Dionysius of Halicarnassus

L'édition des fragments et témoignages de Caecilius de Calè-Actè constitue le troisième moment d’une recherche consacrée à la théorie rhétorique grecque des périodes hellénistique et post-hellénistique, qui a été initiée avec les éditions d’Hermagoras de Temnos (fl. 150/130 av. J.-C.), et d’Apollodore de Pergame (120 av. J.-C. – ca. 40 av. J.-C.) et Théodore de Gadara (né à la fin des années 70 av. J.-C.), parues respectivement en 2010 et 2013 aux éditions de la Collection des Université de France.
D’origine sicilienne, Caecilius est un rhéteur grec, contemporain — et peut-être ami ? — de Denys d’Halicarnasse, et qui doit notamment sa renommée à la rédaction d’un traité sur les figures dont l’influence fut, dans l’histoire de la rhétorique, profonde et durable. Son nom est aussi rattaché à l’histoire du Canon des dix orateurs attiques, au développement de la notion de « sublime » et à la polémique anti-asianiste qui agite les mondes grec et romain au ier s. avant J.-C. Pourtant, la place exacte que Caecilius tient dans ces controverses est loin d’être évidente ni même assurée, et les études qui ont été consacrées à ces questions ont attribué au rhéteur des rôles divers, quelquefois contradictoires. Les divergences qui caractérisent ces travaux sont en partie assignables à l’hétérogénéité des corpus sur lequels elles reposent. Comme pour tous les autres rhéteurs grecs de cette période (mis à part Denys d’Halicarnasse), on ne dispose en effet sur Caecilius que de sources minces et lacunaires, constituées essentiellement de témoignages — dans le meilleur des cas, de fragments — tirés d’auteurs postérieurs. En outre, les éditions qui tentent de reconstituer ce qui aurait été la doctrine authentique du rhéteur de Calè-Actè ne prennent pas toujours en compte les mêmes sources.
Cette édition, qui repose sur les mêmes principes qui ont été adoptés dans les éditions des Fragments et Témoignages d’Hermagoras, et d’Apollodore de Pergame et Théodore de Gadara, se divise en deux parties distinctes : l’une rassemble les fragments et témoignages que l’on peut rapporter à Caecilius, tandis que l’autre — qui se réduit au long texte de l’Ineditum Vaticanum, mentionnant en titre le nom d’un Caecilius qui en serait l’auteur — est un fragment qui n’est pas authentique.
Les témoignages ont été traduits de façon à respecter au maximum l’usage des termes techniques qui se retrouvent d’un témoignage à l’autre, quels qu’en soient les auteurs ou les langues dans lesquelles il a été conservé. Un lexique final réunit les principaux termes mentionnés dans les Fragments et témoignages, ainsi que les équivalences, quand elles sont attestées par les textes, entre les notions grecques et latines : il permettra de travailler avec précision sur le lexique grec de la technique rhétorique et de la critique à l’âge hellénistique et post-hellénistique de mettre à jour ses correspondances dans la langue latine, afin de mieux déceler les innovations tant dans le domaine conceptuel que le domaine purement lexical.

This contribution analyses the first of three speeches that according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 4, 71-75), L. Junius Brutus pronounced after the violence suffered by Lucretia, causing the expulsion of the Tarquins. In this circumstance, he spoke in reply to his fellow citizens who had been asked to decide which of the three forms of government they considered best between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and they had expressed their preference for democracy. In the passage, according to the arguments the historian attributed to him, Brutus suggested a political model where the powers belonging to the monarchic model were transferred to a magistracy as consulship which was double and time-defined, and had to cooperate with the senate and whose decisions would be subject to ratification by the people. On the whole, his discourse seems to reflect the wish for an institutional reorganisation inspired by the theory of mixed constitution, able to preserve the positive aspects of the monarchic model while correcting its defects and on the other hand reconciling the competencies of the monarchic model and the democratic model. Bearing in mind the years in which Dionysius composed his work, we may suppose that through the fiction of the first oratio delivered by Brutus, the historian was trying to give some advice to Octavian Augustus, who meanwhile continued to obtain renewals of his consular office but took care to “transfer the res publica from his own dominion back to the authority of the Senate and the Roman People”, encouraging him to guarantee a form of government able to create harmonious relations between the different state powers.

