Scholarship on Roman political thought and its legacy, especially anglophone, has rapidly expanded over the last decade. The main drivers of this renewed attention to Roman political ideas and institutions are an historical interest in the collapse of the Roman republic; a philosophical interest in republicanism; and a growing sensitivity to the originality of Roman thinkers, especially Cicero, in contrast to the older view that they were simply derivative of the Greeks. In this essay I will discuss recent publications on Cicero and Roman political ideas. After offering an overview of key themes in this new scholarship, I seek to suggest promising directions for future research and encourage the growing interest in Roman political thought and Cicero in particular. Cicero provides a fascinating link between ideas, institutions and action on the ground and he is therefore with good reason at the centre of much of the rapidly expanding literature on Roman political thought. In addition, given his interest in developing a theory of justice as the foundation of the state (res publica), a focus on Cicero will help explore the legacy of republicanism from the angle of his ideas about justice while paying attention to scholarship placing these ideas into their historical and institutional context.

This article examines the reception of Sappho in Julius Pollux’s Onomasticon. The article shows that Pollux primarily quotes Sappho as an authoritative source on clothing and textiles. This presentation of Sappho is unusual, given that other ancient sources largely locate her poetry within an erotic, and sometimes sympotic, framework; and it is particularly notable for the way in which it emphasizes Sappho’s status as a specifically female poet with special insight into, and expertise in, the feminine domestic world. The article argues that this domestication of Sappho’s verses is not (primarily) an act of sexist belittlement, but rather demonstrates how Pollux reimagines Sappho in his own image. In the material world of the Onomasticon, Sappho becomes in turn an emblem of (feminine) materiality, whose apparent preoccupation with the fabric of everyday life productively mirrors the encyclopaedia’s own. As a whole, the article argues that Pollux’s creative engagement with Sappho’s poetry is both an important constituent part of, and a foil to, her wider reception in both antiquity and modernity.

The opening of Book 4 of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica finds its protagonists confounded by the loss of Hercules, their hero-of-heroes whom Juno has caused to run off. As the Argonauts deliberate, loyalty to the man contends with the desire to carry on his heroic labor, presented in terms of Vergilian arma uirumque. This paper uses the debate over Hercules’ abandonment as a case study for Valerius’ engagement with Vergil’s celebration of the fides, pietas and magnanimitas of his hero as the foundation of Roman political legitimacy. By setting Valerius’ Vergilian framing in dialogue with his engagement with Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Horace’s Epodes, I argue that the Argonautica rereads Aeneas’ exemplary model as a guide to internecine conflict, exploring how the essential Augustan concepts of duty and familial fidelity may be encoded and reproduced to a very different effect.

This article offers a fresh examination of the different kinds of labour and labourers in the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, and argues that the poem lends expression to the difficulty of distinguishing between exploitation and collaboration in any form of production, but particularly in literary production. At its core, this article considers the ways in which the Moretum repeatedly denies readerly attempts to pin down the exact status of, and relationship between, the poem’s two principal characters, Simulus and Scybale. This lack of clarity is important for the poem’s interpretation: if, as many have argued, the Moretum is about poetic labour, then the ambiguous socio-economic status of its central characters should lead critics to ask what the poem is trying to say about the nature of literary production. This article shows that, throughout the Moretum, exploitative labour is presented as collaborative, and vice versa; and this, in turn, allows the poem to raise the question of whether there can ever be collaboration without exploitation in the Roman literary world. By thus reading the Moretum as an exploration of willed and coerced co-production in literature, new light can be shed on the poem’s authorship.

Polybius claims that equality to speak in public (ἰσηγορία) and freedom of speech (παρρησία) are the fulcrum of a democracy (2.38.6) and hence the most beautiful of political values (6.57.9). But his reasons for valuing them so dearly have remained obscure. This article argues that ἰσηγορία and παρρησία in Polybius maximize the role of persuasion—instead of sheer force—in the polity; that they favour rational decision-making; and that they keep excessive ambition at bay. Those important political goods disappear when the citizens who enjoy ἰσηγορία and παρρησία become tepid in their commitment to the equal right to speak freely. The article argues that, for Polybius, that commitment fades when the citizens take ἰσηγορία and παρρησία for granted, mostly on account of habit (τὸ σύνηθϵς, 6.9.5). Polybius sets himself the task of dishabituating his readers from ἰσηγορία and παρρησία, by showing that they are always fragile.

