Book contents
- The Future of Rome
- The Future of Rome
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Some Remarks on Cicero’s Perception of the Future of Rome
- Chapter 2 Eclogue 4 and the Futures of Rome
- Chapter 3 Imperium sine fine: Rome’s Future in Augustan Epic
- Chapter 4 Posterity in the Arval Acta
- Chapter 5 The Future of Rome in Three Greek Historians of Rome
- Chapter 6 Philo on the Impermanence of Empires
- Chapter 7 From Human Freedom to Divine Intervention
- Chapter 8 Josephus, Caligula and the Future of Rome
- Chapter 9 “Will This One Never Be Brought Down?”
- Chapter 10 The Sibylline Oracles and Resistance to Rome
- Chapter 11 Revelation 17.1–19.10: A Prophetic Vision of the Destruction of Rome
- Chapter 12 Cicero and Vergil in the Catacombs: Pagan Messianism and Monarchic Propaganda in Constantine’s Oration to the Assembly of Saints
- Chapter 13 The Future of Rome after 410 CE
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index of Names and Places
Chapter 5 - The Future of Rome in Three Greek Historians of Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- The Future of Rome
- The Future of Rome
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Some Remarks on Cicero’s Perception of the Future of Rome
- Chapter 2 Eclogue 4 and the Futures of Rome
- Chapter 3 Imperium sine fine: Rome’s Future in Augustan Epic
- Chapter 4 Posterity in the Arval Acta
- Chapter 5 The Future of Rome in Three Greek Historians of Rome
- Chapter 6 Philo on the Impermanence of Empires
- Chapter 7 From Human Freedom to Divine Intervention
- Chapter 8 Josephus, Caligula and the Future of Rome
- Chapter 9 “Will This One Never Be Brought Down?”
- Chapter 10 The Sibylline Oracles and Resistance to Rome
- Chapter 11 Revelation 17.1–19.10: A Prophetic Vision of the Destruction of Rome
- Chapter 12 Cicero and Vergil in the Catacombs: Pagan Messianism and Monarchic Propaganda in Constantine’s Oration to the Assembly of Saints
- Chapter 13 The Future of Rome after 410 CE
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index of Names and Places
Summary
A historical theory of uncertain origin is directly relevant to how Roman historians, particularly those who wrote in Greek, understood the future of Rome: four empires have dominated the world, Rome is the fifth, signifiying either the continuation of a natural process or the end of the historical cycle. This 4+1 model of world empires occurs also in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic, deriving ultimately from the Book of Daniel, where it may be a reworking of a Zoroastrian tradition.1 So compelling was the idea for the Jews and Christians living in the Roman Empire, nursing messianic dreams, that its absence in a major Jewish thinker of the first century requires explanation.2 Among historians of Rome the model first appears as a tool of explanation and prediction in Polybius’ Greek history of Rome, then in Latin Aemilius Sura3 and Pompeius Trogus – in each of these first cases, indirectly, or in quoted fragments – then certainly in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and later Greek writers. Thus, the 4+1 scheme appears in Greek prose literature from as early as the second century BCE, around the time that the Book of Daniel was being redacted.
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- The Future of RomeRoman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Visions, pp. 85 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020