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This article argues firstly that Cato the Elder’s account of a daring plan involving the tribune Caedicius in the First Punic War is modelled on a scene in Xenophon’s Anabasis. It then argues that Livy’s account of a heroic escape in the First Samnite War orchestrated by P. Decius Mus is modelled not just on the First Punic War episode described by Cato, as scholars have suggested, but on the same passage of Xenophon; it also proposes that Livy’s use of Xenophon may be mediated through Cato. The article then sets out other evidence for the use of Xenophon in Roman historiography and explores the implications of the proposed intertextuality for Roman self-positioning and for ideas of leadership and military hierarchy. The article as a whole suggests that the influence of Xenophon on Latin historiography is greater than has often been conceived.

The object we have decided to discuss here is the use of Ancient History as an iconographical source in the European art of the 17th century. We have divided the study in two parts, the first one consists on the analysis of the deuotio ritual contextualizing it within the republican Roman religion. Basing on the literary sources, we shall focus on the Decius Mus deuotio. In the second part, we will connect that ritual with Rubens and his paints dedicated to the Decius Mus deuotio. The next step is try to explain why this story was chosen, in which sources did Rubens get inspired and which iconographical elements were used to shape the ritual in the different scenes in the cycle. En la presente comunicación pretendemos abordar el tema de la pervivencia de la Historia Antigua como fuente iconográfica para el arte europeo de la Edad Moderna (el siglo XVII en nuestro caso). En una primera parte, analizaremos el ritual de la deuotio, contextualizándolo dentro de la religión romana republicana. A partir de las fuentes literarias prestaremos especial atención al estudio de la deuotio de Decio Mus. El siguiente paso será poner lo anterior en relación con Rubens y su ciclo dedicado a la deuotio de Decio Mus, intentando explicar qué motivo la elección del tema (comitente y destino de la obra), cuál de las fuentes fue la que inspiró a Rubens y qué elementos iconográficos fueron empleados para dar forma al ritual en las diferente escenas que componen el ciclo.

Among all examples of an unique manner of suicide, known as devotio, which occur in ancient sources, the one is especially interesting. It concernes family of the Decii Mures. Three of its members – father, son and grandson – one by one sacrificed themselves and their soldiers during battles with Latins, Samnites and Pyrrhus. It is the only instance of "family" sacrifice among cases listed by Anthony van Hoff – 52 examples of devotio known from ancient times and 21 found in Roman historiography. Livy defined it as familiare fatum, that is the fate destined for a particular family. It means that the Decii became an exemplum to which e.g. Cicero appeals.

In the middle of the fourth century BC, Publius Decius Mus, a celebrated general in the Roman army, sacrificed himself against enemy lines in return for the gods' protection of his soldiers and city. Two hundred and seventy years later, the eques Quintus Sertorius was rescued from the battlefield by his Iberian followers, who hoisted him onto their shoulders and passed him safely over a city wall, out of the range of fire. What Decius did was called a devotio by ancient writers; modern scholars cite Sertorius' rescue as an example of devotio Iberica. In both cases, a cognate of the verb devoveo is used. This paper explores the confusion between two related but nevertheless distinct uses of the term, and argues that devotio Iberica, although possibly referring to an actual phenomenon, should be understood primarily as an ancient practice invented by modern historians to further an idealized image of ancient Spain under the Francoist dictatorship.

Among his commissions for monumental decorative programs, Rubens designed four cycles of tapestries: two historical (the Decius Mus and Constantine series), one religious (the Triumph of the Eucharist), and one mythological (the Life of Achilles). The third in this chronological sequence, the Eucharist Cycle (1625–27), represents not only Rubens's largest tapestry commission but also his largest surviving and most complex program of church decoration.1

Every country has its heroes, legendary or historical, who are remembered for some noble action that has caught the popular imagination and made their names immortal. Among the Romans, just as Fabricius was the type of incorruptibility, Decius Mus of devotion to country, Regulus of faith to the pledged word, so the name of Lucretia was proverbial for chastity. The story of her suicide after she had been violated by Sextus Tarquin is recounted by the historians Livy, Dionysius, and Diodorus, and alluded to by many Roman poets and prose-writers. But apart from such allusions, it is curious that of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us none save Ovid has treated her story at any length; moreover, there is apparently no representation of her among the extant remains of Roman art. To painters and poets of later times, however, she made a strong appeal. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, for example, there is the famous painting by Titian; and in our own literature Chaucer sang the praise of ‘the verray wyf, the verray trewe Lucresse’ in his Legend of Good Women, Gower included her in the seventh book of his Confessio Amantis, Shakespeare in his youth composed that highly coloured arabesque The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Heywood turned the story into a tragic drama, and most recently Benjamin Britten has made it the subject of an opera.That Ovid found in Lucretia an attractive figure is evident from the detailed manner in which he treats her story in the second book of his Fasti.

A paper by me on the same subject appeared in the Journal as long ago as 1929 (pp. 19 ff.). The criticism of the traditional datings there suggested seems in the main to have stood the test of time. But reconstruction should follow in due course on demolition; and, although no final scheme can yet be proposed, already it should not be premature to formulate some results to which research is pointing. Before we can produce a perfect figure we need a rough casting on which to work.The earliest Roman tradition about coinage is of a very mixed character. A number of references to Roman coins—scattered at intervals over the period of the Kings and the Early Republic—may be dismissed as later intrusions. The golden prime of the Etruscan Kings will surely have known the precious metals—perhaps actual coins of foreign cities; but it has no coins of its own to show. A more trustworthy tradition tells of a form of reckoning in oxen and sheep—the ‘pecunia’ (from ‘pecus’, ‘flock’), which became the Latin word for money—only giving place officially to the currency of uncoined bronze (‘Aes Rude’) in the age of the Decemvirs.

The philosophic historian will never stop meditating on the nose of Cleopatra. If that nose had pleased the gods as it pleased Caesar and Antony, a loose Alexandrian gnosticism might have prevailed instead of the Christian discipline imposed by the two Romes, the old one on the Tiber, and the new one on the Bosporus. The Celts would have been allowed to go on collecting mistletoe in their forests. We would have fewer books on Queen Cleopatra and on King Arthur, but even more books on Tutankhamen and on Alexander the Great. But a Latin-speaking Etruscologist, not a Greek-speaking Egyptologist, brought to Britain the fruits of the victory of Roman imperialism over the Hellenistic system. We must face the facts. The victory of Roman imperialism can in its turn be described as the result of four factors: the new direction given by Rome to the social – that is the military – forces of old Italy; the utter inability of any Hellenistic army to match the Romans in the field; the painful erosion of Celtic civilization and its appendages which went on for centuries and ultimately enabled the Romans to control the resources of western Europe from the Atlantic to the Danubian regions; and finally the co-operation of Greek intellectuals with Italian politicians and writers in creating a new bilingual culture which gave sense to life under Roman rule.