This article re-examines archaic and classical treatment of beer drinking to argue, contra Nelson, that beer in archaic and classical Greek texts is not primarily feminine nor does it necessarily feminize its drinkers. Rather, a review of sympotic lyric, historiography, ethnography and Athenian drama demonstrates that beer is primarily an ethnic marker with no inherent gendered connotations. At the same time, in contexts where definitions of Greek masculinity are being constructed, beer can gain gendered connotations which enhance the ethnic otherness of the beverage and contribute to the definition of the Greek man. Any gendered implications of beer, furthermore, come not from the beverage itself but from the method of consumption, of sucking through a tube of sorts rather than sipping from a cup. This article thus argues that beer in the Archaic and Classical periods marks non-Greek status first and foremost and only secondarily effeminizes drinkers through associations with oral sex in contexts where ideas of masculinity are in play.

The Underworld is a ‘shared space’ for poets and their poems, but one that exists on different timelines to Upperworld spaces, such that it is built on cyclicality rather than linearity. In this article, I explore the cycles within and between the homoerotic Underworld poetry of Tibullus, Domitius Marsus, Ovid and Statius. Using a combination of traditional philology and queer temporal approaches, I show how characters ‘recycle’ through these texts, so that Tibullus’ Marathus cycles into Statius’ Philetus through metapoetic metempsychosis. I begin with the role of the Underworld in Latin poetry, before turning to Tibullus’ death, as commemorated by Ovid and Marsus. Next, I explore how Tibullus ‘kills’ Marathus, so that Ovid can hint at his being in the Underworld. Finally, I turn to Statius’ poem on Philetus to show how it continues the cycles of earlier poetry, before concluding with a discussion of the consequences of Elysium’s queerness.

In this paper I argue that the accepted reconstruction of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus has been shaped by unexamined assumptions that have been allowed to take on the appearance of fact. I begin by surveying the scholarly reconstruction of this work from the fifteenth century until today. I then examine two key underlying assumptions: that Suetonius planned and published his series of literary lives as a single compendious work and that it excluded men who were not writers or wrote in Greek; in both cases I propose alternative hypotheses. I lastly test these alternatives by sketching a new approach to a possible Suetonian book De philosophis. I conclude that the more we rid ourselves of a priori assumptions about De viris illustribus, the more clearly we can see that Suetonius’ interests and approach were remarkably consistent throughout all his lives.

In this article we offer an editio princeps of a new inscription from the Cycladic island of Paros and discuss its implications for understanding Parian co-operation with Dionysiοs I of Syracuse in the Adriatic in the early fourth century BCE. We argue that the text throws light on the Parian colonization of Pharos, and is related to activities of the Parians in the Adriatic in what seems to be the result of local Parian strife and strong anti-Athenian affiliations on Paros. We explore possible interpretations of the inscribed decree and their implications for the relationship between the Parians and Dionysios.

Rome’s mid-republican period is back in the centre of attention. Roman money and coinage, however, are largely absent from the debate. As this field has seen important developments in recent years, this paper surveys recent research in order to explore how numismatic sources can contribute to our understanding of this formative period in Roman history. First, we present an overview of these new developments, which we then contextualise in the framework of the Roman economy, Roman state formation and the development of a distinct Roman identity. We argue for a development from coinage irregularly commissioned by individual Roman magistrates to a regular Roman state coinage; from haphazard production often outside Rome to large-scale and more regular coordinated production clearly institutionalised within the Roman state, with a distinct Roman appearance. We propose to recognise two principal moments of acceleration in this process: around 240 and, above all, 210 b.c.e., and show how these insights relate to broader debates on mid-republican Rome.