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Worshipped in the form of a vase-shaped image, Osiris-Canopus (OC) derived probably from the canopic jar bearing the human head of Imsety, one of the four Sons of Horus invoked to protect the organ package of the deceased enclosed inside, after becoming a pseudo-ritual jar converted into a cult figure. After the Nero's dead, the Roman emperors adopted the royal profile of Osiris crowned at Herakleopolis but introduced in Canopus near the seaport of Thonis. In this way, they intended to stress their own legitimacy before promoting this OC as a guarantor of the cereal feeding, but also his storage and carriage from Egypt to Italy. During the second century AD, two OC were used in this aim, a tjenj crowned form and another shape with the atef, worshipped in a Canopus or a Serapeum with Isis Frugifera, Sarapis-Poseidon and the Greek goddess of fertility, Demeter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 398 CE the western Roman emperor Honorius issued a law condemning attempts by Jewish town councillors in southern Italy to seek exemptions from compulsory public services. While this law is usually read for the light it sheds on the legal situation of Jews in the Christian Roman Empire, it is argued here that the ruling is also concerned with another issue. It was issued three years after the division of the Roman Empire into two halves, East and West, each with its own administrative structures, and with its emperor issuing laws for territories under his jurisdiction. Honorius notes that Italian Jews claimed exemptions in accordance with recent eastern legislation but rejects its validity for the West. This indicates how tensions between East and West caused difficulties for Italian Jews who, because of their pan-Mediterranean connections, did not fit easily into the empire's administrative frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of Nerone e Berta, a tale included in Fiabe italiane of Italo Calvino (1923-1985). Its protagonists are the Roman spinner Berta and the Roman emperor Nero. The tale may be studied as an interesting aspect of the modern reception of Nero and an instructive feature of the general project of Calvino’s Fiabe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the religious roles of children in the provinces of Rome, Italy. It says that the only evident religious role was that of Camillus, assistant to the emperor when performing a sacrifice away from Rome. It mentions the evidence from the western Roman empire involving children as assistants or as religious figures in their own right in local cult, in imperial cult or at the emperor's side.

The article focuses on the view of Americans while on tour in Rome, Italy during the Cold War years. It states that several Americans were enticed to visit Rome to explore their complex relationship with the Eternal City, as they can be considered as rightful heirs to the Caesars. It adds that most Americans feel that a visit to Rome is a visit to history as well as the Eternal City is mostly identified with history itself.

The Ara Pacis presents the most important surviving programmatic statement of the middle years of the Augustan principate. Recent scholarship has focused on the identity and significance of the altar's children, but progress has been constrained by assumptions about Augustus' dynastic ambitions. The altar reflects the political realities and ideals of the year 13 B.C.E., when adult generals were in ascendance, foreign children took center stage, and the political prospects of Gaius and Lucius Caesar were still uncertain. Three figures are identified here as foreign princes associated with elite Julio-Claudian children as the "pledges of empire" guaranteeing Rome's global hegemony. This message was understood in the context of such familiar Roman rituals as the triumph and supplicatio, but its presence on the altar also responded to and appropriated Eastern ceremonies and the art that memorialized them in Cleopatra's Egypt and elsewhere. Augustus recast the empire as the "Donations of Rome" in response to Mark Antony's Donations of Alexandria, both men invoking Alexander's vision of an empire of the oikoumene. The Ara Pacis features child pledges connoting the three continents, and, along with their Roman peers, advertises Augustus' claim to be world conqueror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At an auction in Rome in 1896 the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek acquired a statue representing the Roman Emperor Domitian. The hitherto unpublished inscription on the statue's pedestal throws new light on its provenance and history. Found at Albano, once part of the great suburban residence of Domitian himself, it had after his fall in AD 96 been re-hewn as his successor, Nerva. Some 1,500 years later, in 1663, when it was unearthed in what was by then the property of the Savelli, one of the ancient baronial families of papal Rome, the statue was transferred to Rome where it was set up in the Palazzo Savelli, thereby becoming part of an ancestral gallery featuring paintings by Pietro da Cortona as well as a triumphal relief representing the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The famosa statua (so described in numerous guidebooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was now claimed to represent an ancestor of the Savelli, one Gaius Popilius Sabellus, whose bravery in battle was praised by the Roman historian Livy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summaries of articles in the journal are presented, which are among other topics about the relations between Roman emperors and subjects, a relationship of original sin to the natural sciences in Christian theology, and interpretation of Italian author Gabriele D'Annunzio as an early fascist.