Focusing on a digression included in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities concerning the practice of manumission in Rome during the reign of the king Servius Tullius, this contribution aims to clarify the meaning of the historian’s disapproval of the Roman elite’s tendency to free slaves in their will as an expression of social ostentation, which was increasing in the first decades of the Augustan Principate, and also that of his proposal to scrutinize ex-slaves with the same censorial review used for senators and equestrians. In this light, beyond any interpretation as a rhetorical exercise on the decline of moral habits, the passage can be read as it relates to the debate that flourished until limits governing testamentary manumission were introduced by the Lex Fufia (2 BCE). In particular, considering the Roman Antiquities’ time of composition (ca 7 BCE), we may suppose that Dionysius was offering advice on the subject to specific figures such as his protector, the jurist Aelius Tubero , as well as Octavian Augustus

Since Antiquity, Gorgias has been linked with some figures of style, named after him γοργίεια σχήματα.
But ancient testimonies are, on that matter, far less unanimous than modern ones. This paper deals
with two main problems : why do some ancient testimonies ascribe to Gorgias the invention of those
figures ? How was the phrase γοργίεια σχήματα created ? The criticism of excess in the use of
antithesis, parisosis and paromoiosis (which are the main Gorgianic figures) can be traced back to
Peripatetic and Stoic attacks against the Isocratic period. This criticism is first essentially focused on
Isocrates. It is only during the Quarrel between Atticists and Asianists that Gorgias' name became more
than an mere exemple, i. e. the paradigm of excess. The phrase γοργίεια σχήματα was probably forged
by Denys of Halicarnassus for that purpose. Therefore one should be cautious when considering
γοργίεια σχήματα as characteristic of Gorgias' style : it is an anachronistic (and rather isocratic) point of
view, based on criterias inherited from Atticism.

Appians Keltiké, das vierte Buch seiner vierundzwanzig Bücher umfassenden Römischen Geschichte, behandelt die kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Römern und Kelten, beginnend mit dem von Brennus geführten Angriff auf Rom bis hin zur Eroberung Galliens durch Caesar. Die Keltiké, obgleich nur bruchstückhaft erhalten, stellt eine wertvolle Quelle für die Geschichte der Kelten sowie der römischen Republik dar, denn sie bietet eine Reihe von Informationen, die entweder sonst nirgends belegt sind oder die sich deutlich von den bei anderen Autoren überlieferten Traditionen unterscheiden, da Appian für seine Darstellung auf heute weitgehend verlorene Historiker zurückgegriffen hat. Um so verwunderlicher ist es, daß bislang noch kein Kommentar zur Keltiké veröffentlicht wurde. Dieses Defizit will die vorliegende Publikation beheben: Nach einer kurzen Einleitung folgt der eigentliche Kommentar, in dem zunächst von jedem Fragment der Originaltext und eine Übersetzung geboten wird. Daran schließt sich eine Analyse, die die einzelnen Zeugnisse in möglichst umfassender Weise auswertet. Dabei wird nicht nur die Überlieferung für jedes Fragment diskutiert, wozu die Eigenheiten und die Arbeitsweise der verschiedenen byzantinischen Exzerptoren genauestens untersucht wurden, sondern auch die sehr kontrovers verhandelte Quellenfrage. Ferner wird der historische Zusammenhang, in den das jeweilige Bruchstück gehört, vorgestellt, wofür die gesamte antike Parallelüberlieferung herangezogen werden mußte. Die Übereinstimmungen wie auch die Abweichungen zur übrigen literarischen Evidenz wurden herausgearbeitet, um Appians Position innerhalb der historiographischen Traditionen besser bestimmen zu können. Schließlich wurden mehrfach Überlegungen zum Inhalt der verlorenen Teile der Keltiké angestellt. Der vorliegende Kommentar erfüllt zunächst ein Desiderat der Appianforschung, indem er eine Lücke in der wissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung dieses Autors schließt. Aber auch die Forschung zur römischen Republik und den antiken Kelten kann von der Arbeit profitieren, mit der eine wenig beachtete Quelle erstmals gründlich erschlossen wird.

