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In recent decades, Roman sumptuary laws have been actively studied in classical studies, which are traditionally associated with the theory of “decline of morals”: according to this theory, the crisis of the Roman state was caused by the process of decomposition of traditional norms and values under the influence of foreign morals, luxury and wealth. In this context, the relevance of the undertaken research is obvious. The author sets himself the goal of studying in detail the internally contradictory essence of such a phenomenon as Roman sumptuary laws. In particular, he draws attention to the conventional nature of the term “sumptuary laws” used in Russian-language literature, which does not accurately convey the meaning of the Latin phrase leges sumptuariae. The study draws on a range of Latin texts and other sources, as well as an extensive research literature. As a result, the author comes to the following conclusions: firstly, if the word luxus was associated with phenomena introduced into the life of the Roman civil community by the Hellenistic civilization and resulting from the military activity of Rome in the south of Italy and beyond, then the term sumptus was associated with the original Roman ideas about moderation and frugality, which must be considered, first of all, in the context of the life of the familia and its economic activities. Secondly, if the term luxus reflected the concept of luxury as such, then the use of the word sumptus was associated with housekeeping in general and with the concept of expenses in particular.

The scientific study is devoted to the consideration of the legislation process as a form of legal proceedings in the law of ancient Rome. It is noted that in the modern national legal literature, scientific research related to ancient Roman law, as a rule, deals with the problems of substantive law, both civil and family law, and the institutions of procedural law are considered to a much lesser extent. Currently, research on this issue is relevant, since certain institutions and categories of the national legal system are based on the structure of Roman law, its principles, and were developed under its influence. It is emphasised that the legislative form, which was used in private cases in the first half of the Republic, can be considered the first historically developed form of procedure in Roman justice. The procedure was called legislative because it was based, in contrast to the old forms of private self-reprisal, exclusively on the law. It required the parties to act per legis actiones, i.e. without resorting to violence, in a lawful manner, on legal grounds, in a lawful manner. Compliance with the legislative form of legal proceedings guaranteed the legality and formality of the claimant’s (plaintiff’s) claims and the absence of elements of analogy in the claim and provided for the occurrence of only the consequences specified in the law. The specific features of the legislation process (staggered nature; formality, ritual and ritualism; certain passivity of the authorities) are investigated; its varieties (betting process; “laying on of hands” process; sacrifice process; “appointment of a judge” process; “conditional” process) and stages (establishment of the plaintiff’s right and legal qualification; consideration of the case on the merits) are analysed. The great importance of the legislation form for the further development of the legal process is due to the fact that the legislation form divided the legal action into the filing of a claim, which provided for its formal recognition by the judicial authorities, and the actual legal proceedings, which had no regulation until a certain period. The author examines the peculiarities of Roman legal proceedings and concludes that the legislation process was a rather complex procedure which in its content was similar to the customary.

Oath-taking during Roman Antiquity constitutes a telling example of how words and material matter interplay and relate to one another. Ancient Latin literature provides a myriad of representations of oaths sworn, both fictive and supposedly historical, which allude to contemporary notions of materiality. In this study, a selection of personal oaths (oaths sworn between individuals, as opposed to large-scale official ones) from Roman literature are explored in terms of materiality and agency. The chosen oath examples are all phrased using a ‘material language’ and their oath formulae include what is here termed as objectifying wordings, that is the reference to abstract things through material matter. The present article aims to demonstrate that Roman authors sometimes chose to (have their characters) swear by material matter – instead of something abstract and intangible – in order to better express what is actually sworn by or what is actually put up as deposit in the portrayed oath: in other words, how they could utilize contemporary notions of materiality as literary tools for the formulation of personal oaths.

ABSTRACT The methodological rigor and acting according to words make Professor Franco Gnoli an example to follow. The scientific vision that can be obtained from his works of the Roman public and criminal law, which he studied in an era where was instead prevalent the interest in private law, paved the way for a broad revisitation of Mommsen’s theoretical approaches. This perspective was and still is highly fruitful because it highlighted the unity of the legal phenomenon in the thought of the Roman jurists. His memory is alive in all the students he trained through his rigorous and passionate lessons in Roman Law and who then followed his footsteps in the Academia.

In the first part of the study, after having presented the general features of the Ciceronian corpus of letters, their basic characteristics and formal features, the author analysed the concept of friendship in the epistles on the one hand and Cicero’s relationship with Atticus (the addressee of half of his letters and his most enduring and closest friend) on the other. In the second part of the study, he focuses on the family ties that emerge from Cicero’s letters: first, Cicero’s relationship with his wife, Terentia, and his children, Tullia and Marcus, is analysed, followed by the emergence of grief over the death of his daughter Tullia and the role of friends as consulatori in the period of mourning, which at the same time completes the Roman concept of officia amicitiae outlined in the previous part.

В данной статье рассматривается роль эпохи (период правления императора Адриана, 117-138 гг.) культурного и политического упадка Древнего Рима в поэме Ц. Норвида «Quidam». С точки зрения литературоведческого анализа художественного текста изучено восприятие автором исторического периода в контексте произведения. Актуальность данного исследования обусловлена, в первую очередь, недостаточным количеством исследований на данную тему в русскоязычной филологической науке, а во-вторых, связана непосредственно с важной ролью исторического контекста для рецепции художественного текста польского писателя. Цель статьи заключается в выявлении особенностей интерпретации древнеримской темы в произведении Ц. Норвида и анализе значения исторического времени и пространства в поэме «Quidam». Практическая значимость статьи заключается в возможности использования данного материала при изучении зарубежной литературы в целом и польской литературы 19 века в частности.

