Periodisations are inevitable and useful short-cuts in conceptualising the past. But they are often inherited without reflection or a clear idea of their origins; in literature they can endow fashionable aesthetic judgements with lasting canonical force in ways that can be intellectually harmful. Latin is a language with a literary history of over two millennia, with highly differentiated levels of survival from different periods, and with a complex scholarly tradition: its periodisation is both important and challenging. I open with three vignettes of attitudes to Latin literature which in their different ways show the tendency to esteem antiquity above all. I look at six possible ways in which the history of Latin literature has been periodised or could be better periodised, with a recurring focus on two particularly dynamic periods : the last half-century before Christ and the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. An examination of changes in language, metre, prose rhythm, politics, religion and book history is used to challenge and test established periodisations, and to suggest the benefits of a greater acknowledgement of continuities and the longue durée.

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of revelation in Roman augury. Although augury is often regarded, not without reason, as being preoccupied with matters of narrow import and significance, it is a craft based on the detection and interpretation of divine signs, and thus builds into its operating process the question of the extent and quality to which the gods disclose to mankind their will and their attitudes. Revelation thus proves a productive vantage point on the workings of Roman augury, and more broadly of Roman public divination.

The early history of Rome has long been subjected to various forms of criticism. I am told that public-school boys in the United Kingdom used to read whole books of Livy’s history, which they (in turn) were told was the work of his imagination, and this view has become a communicative memory still propagated by many historians. This unstable construct began to shake under the weight of Ogilvie’s voluminous commentary (and its continuation by Oakley).1 A serious modern reconsideration began with Tim Cornell’s monograph The Beginnings of Rome in which he argued for the internal consistency of the traditions on early Rome.2 Cornell made the case that the main body of narrative is likely to go back a long way and shows a structure that could not simply be invented by historians of the late Republic and early Principate. Given that Roman historiography started only in the second half of the third century BC, there is a gap of several centuries between this and the regal period (traditionally dated 753–509 BC).3 Accordingly, if there was any earlier material, it must have been transmitted by means other than formal historiography, and oral tradition seems like the obvious candidate.

Imperial behaviour, like the emperor’s name and image, was multifaceted, with different people expecting different things at different times. The variation was limited. A set of imperial roles – military, religious, and civil – was established rapidly and remained important throughout Roman history. There was variation of the balance between these different roles, but it was difficult for any emperor to wholly ignore any of them. Emperors could not present themselves as they saw fit. In that sense, Roman emperorship shows striking continuity. Still, the empire developed, and emperorship developed with it. Some of these shifts took place within traditional patterns. Christianity reformulated the emperor’s religious role, but did not redefine it. Child emperors were still expected to be military leaders. The move away from Rome as the emperors’ residence seems to have had a different kind of impact, diminishing the importance of some of the ‘Republican’ expectations with which Roman emperors had to cope. Yet for a Roman emperor to become exemplary, he had to satisfy different demands. Playing the right roles for relevant people was the best way to become the perfect emperor.

Starting from a cognitive point of view, this paper provides an entirely new reading of the dances and chants of the Salian priests. By focusing on their dances and chants in the perspective of embodied cognition and by putting a diligent analysis of (a) the reports and (b) the prayer texts into historical comparisons with other ‘prophetic’ practices of that time, this study is able to elucidate the Salian performances as body techniques that go beyond a mere facilitation of sociality. These techniques alter the practitioners’ states of mind and thereby elicit an experience that one may call religious experience, divine experience, or ‘possession’.

This chapter examines the cultural status of ritual song and dance in the Roman Late Republican and Augustan periods. By applying the modern theoretical work of Paul Connerton on the social reproduction of memory, the chapter explores several strategies through which two of the most iconic religious associations in Rome – the Salian priesthood and the Arval Brethren – stored and transmitted their cultural traditions. The hymns of these collegia, as well as their performances, constitute unique artifacts for understanding the interconnected processes of writing and embodiment – what Connerton defines as “inscription” and “incorporation”– in the production of ancient musical memories.

This chapter analyzes Livy’s narrative of the events of 207 BCE, when Roman officials addressed a pressing religious and military crisis by commissioning an innovative musical event – a Greek-style maiden procession with a hymn composed by Rome’s first known poet, Livius Andronicus. Livy’s account asks us to confront the question of how Roman musical and ritual traditions were created and remembered, by inviting the reader to witness a tradition in the very process of being invented. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on how the hymn’s ritual actors created a collective memory of its success and incorporated it into the religious traditions of Rome. On the other, Livy refuses to record the hymn himself on the basis of its primitive aesthetics, with the paradoxical result that a significant document in the history of Roman music is simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Self-consciously aware of ritual song and narrative history as differently constituted repositories of collective memory, I propose, Livy draws attention to the processes by which his account of Rome’s early song culture shapes his reader’s musical memory.