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the lists of Olympic victors that were assiduously maintained by ancient Greeks for more than a 1,000 years. The origins, development, content, and structure of Olympic victor lists are explored and explained, and a number of important questions, such as the source and reliability of the year of 776 BCE for the first Olympics, are addressed.

Vesta and the Vestal priestesses represented the very core of Roman cultural identity, and Augustus positioned his public image beside them to augment his political legitimacy. Through analysis of material culture, historiography, and poetry that originated during the principate of Augustus, it becomes clear that each of these sources of evidence contributes to the public image projected by the leader whom Ronald Syme considered to be the first Roman emperor. The Ara Pacis Augustae and the Res Gestae Divi Augustae embody the legacy the Emperor wished to establish, and each of these cultural works contain significant references to the Vestals. The study of history Livy undertook also emphasized the pathetic plight of Rhea Silvia as she was compelled to become a Vestal. Livy and his contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus explored the foundation of the Vestal Order and each writer had his own explanation about how Numa founded it. The Roman poets Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Tibullus incorporated Vesta and the Vestals into their work in a way that offers further proof of the way Augustus insinuated himself into the fabric of Roman cultural identity by associating his public image with these honored clerics.

The paper discusses the proposed reconstructions of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus from the 19th century to more recent scholarship. These offer three main models, summarized as the short, medium and extra long size models.
The small size model proposes a small temple built on a huge platform.
The medium size model interprets the remains of the temple of Jupiter as corresponding to the podium of the temple, while the extra-long model hypothesizes that the podium of the temple also includes the remains of two or more walls at the rear of the cells, usually identified as links between the podium and the retaining walls of the Capitoline Hill.
Among these, the medium size model appears as the most probable, or at any rate, the least unrealistic.

The topic of my paper is memory and oblivion in the literary field, as it appears in the work of Quintilian and, in particular, in the tenth book of his Institutio oratoria. After some general considerations, I focus on the comparison between the Roman writer and his Greek predecessor, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, about the construction of a shared literary memory in order thereby to identify what are the motivations and the discursive strategies Quintilian uses in the devel- opment of this dynamic process between memory and oblivion.

This book-length study is published as an online supplement to an article in the following DramaNet volume:
History and Drama. The Pan-European Tradition.
Edited by Joachim Küpper, Jan Mosch, Elena Penskaya.

(For the condensed version, see the paper below).

Full Title (abbreviated in the above caption due to spatial constraints):
"Variants of Rhetorical Ventriloquism: sermocinatio, ethopoeia, prosopopoeia (and Affine Terms) in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintilian, Augustine – Including Tentative Remarks on the Oratorico-Dramatic Concepts of ethos and persona, as well as Their Potential with Respect to Authorial Selfcraft in Shakespeare and Cervantes".

Επαναφέροντας στη μνήμη ένα χαμένο σήμερα ενεπίγραφο βάθρο της λατρείας των Καβείρων στην Αμφίπολη, μέσα από 3 παλαιές δημοσιεύσεις, ερμηνεύοντας την επιγραφή και αναλύοντας την σχέση της Αθηνάς και του Ηφαίστου, με τους μεταλλοτεχνίτες, την μαντική, τον Διόνυσο και την Δήμητρα.

