Elisa Migliore

The article examines quotations by Fenestella from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia. The analysis is mainly based on three passages (33, 146; 8, 19; 15, 1) and aims at showing many antiquarian and chronographic issues that seem to have characterised Fenestella’s work (i. e. the topos of πρῶτος εὑρετής, the interest in public games, polished and complex formulas used to record past events, and the explanation of cultural phenomena based on his own life). Secondly, the purpose of this paper is to reconstruct which of Fenestella’s work Pliny used in his erudite research, since the quotations only record Fenestella’s name. In conclusion, we will show how reflection on chronographic issues seems to play a central role in these fragments. Perhaps, because of the issues they deal with and the structure of the exposition, they could have belonged to a historiographical-antiquarian work such as the Annales.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the role played by literature in Fenestella’s
historiography. Even though Fenestella’s works are mostly lost, we have five fragments
containing paraliterary information, such as chronology, biography or references to other
authors’ lives (see FRHist 70 frr. 11, 18, 21a-b, 22, 23). In the first section, we will examine
the incipit of Suetonius’ Vita Terentii where Fenestella is mentioned in relation to some
conjectures concerning the poet’s chronology. The second part of the paper deals with Asconius’
commentary on the In toga candida from which we learn that Fenestella claimed that
Cicero defended Catilina in 65 d.C. on the occasion of a de repetundis trial.

Pontifical law and sacred rites are key points in Macrobius' Saturnalia. Macrobius, however, deals with the question as an antiquarian, since the Christianisation of the Roman empire gradually banned any public manifestation of traditional Roman cults. The solution Macrobius suggests to stem the decline of paganism is to crystallise Roman religion into eternally valid truths. This article explores pontifical law in Macrobius' Saturnalia as an expression of the resilience of Roman paganism.

In the Letter 108 Seneca analyses Cicero’s De re publica according to three different perspectives: the ones of the philosophiae deditus, the philologus and the grammaticus. The section of the philologus stands as a series of notes taken by an expert antiquarian writer. Therefore, since these notes cannot be completely retrieved in Cicero’s work, Seneca might have not collected them directly from this source, but from a hypothetical intermediate one. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to prove the existence of this intermediate source, which may be identified with the Fenestella mentioned at the end of Seneca’s work.