With his Sententiae, diuisiones, colores rhetorum et oratorum, published around 30 CE, Seneca the Elder, father of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, produced an anthology of excerpts from declamations (forensic or deliberative mock speeches) by 116 different declaimers (teachers, students and non-professional practitioners) who lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. By citing these declaimers, Seneca intended to offer an informed and critical view of their qualities and shortcomings, and to memorialize the emerging literary genre of declamation. But his text also lends itself to a more social reading. By mining the Sententiae, diuisiones, colores for mentions of direct contact between declaimers, and by applying the methodology of network analysis, it becomes possible to read the anthology as a depiction of a structured intellectual milieu. The aim of this article is to identify and reconstruct a set of social relationships within the declamatory world described in the anthology, using mentions of criticism (where one declaimer comments on the performance of another) as markers of relationships. After explaining the goals and biases of Seneca and their impact on his depiction of the declamatory milieu, this article expounds a method for: 1) identifying concrete links between declaimers with a reasonable degree of certainty; 2) building a set of usable data based on these findings; and 3) assessing the significance of the expected results given the incompleteness of the anthology. It then reconstructs and plots this particular declamatory network, identifying its central figures and mapping its main relational structures.

Abstract - The transcription of Eugen Huber’s notes on Karl Georg Bruns’ ‘Pandekten’ course held in 1870 in Berlin constitutes a meritorious work that makes a previously unpublished source available: it is an important testimony not only of the romanistic training of Huber, the father of the Swiss Civil Code, but also of the teaching role of Bruns, from whose lectures emerges the awareness of Roman law as a common basis for European legal culture.

Abstract - Some texts by Alfenus Varo and Titius Aristo speak of an actio negatoria granted in cases where the servitude relationship appears difficult to configure: since the formula ‘ius non esse ’ is also used by Alfenus in place of reivindicatio, it appears extremely likely are not hypotheses of edictal actions but of formulas dating back to the procedure of the agere per sponsionem.

Abstract - The paper deals with aequitas and its relationship to ius from the perspective of the declaimers of Seneca the father’s anthology of controversiae, a scholastic practice in many ways connected to the world of jurists, which also teaches to apply rhetorical status theory, in turn of great importance for the development of jurisprudence. In them, aequitas, which appears in the divisio between quaestiones iuris and quaestiones aequitatis or tractationes, adapts the ius, general and abstract, produced by the lex to the individual concrete case without opposing it.

Abstract - From 23 to 25 June 2022, the eighth edition of the ‘Laboratorio Romanistico Gardesano’, organised by the Universities of Milan, Rome 'Sapienza', Trento and Verona, was held in Gargnano (BS). The first part of the event was dedicated to the ‘Moot court competition’, a competitive trial simulation in Roman law aimed at first-year law students. In the second part, the doctoral seminar took place in which many young scholars had the opportunity to present and discuss their research results with a specialist audience.

Abstract - In ancient Rome, the phenomenon of infants fed by hired nurses could be dated back as early as the late republic. The practice became even more widespread during the imperial age, owing to the updating social customs and the medical culture of that time. Although it is widely believed in the literature that the age of the Antonines there was an attempt to curb this tendency, by reverting back to encouraging mothers to assume the role of feeding the infants, there is no specific legislative intervention to attest. However, my research points out that the testimony of Gellius, who reports on Favorinus, a strenuous defender of traditional maternal care for infants, and some other sources from the 2nd century seem to give actual confirmation of the great topicality of this subject at that historical moment.

Abstract - The theme of the lex Voconia is illustrated by the author in an innovative way with respect to the previous bibliography on the subject, focusing on the rationale of the lex of wanting to affect the juridical-social position of women. It is illustrated how the provision was often evaded – also through recourse to historical sources – and how, despite the validity of the law, there were Roman marriages in possession of large assets. The problem of female succession thus presents itself as a starting point for reflection on the juridical status of women.

Abstract - It is known that the hostile attitude of Marcus Aurelius towards Christianity has even an autograph attestation in a famous fragment of Marc. Aur. Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν 11.3, based on this testimony the princeps philosophus, on the one hand reproached the Christians for their lack of reasonableness, on the other the obstinate theatricality with which they faced martyrdom. At the end of an analysis aimed at retracing the testimonies of the acts of the Martyrs, apologists and historians and writers, it was decided to 'drop' the individual episodes attributable to the twenty years of the Aurelian principality in the broader context of administrative and legislative reforms of the princeps . What emerged was the absence of an ad hoc regulatory provision and more generally a hostile attitude of administrators and officials, which also reflected a hostility of the ‘intellighenzia’ of the time. In essence, more elements, local – such as the gladiator shows – and global, such as the plague and religious and normative conservatism, as well as the administrative reorganization, contributed, perhaps beyond an ill-concealed antipathy of the princeps, conservative both in the legislative and in the religious one, to create unfavorable conditions for Christians, during the Aurelian age.

Abstract - The interpretatio Gai Institutionum Augustodunensis is – despite the large lacunae in the manuscript that made it known in 1897 – an exceptionally important document. This scholastic commentary – written at the end of the 4th or on the threshold of the 5th century A.D. – allows us to perceive how the law of the age of the principate still represented the centre of gravity of scholastic education in Late Antiquity. What we hear again, in the Interpretatio of Autun, is precisely the vox magistra celebrated by Justinian in the constitutio Omnem 1. This writing was probably composed in the Galliae, perhaps within the Menianae scholae of Autun.