Se examinan los datos trasmitidos por los autores greco-latinos sobre el cónsul Espurio Cassio Vecellino (s. VI-V a. C.). Los analistas de los siglos II y I a. C. reelaboraron y falsificaron los hechos y presentaron los actos de Cassio como un precedente de los protagonizados por los Gracos. La condena y ejecución del cónsul fueron expuestas como un ejemplo a seguir contra los aspirantes a la affectatio regini. Por último, se analizan dos estatuas que la tradición vinculó con Espurio Cassio y se hacen una serie de consideraciones acerca de su muerte y de la opinión que sobre su persona tenía la plebe y la gens Cassia en los últimos siglos de la República romana.
We examined the data transmitted by the Greco-Latin authors about the consul Spurius Cassius Vecellinus (VI-V century b. C.). Analysts of the second and first centuries b. C. falsified data and they presented the action of Cassius as a precedent of the actions of the Gracchi. The conviction and execution of consul were exposed as a role model against affectatio regini´s aspirants. Finally, two statues, that tradition linked with Spurius Cassius, are analyzed and some considerations about his death and the opinion that the plebs and gens Cassia in the last centuries of the Roman Republic had about him are made.

The story of the single combat of M. Valerius Corv(in)us with a Gaul is one of the most famous Roman legends, as is evident from the unusually high number of attestations. A common element in all these testimonies is that the Roman was helped by a raven in this duel. Only a fragment from Appians Κελτική (Celt. F 10), treating this episode, does not mention the raven at all. For this obvious divergence from the rest of the tradition previous scholarship has offered various explanations, but ultimately all of them remain unsatisfactory. This paper attempts to show that Appian knew the raven story very well. In fact, his text (of which the extremely fragmented state has not always been taken into due account) can be connected with a parallel passage in Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ant. Rom. 15, 1,1–2) and so be freed from the (supposedly) isolated position within the tradition about the single combat of Valerius.

Die Erzählung vom Zweikampf des M. Valerius Corv(in)us mit einem Gallier gehört zu den berühmtesten römischen Legenden, wie an den ungewöhnlich zahlreichen Bezeugungen zu ersehen ist. Ein allen Berichten gemeinsames Element ist, daß dem Römer in diesem Duell ein Rabe zu Hilfe kam. Lediglich ein diese Episode behandelndes Fragment aus Appians Κελτική (Celt. F 10) erwähnt den Rabe überhaupt nicht. Für diese augenfällige Abweichung von der restlichen Überlieferung wurden in der Forschung bislang verschiedene Erklärungen geboten, die aber letztlich allesamt unbefriedigend bleiben. Dieser Beitrag versucht zu zeigen, daß Appian die Rabengeschichte sehr wohl kannte. Sein Text, dessen extrem stark fragmentierter Zustand nicht immer gebührend in Rechnung gestellt wurde, läßt sich nämlich mit einer Parallelstelle bei Dionysios von Halikarnaß (ant. Rom. 15, 1,1–2) verknüpfen und so aus der (vermeintlich) isolierten Position in der Überlieferung zum Zweikampf des Valerius befreien.

The subject of this short study is a legend that describes the transfer of a statue of Juno Regina, the patron goddess of Veii, to Rome in 396 BCE, shortly after the fall of the Etruscan city to the Roman forces led by Camillus. The legend is commonly interpreted as a depiction of evocatio, a ritual meant to convince the tutelary deities of a beseiged city to support the Romans. However, none of the multiple known accounts of the statue’s transfer (the principal of which is provided by Livy) present it as a part of a ritual. The article aims to examine the validity of such a connection by closely comparing the events of the legend, their timing, and their nature to the ancient accounts of evocatio. Following this, a comparison is made to two other legends, preserved by Herodotus and Athenaeus (his source is Menodotus), both of which describe miracles displayed by the images of gods in response to the attempts to move them. On the basis of this comparison it is concluded that the legend of the transfer of Juno Regina is not meant to depict a particular ritual and has emerged merely to provide an explanation of the fact that the ancient Etruscan image has found its place in Rome. Refs 7.

This dissertation explores the idea of Parallelism within Livy's presentation of the Life of Romulus, focusing on three liminal stages : The death of Remus, the rape of the Sabine women, and the death of Romulus.