The chapter argues against recent attempts to analyse religious aspects of Latin literature without paying attention to the question of genre. History, antiquarianism, epic are all very different ways of representing the divine, and the specificity of each genre is crucial for understanding how the texts function.

This chapter explores the diverse ways in which coins serve as ‘monuments in miniature’, commemorating a wide variety of aspects of Roman public life.The first section uses two case studies to exemplify the different types of interactions of individuals, families, and the state seen through the coins.The first looks at the coinage produced over three generations by the Marcii Philippi; the second looks at the diversity of commemorative strategies used within the divisive years 56-55 BCE.The second section looks at how the Romans conceived of their empire as proof of divine favor.This type of ideology is evident in their foundation legends, how Rome is personified, the importance of priesthoods to individual and family status, and how military victories are themselves the subject of religious thanksgiving.

This chapter documents how the Roman elite attempted to speak to ‘popular’ concerns: Will there be enough to eat? Can we keep the favor of the gods? How will our rights to land and our own bodies be protected? What can preserve the anonymity of our votes? It starts with coins celebrating concord in the aftermath of the Catilinarian conspiracy.It then looks at the representation of religious festivals and the city's grain supply on the coinage.The next section examines numismatic evidence related to Roman agrarian policies and colonization, with particular attention to Paestum.The last section considers how the coinage reflects constitutional issues, especially the secret ballot and political rhetoric in reaction to the Sullan Constitution.

The final chapter returns to the distinction between idols and other cult images that was proposed in the introduction. In each of the book’s main sections, clues have been observed that confirm a functional distinction between idols and other cult images. The status of both idols and cult images was also found to be flexible, with new images existing side-by-side with old ones in virtually all Roman temples. Since it was largely human interactions that transformed a cult image into an idol, it is rarely possible to identify individual objects as an idol on the basis of archaeological or art historical evidence alone. We never have the full biography of any surviving cult image, just glimpses and hints into particular moments in its life. The fact that idols were continually created, used, and destroyed in the ways discussed in this book for hundreds of years is itself an indication of their important role in Roman religion. So too is the continued use of specific strategies to retain agency for idols. The encounter with a temple’s idol was surely the most important reason for individuals to visit Roman temples.

Images of the gods were omnipresent in the Roman world. Cult images served many functions, but some were the focal point of ritual activity in temples and are termed ‘idols’ in this book. After exploring both the ancient and modern terminology of cult images, this chapter turns to evidence for belief in the divinity of idols. Many ancient writers, including Arnobius of Sicca, give a sense that many Romans perceived idols to be divine, or at least endowed with agency. It is suggested that this aspect of Roman religion can be understood through cross-cultural comparisons and anthropological theories of agency in religious art. To help us build a complete picture of the place of Roman cult images in Roman religion, and to avoid the problem of the so-called museum effect, the book adopts a biographical approach, exploring the births, lives, and death of cult images. It focuses on cult images and temples in the western Roman Empire, including Rome, Gaul, and Germany, from the Roman Republican period, or the pre-Roman Celtic and Germanic Iron Age, to late antiquity and the early medieval period.

This final chapter draws together the themes from the previous chapters to discuss the place of Roman Aquae Sulis as a whole. It then examines the archaeological evidence for the sanctuary’s decay and eventual abandonment in the context of our broader understanding of late- and sub-Roman Britain, and finishes by looking at the Old English poem ‘The Ruin’, thus bringing the story full-circle back to the Middle Ages and the rise of Bath as a healing spa.

This chapter investigates the significance that Roman augural practice, as a kindred practice to Greek theôria, held for Roman comedy and tragedy. Central to its arguments are notions of time and space, which ultimately show the broad importance of Aristotelian concepts to the broader Hellenistic world. This piece argues that augury-taking involved sitting in a terrestrial temple while gazing at a specially demarcated zone of sky or a ‘whole-world’ (mundus). This temporarily legible space in which the gods would direct the signifying flight of birds was more than a celestial backdrop; it was also itself a temple (templum caeli), and the technical term for this temple-gazing was contemplatio. The institution of Roman theatre has not generally been associated with practices of auspication, but because of the emphatic insistence on the temporary stage, the conventional ‘unity of time’ and the probable placement of audience seating, there was a suggestive similarity between the Middle Republican audience’s spectation at tragedies and comedies and traditional augural contemplation. The structural echo between augural and theatrical contemplation outlives the Republican temporary stage in Seneca, where it has become a distinctively Roman mode of construing the intersection of the cosmic gaze and philosophical or spectatorial theôria.