This chapter explores the central image of currus (chariot), and its top-of-line model, quadriga (the four-horse car), which occupy the most commanding position within the rhetoric of Roman transportation. Already a symbol of unique power and prestige due to its built-in, inherited features, this Roman vehicle takes most distinct shape in two powerful and complementary forms, the four-horse currus triumphalis, in which generals proudly paraded in the triumphal procession, and the currus circensis, the breakneck-fast racing vehicle of Roman chariot-racing. The chapter analyzes the rhetoric of currus in oscillation, alternating between examinations of some its winningest portraits of victory (on the battlefield and in the circus), on the one hand, and uncovering a series of unsettling representations of the danger and violence it claims to transcend. Visions of victorious currus in Ennius, in the story of Ratumena, and in Cicero are counterbalanced by an investigation of ‘chariot-talk’ in Plautus, explorations of the meaning of winning in Roman didactic, and telling versions of the story of Phaethon.

“The die is cast.”1 Calvin’s words in his 1532 letter from Paris to François Daniel indicated his enthusiasm at publishing his commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, which Calvin hoped would launch his career as a brilliant humanist. His audience, in this case, was the Republic of Letters; that pan-European collection of scholars, notaries, court officials, poets, lawyers, and academics to whom he sought to ingratiate himself. Eight years later, he published his Commentarii in epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, from Strasbourg. The juxtaposition of similar and dissimilar elements in these two works opens up a fascinating window into the character of biblical commentaries and, more broadly, scholarship in the sixteenth century.