Focus is placed on a detailed comparitive analysis of the work of Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and of the surviving sources (largely fragmentary) which predate Livy's work. Once this is done, the aspects which only seem to apper in Livys work are analysed along side supplimentray modern scholarship on the chapter topics.

The conclusions of this research indicate that one of the possible intentions of Livy in writing the early histroy of Rome was to create parallels to the events of his own time, specifically the Roman civil war. This is argued to have been undertaken with the aim of creating an understaning of how these events occured, what could have been done to prevent them form occuring, and the processes which contributed to the conclusion of the civil war.

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition.

Nella Praeparatio Evangelica di Eusebio di Cesarea citazioni e brani dalle opere storiche di tradizione greca e giudaica sono recepiti ed incastonati in un’architettura apologetica lucida, protesa a dimostrare la superiorità del cristianesimo rispetto ad ogni altro credo religioso. Il presente volume si propone di investigare la sofisticata metodologia eusebiana che, sorretta da un accurato procedimento bibliografico, intende accreditare il nuovo messaggio evangelico mediante la ragionata reinterpretazione – tra gli altri – dei testi della storiografia antica. L’utilizzo e la distorsione di fonti storiche greche e giudaiche nella Praeparatio Evangelica concorre alla definizione dei rapporti tra cultura “pagana”, giudaica e cristiana, offrendone una chiave di lettura destinata ad esercitare una larga influenza sulla vicenda storica e culturale della Tarda Antichità.

Nonostante la fama delle biografie plutarchee, la scelta da parte di Plutarco di accostare Licurgo e Numa non è così usuale nelle fonti antiche. In precedenza, infatti, diversi autori avevano piuttosto valorizzato il paragone tra Licurgo e il primo re, Romolo, al fine di istituire un confronto diretto tra le due città. Dopo aver offerto una sintetica panoramica relativa ai parallelismi tra la costituzione romana e quella spartana nella letteratura antica, lo scopo di questo intervento sarà quello di analizzare le tracce di una synkrisis tra Romolo e Licurgo – alternativa al confronto con Numa proposto da Plutarco – con specifico riferimento ai passaggi di Dionigi di Alicarnasso e di Cicerone. L’imitatio da parte di Romolo nei confronti di Licurgo è, infatti, un tema presente tanto nel De Republica di Cicerone quanto nel secondo libro delle Antichità Romane di Dionigi di Alicarnasso. Secondo questi autori, come sarà analizzato nello specifico, Romolo aveva direttamente imitato lo Spartano dal punto di vista legislativo e istituzionale, prendendo consapevolmente “in prestito” alcuni elementi fondativi della politeia di Licurgo.

Book Review Essay discussing the plebeian interpretation of Machiavelli in John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics (Princeton: Princeton University press, 2018), and Gabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Es geht um die Frage, wann und warum die Ursprünge Roms nicht nur mit Romulus und Aeneas, sondern im Besonderen auch mit Arkadien verbunden wurden. Zu diesem Zweck werden die Romulusbiographie Plutarchs, die Fragmente römischer Annalisten und das 1. Buch der Archaiologia des Dionysios von Halikarnass untersucht. Es wird gezeigt, dass Konstrukte von Roms arkadischen Wurzeln auf den frühen Hellenismus zurückgehen, d. h. auf Gelehrte peripatetischer und alexandrinischer Provenienz, und dass sie sekundär von den frühesten römischen Historikern übernommen und adaptiert wurden. Zugleich werden die genealogischen, aitiologischen, etymologischen Verfahren untersucht, derer man sich zur Schaffung derartiger Konstrukte bediente.

