers no detail as to its content. This article speculates that Ciceros reference to rhetorical misgivings concerning her marriage offers a clue. References by Pliny and Solinus to the ominous nature of Cornelias postnatal condition prompt the further speculation that enemies of the Gracchi were able to claim that both her marriage and the birth of her children had run counter to divine injunction.