Abstract - The work examines the involvement in entrepreneurial activity, especially maritime, of alieni iuris and females. In the context of the broad theme relating to the relationships between man, land and sea (on which some preliminary reflections are carried out), the various roles relating to the administration of the ship (exercitor and magister navis) and the possibility of their entrustment to people other than pater familias are briefly reconstructed. A comparison follows between the text contained in D. 14.1.1.16, relating to the actio exercitoria, and the analogous affirmation reported in D. 14.3.7.1 on the actio institoria, from which the irrelevance results of sex and of subjection to potestas, on one side of the exercitor, on the other of the institor. In the light of these sources, the intermediation of filii familias, slaves, women sui iuris and in power, as well as subjects of minor age, is taken into consideration, with a distinction between impuberes and adulescentes.

Abstract - This report retraces the central passages of the conference Classical Jurists of Jewish Origin in German Legal Science in the Nineteenth and First Half of the Twentieth Century, organized by Fulvio Cortese and Luca Nogler of the University of Trent, two days of work in which the figure of Hugo Sinzheimer (1875-1945) and the jurists presented in the work, Jüdische Klassiker der Deutschen Rechtswissenschaft of 1938, were discussed. Scholars of public law, Roman law, labor law, as well as philosophy of law, morality and politics were confronted with the personalities and works of a selection of the jurists included in Sinzheimer's work.

Abstract - Starting from the 1950s, the reaction to the interpolation critique, on the one hand, allowed the abandonment of an extremism that had led to excesses and apriorisms, and on the other, led to an anti-interpolationist extremism and to a consequent superficiality in the study of the sources, approached in a sectorial and uncritical manner, rejecting any possibility of their alteration. Illustrative of such illogical genuinism are the attempts to save two texts, namely D. 8.5.10. pr.-1 and D. 39.3.1.23, which, despite appearing to raise insurmountable problems both as regards the terminology and therefore the conceptualisations used by them, and especially the legal regulation of iura in re aliena implied by them, are considered classical. Urgent then is the need to revise this tendency, aspiring to a «critical neo-interpolationism», centred on the historical study of the text and on the identification of its possible various drafts - focusing on the specific reasons that led the late antique jurist or the Justinian commissioner to that specific type of intervention on the classical text - with the consequent return of the sources to their intrinsic diachrony.

Abstract - The article aims to illustrate the topic of Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti based on the latest studies, briefly considering its various aspects (bibliography, discovery of the manuscript, its edition, formal and content aspects, nature of the work). The approach is particularly problematic, aimed at pointing out the doubts and perplexities that persist and require new solutions or hypotheses. In particular, the emphasis is placed on the possibility of a more concrete use for the particular study of the sources that appear in it (individual norms of the Gregorian, the Hermogenian, the Theodosian, the Pauli Sententiae) and their development in the Late Antiquity centuries, thanks to the specific comparison with the tradition in common use.

Abstract The contribution focuses on the publication of Diocletian’s edict on prices in Egypt. A scrap of papyrus, from Oxyrhynchus, PSI. XVII 1685 recto, preserves the initial part of a text that the editor Marco Stroppa has recognized as the draft of a publication edict of a strategos, datable between 293 and 305. The PSI. XVII 1685 recto’s review suggests it is the draft of the publication edict of Diocletian’s tariff: it would be an important testimony, which adds to the law’s publication in Phrygia, by Tiberius Fulvius Asticus. Precisely this edict of the praeses provinciae allows to integrate the surviving lines of PSI. XVII 1685 recto, and to reconstruct the entire text.

The institution of slavery was characteristic of all the civilizations from Mediterranean basin in ancient times. However, slavery had its widest application in the Roman state, for which it was of immense importance, since slaves were seen as the driving force of Roman social and economic system. Slaves (servus, puer) were treated as “speaking tools” (instrumentum vocale). The position of the individual in the Roman state was regulated in detail, and there were three special positions: status civitatis (Roman citizen or foreigner), status familiae (elder of the family or its member under the rule of pater familias) and status libertatis (slave or free man). Slaves had a special legal status in Roman law at the time. Unlike animals and things over which power was referred to as domicium, this was about power over man, so the term domicia potestas was used. In the initial stages of the development of state and the law, they were viewed exclusively as property, without any personal, property or other rights. Thus the puer could not be a party to the proceedings, and his union with the slave girl was treated as a de facto union (contubernium), not as a valid marriage. He could only improve the position of his master, and if the servus would cause some damage to a third party, the master was not obliged to eliminate it, but according to Aquilius law of damage from 287 AD there was a possibility of handing over the slave to the injured party according to the principles of noxal liability. An individual could find himself in the status of a slave in three ways: by falling into captivity in war, by being born to a slave mother (vernae) or by losing his freedom as a form of sanction. In addition to private and royal, there were also so-called public slaves (servi publici). Their owner was not a private person, but a wider social community, and power over them was officially exercised by the Roman people (populus Romanus), civilian authorities in municipalities or colonies in Italy and its provinces. Servi publici were most often employed by magistrates or priests, and they also worked as guardians of various Roman buildings: basilicas, temples, archives and libraries. Roman law also knew of other forms of subordination that were not a form of slavery but states similar to it. The first aspect referred to persons in mancipio who were handed over by the pater famillias through mancipation to another elder as labor or to avoid tortious liability. The second case concerned addictus. Under the old civil law (ius civile) the addictus was a debtor in a certain obligatory relationship where, in case of non-payment of his obligation, he would be assigned to the creditor. The creditor had to keep him in the so-called creditor’s imprisonment for 60 days, until a guarantor appeared or the debt was repaid. If this did not happen, the debtor could be killed or sold as a slave. Persons redeemed from captivity (redempti ab hostibus) could be held captive by the redeemer until the ransom is paid either in money or by the work of the redeemed person. During the period of the empire, the duration of captivity of this kind could last for a maximum of 5 years. Gai Institutiones also classified auctoratus in these states. These included men, women and minor children who undertook to work for a person for a certain period of time (iudicati). Liberation from slavery was done through a special legal procedure (manumissio). In the early epochs of the ius civile, it was of an extremely formal nature, and with later praetorian activity this formalism was abandoned and replaced by new, more efficient legal means.