The study recognizes in the term sunchorema a keyword inside the narration of Dio-nysius of Halicarnass about the patricio-plebeian struggle, with a textual analysis of two relevant debates on the point, the first in the context of the Sacred Mount secession (6.71-87), the second about the Coriolan case (7.24-46). On this ground the author builds an organic theory about the Roman constitution, based on a fair and free agreement between the two parties in struggle. This element comes to Dionysius as an historical result where, on the contrary, most of the more or less contemporary historiography (Livius and Cicero) gives rise to a very different reconstruction. By this view, the original institutions become a model of civil union and when internal strifes can end in a new institutional profile (the augustean Empire), the new composure can be presented not as a new social and political experiment, but as a recovery of ancient civil conquests, which the near past (civil wars) could have been neglected only for a short time. Such a perspective is for the most incoherent as a matter of fact and doesn't find any validation in other counts. Although, Dionysius does not contradict any specific evidence of the tradition. He just tries to translate in historical count his image of the Roman constitution, where the civil pact is made once for all, to the benefit (he thinks) of the posterity. We can also consider the Dionysius reconstruction as a study in rhetorical communication, about the manner in which the same material of facts can be organized in a coherent system, without need of any significant inconsistency.

The aim of this paper is to identify the origin of the clientela in archaic Rome. In order to do that, I will use both the emic and etic approaches. Firstly, I will focus on the ancient authors (Dionysius of halicarnassus, Cicero, Plutarch, Festus, Ampelius) and their interpretations in order to identify the reason that led them to attribute the origin of patronage to Romulus. Secondly, thanks to the anthropological approach and by analysing the recent bibliography I will propose a more plausible hypothesis concerning the formation of the archaic clientela.

PALLAS, 53, 2000, pp. 205-239. L'ethnographie de l'Italie du IVe siècle avant J.-C. d'après Denys d'Halicarnasse (livres XII à XX) Stéphane BOURDIN (ATER à l'Université de Provence) Quiconque veut connaître le peuplement de l'Italie au IVe siècle avant J.-C. se réfère naturellement à ...

Despite a growing interest in the material sources for the history of Boeotia and Thebes, and the publication of new epigraphic texts, which contribute to their political and religious background, we still miss a systematic history of the cultural background of Boeotia, apart from the fundamental studies on its pivotal poets, i.e. Hesiod and Pindar (Corinna being a hardly graspable voice to understand). Still, new historiographical trends such as the intentional history and three thought-provoking studies on the local Boeotian myths published in this century (Κühr 2006, Larson 2007 and Berman 2015) have detected how much we still have to learn on the local reception and description of Boeotian history and myths, especially during the short period of the Theban hegemony.
In this paper, I would like to focus my attention on the first writers of Boeotian histories and to offer a few examples of the richness and variety that these fragments reveal. Starting from Hellanicus, who displays a version of the founding myth of Cadmus (F 51a Fowler) in deep contrast with the storyline followed by the Athenian sources, I will then concentrate on four texts by Armenidas (BNJ 378) and Aristophanes (BNJ 379), who can be dated to the middle and to the second half of the fourth century. These few case studies may suggest how short-sighted are the current definitions of local versus great historiography, a debated issue which can be better understood only through an analysis of the single cases. Boeotia represents a particularly stimulating one, since the overall bad representation that this region had in the classical sources -starting nonetheless from the local Pindar in the sixth Olympic (152)- might be challenged by a structured reading of its local historians.


http://www.sas.ac.uk/support-research/public-events/2016/ics-postgraduate-work-progress-seminar-10

This paper applies rhetorical theory (specifically the rhetorical theorist Michael Leff's concept of hermeneutical rhetoric) to the " gay debate " in American evangelicalism. Given that liberal and conservative positions arise from contrasting interpretations of the Christian scriptures, which in turn arise from a contest of hermeneutical priorities, I suggest that hermeneutical rhetoric potentially creates interpretive common ground because it does not prioritize historical data over scriptural authority—a hermeneutic method that has been resisted consistently by American evangelicals. Through the specific case study of the 2006 Soulforce Equality Ride at Wheaton College, I demonstrate how hermeneutical rhetoric circumvents stakeholders' implicit observance of the hermeneutical fault line between liberal-historicism and evangelical-biblicism.

