Roman Empire

The importance of these much-debated scrolls is here interpreted by Cecil Rothin the light of the events that took place during the first-century Jewish Revolt against the power of Rome.

By his very ruthlessness, Julius Caesar made himself indispensable to the State he had largely been responsible for disrupting. Peter Green assesses the Caesarian legend he left behind him, as well as its malign influence upon later ages.

E. Badian introduces Cicero, the master of Latin rhetoric, who long strove to preserve the traditional Republican oligarchy, but who perished at the orders of a military triumvirate that came to represent “the reality of power” in Rome.

Caesar once crossed the Thames on the back of an animal previously unseen by Britons. Here, C.E. Stevens assesses just how much of a historical anomaly this pairing was.

D.M. Nicol assesses Justinian's valiant attempt to restore the splendours of Imperial Rome, by turning back the clock to the days of Augustus, and making the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, concluding it “was impractical and largely a failure. But it was a glorious failure."

S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.

In Rome, after the fall of the Republic, women played a conspicuous, independent and sometimes ill-omened part. But it was on their follies and extravagances, rather than on their virtues, that masculine writers usually preferred to dwell, writes J.P.V.D. Balsdon.

After centuries of masculine predominance, as the Republic neared its end, a host of notable women crossed the stage of Roman history—the devoted Porcia, the beautiful Julia, the Amazonian Fulvia, described here by J.P.V.D. Balsdon as “a Lady Macbeth of the Roman world”.

E. Badian writes that the efforts of Antiochus Epiphanes to Hellenize his dominions led to a revolt in Judaea under the leadership of the Hasmonaean house, known as the Maccabees, who succeeded in re-asserting Jewish law and the Jewish religion in traditional form.

The monarchs of the East had developed an effective technique of establishing control of the Greek cities by volunteering to “liberate” them. This was a method, writes E. Badian, of which Roman statesmen quickly learned to take advantage.