Purpose: The main purpose of the article is to establish whether the ancient Romans used double-entry bookkeeping. The secondary aim is to present a wide range of accounting vocabulary used by the Romans, which was later used by Venetian merchants and Luca Pacioli in the 1494 treatise on double-entry bookkeeping and which is still in use today.Methodology/approach: The paper uses a deductive inference method based on an anal-ysis of the economic, legal, and historiographical literature on the accounting vocabulary used in the state and private finances of the Romans. Findings: Although the terminology presented in the article suggests that the Romans had a highly developed accounting system using the principle of double entry, this was not the case. No material evidence of this has been found in accounting documents, such as single accounting records, repeated counter entries or balance sheets. Historians of ac-counting and banking rely on the analysis of secondary historical sources, such as legal literature that documents the course of trials in which account books were the main evidence. One trial that was fully described in the literature was between the partners Fannius and Roscius, in which Cicero was the defender of Roscius. The article demonstrates that Ciceroʼs defense speech does not prove the existence of double-accounting in Rome. Reflecting on the reasons for the absence of double-entry bookkeeping, the author pre-sents de Ste. Croix's arguments, the most important of which was the Roman numerical notation system (I, V, X, L, C, M) did not ’force’ bookkeeping entries into columns. This was only done by the Arabic numeral notation system, which quickly translated into the opposite double notation.Research limitations: The lack of surviving documents and a need to rely on legal litera-ture.Originality/value: The article proves that the double notation – the debit/credit convention – cannot be ascribed to ancient Rome. However, the article informs the reader about the richness of the accounting and financial terminology of Rome at the turn of the era.

The article considers Dinner by V. S. Filimonov (1837) as a literary and gastronomic poem. The dishes mentioned by the poet are not only of practical use, they are incorporated into the system of literary relationships, and become a source of intertextual connections and allusions. V. S. Filimonov’s characters taste not only and not so much the dishes and drinks served; they rather taste life itself: over dinner they satisfy their hunger of long-expected meetings with true friends, have polemic conversations, relish literary novelties. The research focuses on the food culture of Ancient Rome. The poem Dinner follows the forming system of images of the Russian Italiana of the 1840s, but its thematic peculiarity allows S. V. Filimonov to show the power, the eternity of Rome from another point of view – the everyday one. Five categories, recreating the picture of the gastronomic life of the great empire, have been singled out: popular phrases and Latin expressions; culinary dishes; names and events; elements of everyday life and customs; quotes from the works of Roman authors. The object of research in this article is the first category: popular phrases and Latin expressions. A transformation of the expressions “edimus ut vivamus”, “non vivimus ut edamus”, “sub rosā”, “in vino veritas” can be traced. A probable source of the Latin expression “nubes exculenta“ for V. S. Filimonov is assumed to be the treatise of a French political leader J. A. Brillat-Savarin. By studying the culinary encyclopedia, dictionaries and cookbooks of the 18–21st centuries, an attempt is made to identify the dishes included in the notion of “nubes exculenta“ (edible clouds). The poem Dinner is compared to the original texts of the Roman authors – Natural History by Pliny the Elder, On Nature, On the Blessed Life by Seneca. The Latin sources have been translated by the author of the article.

The cursus honorum is a Latin phrase which translates to “course of honour”. It refers to the sequential order of public offices that were held by aspiring politicians in the Roman Republic and Empire. It was the Roman idea about the order of public offices which were held by citizens. One of the requirements for taking office was the age of the candidate to hold it. Over the centuries, Roman law changed the age limits required to take up a specific office. Starting from republican times, there were regulations in Rome that required candidates for office to reach a certain age. The aim of this paper is to present the importance of the age criterion for holding offices in ancient Rome. For this purpose, the available source texts were analysed and the existing literature on the subject was examined and presented. The research used the historical method, which includes the analysis of source texts, and the dogmatic and empirical research method, which includes the critical analysis of legal sources and literature on the subject. Thanks to the research conducted, the available sources and literature on the age limits used in the cursus honorum were discovered and unified. As a result of the conducted research, the results were presented, which made it possible to identify the age limits required for a civil servant career in ancient Rome. Research in this area is of theoretical importance. Secondly, such an analysis is important for further comparative legal research. In modern legal systems, each country sets certain age requirements for participation in public life in the broadest sense (e.g., the age at which one may vote or run for office). Thanks to the ongoing research on Roman law, it will be possible to make comparative analyses and thus search for the Roman sources of contemporary laws. In this part, the research has a practical (comparative law) meaning.

The description of the history of early Rome (VIII-IV centuries BC) in the works of ancient authors is usually perceived as a mythological legend, which shifts the focus of scientific discussion to assessing the degree of reliability of the events being told. As a result, the normative-value and legal significance of ancient legends sufficient attention of researchers. The oral and therefore naturally plastic nature of archaic law creates additional difficulties for its modern study, in contrast to numerous and well-studied legislative texts. The author proposes to refer to modern types of legal understanding and turn down strict positivism with the aim of expanding the boundaries of legal analysis, rethinking the legend (on the example of Lucius Junius Brutus), recognizing it as a source of Roman law, and reconstructing its criminal law content. For this purpose, using socio-psychological, historical-legal, formal-logical and other scientific methods, the author singles out that part of the story that was not lost, but was steadily reproduced from generation to generation. The surviving core of the legend remained in history because it carried socially significant information modeling of behavior (behavioral stereotypes) of the ancient Romans. The article shows that children`s execution by the first republican magistrate not only legitimized the right of paternal power (patria potestas), but also proclaimed the priority protection of the public interest (civitas) that became the cornerstone of the Roman legal order. The legend set a special imperative for citizens, shaped their worldview and sense of justice. From the criminal law standpoint, this precedent fixed the standard of both prohibited behavior and retribution for it, i.e., a measure of justice, broadcast the requirements of the inevitability and personal nature of responsibility, laid foundation for the requirement of legal equality of all citizens before the law. Ultimately, the legend set the vector for the development of Roman criminal law, which led to the formation of its principles, many of which are accepted and developed in modern legal systems.

The article is a scientific and research paper. The subject of research is letters exchanged between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan, whereas the discussion addresses some aspects of the legal meaning of the term sacramentum. To expound the problem conclusively, the etymology of the term was explained, and next, sacramentum was discussed as a terminius technicus to denote an action by wager and a military oath. The use of the concept in the letters of Pliny the Younger and in the legislation of the Late Roman Empire was highlighted. In conclusion, the Latin term sacramentum was confirmed to have had both a religious and a legal connotation. In the juridical sense, sacramentum meant an action by wager known from the civil proceedings of legis actio sacramento. But it received yet another meaning for the purposes of military discipline – it was a name of a military oath. These conclusions contribute to the scientific aspect of the problem and demonstrate the originality of the research. They have an international significance as Roman law is a discipline studied across the globe.

The paper discusses the issue of the attitude towards medicine, physicians, and healers in Ancient Rome (1st – 5th centuries) based on ancient texts (Juv. Sat., Plin. Nat. Hist., Mart. Ep., etc.). It is shown that the profession of physician in Rome did not immediately receive recognition. The reasons for this are revealed: first, Romans did not consider medicine an art (science), and second, those who were associated with medicine were not Romans by origin and did not initially have civil rights. The collective biography of the Roman physician is reconstructed; it is based on the surviving testimonies about Anthonius Musa, Sextius Niger, Scribonius Largus, Rufus of Ephesus, Galen, Serenius Sammonius, Theodorus Priscianus, Adamantius, Marcellus Empiricus, and others. Information about their origin, names and nicknames, positions, social status, duties and rights, features of professional activity, subject and content of their medical texts is taken into account. Some provisions of the collective biography are as follows: 1) Roman physicians and people associated with medicine initially had the status of a slave; 2) As a rule, they received education either in Alexandria, or in special medical schools and temples-hospitals, or from famous teachers; 3) Some physicians were at emperors’ courts, had high titles, positions and privileges; 4) For the most part, physicians authored works written mainly in Greek, but also in Arabic and Latin; 5) The interests of physicians were connected with natural philosophy, medicine itself (theoretical and practical) and its fields, for example, physiology and pharmacology, as well as biology (botany); 6) In addition to medical practice, physicians’ occupations included teaching, mentoring, and sharing experience; collecting prescriptions and antidotes, inventing medical drugs; 7) The career of a physician (especially at the court of an emperor) could not always be successful. He could be expelled, forced to flee to a foreign country, or murdered.

Resorting to violence on animals, particularly in socially organized forms in public settings for the sole purpose of entertaining a human audience, has been considered a real cultural taboo in modern Western society for some decades. This kind of violent behaviour, judged inhumane and disrespectful of the lives of other animals, has often been presented as normal and widespread in ancient Roman culture. Indeed, the circus and the amphitheatre games are normally portrayed as occasions where Roman society as a whole ritually enjoyed the bloody spectacle of killing animals. By analysing a specific episode where an elephant hunt, presented as a fictional entertainment, is interrupted and fails miserably, this article will try to offer a different perspective on the treatment of animal violence in Roman culture. This paper will focus on the particular ecological relationships that ancient Roman culture had established with other living beings and whose transgression could not be accepted in an uncontroversial way, not even in a playful and amusing context such as that of a public show offered by the city magistrates.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the term “manubiae” in the context of the construction activity of magistrates in ancient Rome. The author's arguments show that neither ancient sources nor historiography can resolve the dispute about war booty and manubial construction. Therefore, the author of the article proposes a different solution to the problem – in order to determine what manubiae is, how it differs from praeda, how and who could use manubiae, it is necessary to consider some property embezzlement claims by Roman generals (i.e. how and who could not use manubiae and on what grounds the Roman Senate could accuse duces of peculatus during the Rebuplic period). In conclusion, the definition of manubiae is given as part of the spoils of war, which was at the disposal of the generals.

The article is an attempt to revise the long-established belief in the alabaster-white exterior shape of Roman antiquity, which in fact turns out to be full of colours that bring life to its image. The authors implement this intention by indicating how intensely the colour red was present in the reality described by classical Latin authors – contrary to the accusation that one of the participants of the discussion on this subject in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights (Gell. Noc. Att. 2.26) makes of the alleged poverty regarding various shades of red in Latin terminology. The material presented contradicts the opinion expressed in Gellius’ text, and at the same time makes us realise how colourful and lively the world that emerges from the literary works of the classical Roman period was. In comparison with it, the reality witnessed by the literature of the Christian era – this parallel is what the authors of the article focus on, concluding their deliberations – in which red becomes almost exclusively a sign of shame, turns out to be ascetically sterile and depressingly colourless.

Epidemics are dramatic, far-reaching events. Their impact on society is unpredictable. Starting from the meaning of the Greek word epidemia, the paper highlights its topographical and social connotation (“stay at home, stay in a city”), from Homer to Hippocrates. By revisiting some of the most impactful epidemic events in ancient Greece and Rome, some of them well known, it focuses on their social and political consequences, the geographic spread and the medical features, the continuities in the reaction, and in the astonishment of societies. These events are the Athenian so-called plague of 431 BCE; the epidemic cough of Perinthos as narrated in the Hippocratic Collection; the Antonine plague in Rome around 166 CE; the epidemic taking place in China in the same years of the Antonine plague, suggesting a possible connection between the two, at a time when the first direct contacts between the two empires were established. The notion of contagion is considered. The paper also briefly recalls the so-called plague of Justinian, whose fateful aftermath has been often related to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Eventually, a reflection upon the different perceptions of an epidemic can provide us with some food for thought.

В данной статье с точки зрения литературных взаимосвязей и с учетом социального, исторического и геополитического контекстов рассматриваются произведения трех ярких представителей польского романтизма – Г. Сенкевича, Й. Крашевского и З. Красиньского, объединенные общей темой истории Древнего Рима. Актуальность данной темы обусловлена не только отсутствием подобных трудов в русскоязычном литературоведении, но и, прежде всего, особой связью польского культурного кода с римской темой в культуре в целом и литературе в частности. В действительности вся польская литература 19 века была тесно связана с размышлениями на тему судьбы Польши, польского народа, а также провозглашала патриотические настроения, часто обращаясь при этом к древнеримским сюжетам и образам. Цель статьи – выявить особенности интерпретации древнеримских исторических сюжетов в польской литературе 19 века и доказать, что все вышеперечисленные авторы усматривают исторические и идеологические параллели между Древним Римом и Польшей, обращаясь, в том числе к идеям польского мессианизма. Практическая значимость статьи заключается в выявлении материала и в возможности использования данного материала при дальнейших исследованиях в данной области.

The aim of this article is to analyse sources on a verbal and written mass communication between the organisers of the games (editores) and the audience in ancient Rome. Methods established by the Romans as senders and recipients of the conveyed information gave a range of possibilities to communicate needs and preferences, as well as to express often extreme emotions. The model, the creation of which stemmed from the necessity to inform the audience about the upcoming arena events (by the organiser) and to communicate the experienced emotions (by spectators), became over time the distinctive culture of communication, applied before the games but also throughout the event and after it ended. This communicative social construct typical of ancient Rome was necessary for the efficient distribution of oral and textual messages. The preserved sources allow us to state that the communication model included: 1) verbal/oral information conveyed to the public by the games organisers (via the announcements made by heralds); people’s cheers and chants (including both criticism and praise); 2) written information conveyed by the organisers (edicta munerum advertising the games before the event and announcements presented on placards distributed around the theatres and amphitheatres throughout the event); acclamationes and graffiti, painted and inscribed accordingly, by the audience after the spactacula. This article is to define the individual types of ancient methods of oral and written communication, to determine their function depending on their context, and to establish their effectiveness in the discourse carried out on a mass scale in ancient Rome.

The theory of class struggle lay at the root of Marxist methodology. According to historical materialism, the slave formation existed in the ancient Roman state, and Marxist historians further developed the concept of class divisions in Roman society. Their views on this subject permeated also the research on Roman law, which was to be studied in terms of the influence that class divisions and class struggles had on the evolution of the state and legal norms in ancient Rome. This approach mainly concerned Roman private law, which was of the primary interest to scholars. The author attempts to determine whether the issue of class also constituted a reference point for studying the criminal law of ancient Rome, which had the character of public norms. The article examines the most representative views of Roman law scholars who applied the Marxist method in their research. Despite their attempts, they found it hard to uphold the concept that ancient Roman society had been divided into antagonistic and structurally homogeneous classes, and what is more, that these classes had been united by class consciousness. Differences between social strata in their legal position, including different criminal law norms, did not result from class divisions and class struggle, but rather reflected the specific character of ancient Roman society.

The galli were the self-castrated devotees of Magna Mater, a Phrygian goddess introduced to Rome in 204BCE during Hannibal’s invasion of Italy (Roller, 1999, p.263),1 ostensibly due to a prophecy claiming that her arrival in Rome would expel the invaders.2 Magna Mater’s arrival in Rome was consequently not the result of a long-term development, but a direct response to political crisis, leading Roller (1999, p.263) to assert that her impact was “real, vivid and public from the very beginning.” As her devotees, the galli were subsequently introduced to Roman life in a similarly vivid way, perhaps becoming the most recognisable symbol of the cult (Beard, 2012, p.341). Their status as eunuchs and publicly active religious figures often put them in conflict with traditionally gendered norms and spaces of Rome. This article argues that the interaction between the galli and the gendered spaces they occupied in literature is central to the galli and their representation. Their presence in these spaces is not simply a conflict of cultural values, but an interaction constructed to enforce these values by using the galli as a negative paradigm. By investigating this we can interpret how gendered space and the galli were constructed and understood by contemporary writers and audiences. As Fitzgerald and Spentzou (2018, p.10) summarise, “the meaning of a space changes as people interact with and react to that space.” This essay will view this concept through the spatial interaction and reaction of the galli.

Book Review of Morales, H. (2020). Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths

This paper reviews three novels by different modern authors, all published in 2020 and applying to the realities of Ancient Rome. Marik Lerner’s science fiction novel “Practical Ufology” fits within the subliterary genre of “accidental travel”, and any background information from the Roman-Byzantine life is not very appropriate in the adventure text. The new novel “The Triumphant” by Olga Eliseeva, a professional historian, can be labeled as a form of the “science novel” genre, because it has numerous references and “anchors” that only an educated person is able to understand. The main canvas of O. Eliseeva’s novel is a synthesis of the personalities and actions of Julius Caesar and Constantine the Great, so the writer used the motif of the fantasy world, in which the Roman Republic and Rome are replaced by Latium and Eternal City with the Nazarenes (i.e., Christians) playing an important role in its future. The trilogy “Divine World” by Boris Tolchinsky, a professional politologist, is the most radical inversion of the reality with its own alternative history. The world of the Amorian Empire is a synthesis of the ancient Mediterranean and the ancient Egyptian civilizations. These texts can be considered as “imperial literature” tied to the post-Soviet realities and projects aimed to find a better future.

This article pertains to the heritage of the ancient Rome in the Western European cities as a theme of cultural tourism. The main objective is to describe this heritage and to present it as a tourist value of particularly high historical and cultural worth. The main goal is to develop the authors’ concept of a cultural heritage route named the Rhineland Route of the Roman Civilization that includes 11 cities where 30 selected monuments of legacy of the ancient Roman civilization have been depicted. A cartographic method, namely the signature one, has been applied in the article. It was used to mark, among other locations, towns with Roman roots on a map of the Rhineland, showing a proposed route through the ancient Roman monuments. The heritage of the ancient Rome can serve to raise historical and cultural awareness at many levels – from local and regional to international ones. This historical legacy has a real impact on the tourist attractiveness in all the characterised cities, being well-adapted and attractively developed for tourist use.

From the late Republic to early Imperial period, the Roman garden occupied a liminal space between the notions of rus and urbs, characterised as the ‘cultural faultline’ by Spencer in her study of Roman landscape in 2006 (p.246). During this period, horti came to typify permeable boundaries between the countryside and the urban centre, the former characterised values of rusticity and subsistence-living, while the latter represented standards of political endeavour and social integration. Yet despite this conflation of meaning and use in the Roman hortus, and the difficulty for the historian in defining their intentions and receptions with certainty, it is still possible to find levels of delineation and spatial organisation within the urban garden, including both defined and merged areas of function. In order to achieve this, defined concepts of spatial organisation are required, to act as signifiers of boundaries and content in an analysis. This paper therefore argues for the epistemological application of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ landscape elements to the spatial analysis of Roman urban gardens, in order to establish patterns of organisation, if any, in relation to the ideological concepts of ‘rus’ and ‘urbs’. ‘Hard’ features will be defined as the ‘bones’ of a landscape, the immovable elements which shape it, such as water, earth, and architecture. ‘Soft’ elements will be classified as those which are changeable, the living entities making up the landscape, i.e. plants. In delineating the two categories, it will be possible to establish boundaries in the garden space, as means of division, obstruction, privatisation, and social direction, subsequently allowing the definition of space by function. Within this paper, case studies from Pompeii and Herculaneum will be applied to domestic and commercial structures in order to better establish non-elite constructions of garden space on a local scale.

Rome’s climate has shifted perceptibly over the past two millennia, and in the first centuries BCE and CE it grew drier and warmer, from the cooler climate of the regal period and the humidity generated by the Tiber’s frequent flooding. Buildings from the first century BCE were designed with this changing climate in mind, and Vitruvius, a first century Roman architectural engineer, advises the buildings of porticoes behind theatres, in order to give shelter to the people in the event of sudden rainfall (De Arch. 5.9.1). Vitruvius also advises green spaces be incorporated into these porticoes, thus providing portico gardens. This, he tells us, will benefit the health of visitors to the space, since the airflow generated by the greenery clears the “humours”. In the current architectural climate, environmental concerns are being brought to the fore again, and work on the built environment prioritises the inclusion of nature in architectural spaces as an attempt to combat climate change. The use of trees in urban settings has in particular received a renewed interest, in both academia and the media. This paper will explore Roman uses of nature in architectural spaces to manipulate the climate of these built environments. It will combine modern approaches to architecture with ancient ones, and present possible interactions between ancient use of space with modern use of space. It will also examine the importance of species type in architectural natural spaces, in particular how this would influence the usage of the space, and how a variety of species could be used for multivalent spaces in modern building design.

Issue 4 of New Classicsists

Europe’s oldest children’s book was a bilingual easy reader designed to teach Greek to Roman schoolchildren. Composed perhaps in the first century BC, it described a typical day in the life of a Roman schoolboy: getting ready for school, lessons, interactions with other children, lunch, etc. Although we no longer have this text exactly in its original form, it survives in multiple versions rewritten in subsequent centuries during the Roman empire. Strikingly absent from almost all these versions is any mention of play: the only reference to play is a single line in one version, clearly a late addition to the text, in which a child is accused of playing when he should have been studying. The accusation is indignantly and convincingly refuted: the child was in fact doing something more worthwhile. This absence of play must be connected to the fact that the child depicted in this text is normally an idealized one, for other evidence for Roman attitudes towards children’s play suggests that it was often seen primarily as an obstacle to learning. In this book, therefore, play is depicted not as a typical characteristic of children, but rather as deviant behaviour, something that children should not do at all.

The word “prison” applied to the prison realities of Ancient Rome is misleading, even anachronistic. Originally a place of execution (by abandonment or strangulation), the dungeon has always had a preventive function for the detention of remand prisoners or convicted prisoners awaiting execution. During the imperial period, the Acts of the Martyrs testify to this during the persecution of Christians. Moreover, sentences involving imprisonment or putting in chains were always associated with the performance of labour (mines, quarries, forced labour, etc.), which treated convicts of free origin as slaves, either for a fixed period or for life.

The topic of this paper is the continuity of major religious, moral and ethical concepts of Roman culture in following periods. These are the virtues of the citizen, namely virtus, fides and pietas — which distinguish the Roman citizen as a brave warrior, honest magistrate and pious pater familias. The central one was the duty to the City. Some traces of this tradition can be observed in the most influental sources of the Christian Patristic period, although the very intention of morals has changed: res publica, a common/communal duty, was replaced by the adoration of God. With the view to a representative research, De Civitate Dei by Saint Augustine, the most famous Christian treatise dealing with the state, civic rights, state religion, authority etc. was analyzed. On the one hand, this great book provides multiple suitable illustrations for almost every feature of the continuity between the Ancient pagan culture and Christian intellectual one. On the other hand, it isn’t just a plain comparison of loci classici in pagan and Christian context, one can find the origins of a completely new approach to the world history, which had had an influence on minds of further generations of Christian theologians in Middle Ages and later periods.

Issue 3 of New Classicists

In the east under the Qin First Emperor and in the west under Augustus, who both established new regimes after a period of internal wars and expanded their territories enormously, an idea of universal ‘empire’ (orbis terrarum and ‘All-under-Heaven’) began to take shape. In this paper, I will compare two inscribed texts issued by these founders, the Res Gestae of Augustus and the seven stele inscriptions of Ying Zheng (First Emperor) who, having conquered all the other Warring States, unified China in 221 BC. The Res Gestae is a retrospective survey by Augustus of his own public achievements in restoring the res publica and conquering the world, framed in traditional language, which was published in Rome but whose only surviving copies were found in the new and distant province of Galatia. The stele inscriptions of the Qin First Emperor, which were set up on the top of seven venerated mountains, five in the Zhou homeland/oikoumene and two bordering with the non-Chinese/barbarian tribes to the northeast and southeast, when he toured the newly conquered eastern regions in 219-210 BC, are hymns with some variants, supposedly based on a main central text, which praise the Qin unification. I will compare how the two inscriptions present the regimes and their ideas of the new ‘empires’, and the achievements and roles of the rulers in establishing them. I will also consider how both of the texts, as symbolic representations of these ‘world empires’ in their public display, convey the imperial messages to their distant readers/audiences.

At an unknown date in the first century AD, the historian Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote the Histories of Alexander the Great. It is the only Roman historiographical work that has foreign history as its main subject. However, Alexander the Great had always been a very famous figure in Roman cultural memory, and can even be called, as Spencer (2002) puts it, a “Roman cultural myth”. He was the role model of several Republican generals and emperors , the subject of many moral exempla and declamation exercises: he found his way into all forms of literature, thus showing that Romans came to cast their hopes and fears about monarchy and empire into this nearly legendary character. Alexander was indeed a perfectly relevant case for a “study on power” : in the Histories, the Macedonian king, from being a good and moderate ruler tolerating libertas according to the customs established by his fathers, becomes a tyrant, corrupted by the East and Fortune. Through the portrayal of Alexander’s reign, Curtius thus wrote a discourse on monarchy. To articulate his reflection, Curtius focuses in particular on the relationship between power and speech. Oratory was indeed a central part of Roman culture and underwent profound changes when the Republic was replaced by the Principate, as is famously discussed in Tacitus’ Dialogue of the orators. This topic is investigated in the passage I focus on, the debate on the king’s deification in book 8 of the Histories, also known as “proskynesis debate”.

Freedom and its oppression are the most vital themes of Gaetano De Sanctis' scientific production during the 1920s. His experiences between the end of the First World War and the advent of Fascism oriented him in this direction. In the first volume of the fourth volume of the Storia dei Romani (1923) and in other contemporary essays, the Romans are represented as cruel and aggressive militarists who, in the end, oppressing the freedom of others, ended up losing their own at the end of the Republic. In contrast to the suffocation of freedom implemented by Roman imperialism, Greece appeared to De Sanctis as the mother of freedom, precisely in the years in which Fascism showed its liberticidal face, which was paid for by the Master himself with the forced removal from university teaching following his refusal to swear loyalty to the Regime.

The articles deals with the analysis of Russian and Soviet works related to Cicero’s views on the ideal citizen, ruler, and state. There are several contradictory trends in the Russian and Soviet historiography on the topic mentioned above. The first one is about Cicero’s conservatism in ethical and political questions (Grabar’-Passek and Utchenko considered Cicero conservative). A bigger number of scholars, on the contrary, wrote about Cicero’s definite innovation (Derevnin, Kamalutdinov, Temnov, and Bragova). The approach to the essence of Cicero’s concept of the best ruler is also twofold: Vipper and Marchenko attach a monarchical essence to it, while the majority of the scholars (Vekhov, Protasova, Mashkin, Utchenko, Zimin, Motus, Derevnin, Kamalutdinov, Temnov, and Bragova) point to its non-monarchical nature. Zvirevich and Derzhavitsky wrote about the humanism of Cicero’s image of the ideal citizen. Some researchers (Zelinsky, Knabe, Motus, Chernyshov, and Bragova) believe that Cicero’s perfect state was a utopia in the time of transition from the republic to the principate, while Temnov is convinced of its realism.

True to the memorialists and satirists of the seventeenth century, contemporary historiography generally assesses Gaston d’Orléans’s political activities of the 1630s with reference to ‘ancient Rome’s’ republican values, celebrated by Balzac and Corneille. However, the successive translations of Tacitus by Rodolphe Le Maistre (Gaston’s physician and pedagogue from 1615 to 1636) permit a better understanding of the respective actions and political positions of both the king and his brother in relation to contemporary Tacitist culture.