Ancient sources relate that the tribunes of the plebs were created in the first plebeian secession (494–493 BCE) to act as officers for the assembly of the plebs, to pass resolutions (plebiscites) binding on the plebs, and to defend the plebs and their property against abusive magistrates. By 287 BCE, the tribunate had become Rome’s principal legislative institution, its plebiscites binding on all Roman citizens. Through aggressive use of their legislative and obstructive powers, popularis tribunes of the later second century BCE helped spark off the so-called “Roman Revolution,” a century of civil and military conflict that culminated in the establishment of the Augustan principate and the reduction of the tribunate to an urban administrative position. Nevertheless, literary and epigraphic evidence indicates that the office of tribunus plebis continued as an important step on the cursus honorum into the late imperial era.

(Online links to Wiley EAH version will be added as soon as available).

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics. In a crucial chapter of the Discourses on Livy, he wrote: “a republic will never be perfect unless it has provided for everything with its laws and has established a remedy for every accident and given the mode to govern it. So, concluding, I say that those republics that in urgent dangers do not take refuge either in the dictator or in similar authorities will always come to ruin in grave accidents.”  Dictatorship therefore is the magistracy to which republics turn in moments of emergency; it is the “ordinary way” which they use to face up to “extraordinary accidents.”

Machiavelli’s reflections on the subject of dictatorship thus shed light on a series of key concepts of his thought: first of all, the republic as the embodiment of the rule of  law; tyranny, as distinct from dictatorship, as a form of government based on violence; the difference between ordinary and extraordinary forms of political action; and more generally, the relationship between law and politics. His reflections on dictatorship are an excellent vantage point from which to reconsider these issues.

Machiavelli develops his reflections on the magistracy of dictatorship in three important chapters (33 to 35) of the first book of the Discourses, but he returns to discuss historical figures of Roman dictators,  and therefore the meaning of dictatorial authority, in many other passages and chapters of his work. His gaze, as always, is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. His problem was of a normative kind: how republics should deal with emergency situations, which he called “urgent dangers.” In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli’s discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his thought as a whole.

The development of Arianism as a rhetorical category is an important topic in scholarship on the Cappadocian Fathers. Their polemics against opponents such as Eunomius and Aetius become formative texts in the creation of the heresiarch as a literary type. Nicene writers draw upon a formidable arsenal of techniques for character assassination in order to paint their adversaries with every form of vice and degeneracy imaginable.

    This paper uses Gregory of Nazianzus’ encomium for Athanasius to show how a particular type of polemical discourse enters the literary toolkit of heresiology. Gregory’s narrative of his subject’s life offers an account of the rise and fall of George of Cappadocia (Or. 21.16-26), the “usurper” of Athanasius’ episcopal see in Alexandria from 357-361. This paper shows for the first time that the description of the background and career of the Arian George is in fact a reimagining of the major literary feud of the Hellenistic and Imperial eras. Gregory rewrites the classic account of the rise of the rhetorical school known as “Asianism” found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ preface to his study of the ancient Attic orators. Gregory’s treatment of George’s career is based point for point on Dionysius’ lurid account of the stylistic and cultural disease that for him was represented by Asianism. Athanasius, in turn, is made to play the part of Atticism, which returns in triumph to its position of authority after being unjustly displaced by the upstart usurper.

    In the character of George of Cappadocia, Gregory conflates the two cultural heterodoxies of Asianism and Arianism. His interest in Asianism as a heresy of language puts into sharper relief his numerous attacks on Arians, both with respect to their misunderstanding of language as well as their inappropriate and untimely use of theological discourse. Ancient theories of language have played a prominent role in recent scholarship on 4th century theological and philosophical debates, and Gregory’s interest in the Asianist-Atticist controversy should be brought into the conversation. Finally, Gregory’s encomium on Athanasius enjoys a long Byzantine afterlife, and this paper concludes by exploring one episode in the reception of Gregory’s “Asianist” characterization of George of Cappadocia in the polemical traditions of subsequent theological debates: Theodoret of Cyrus' account of the rise of Nestorius in his Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium.