This article aims to re-examine the exemptions from military service that were given to the Jews in the Late Republic, conserved to us in Josephus' writings. The extent of these exemptions and their ...number are part of a long, extensive scholarly debate. This article wishes to prove that there were only two original exemptions, one issued by Lentulus and one by Julius Caesar, that were limited in their extent, and that there was never a general exemption for all the Jews. It will also be shown that the other exemptions are only edicts renewing the previous two. Moreover, it will be proven that the Jews served no less than their percentage in the general population, and that extensive Jewish service started in the middle of the 1st century BCE. By showing this and highlighting the vast number of Jews that were in the domain of the Roman Republic at the time, especially in the city of Rome, the current article will stress that there was no logical reason to give a general exemption to the Jews in a time of war. And so, an attempt to delve into the logic behind the exemptions, their extent, and the reason for their creation, will be made. Another aspect which will be addressed is the role of the local Roman administration in issuing edicts, their extensive understanding of the different minorities, including the Jews, and the legislative tradition of not creating precedence.
At the heart of this essay is the transcription of a collection of Lily Ross Taylor’s unpublished notes. These were first presented at a colloquium held at Bryn Mawr College in November 2019 as a ...memorial to the fiftieth anniversary of her death. As presented here, they provide her view of the coins as evidence for Caesar’s aims between 49 and 44 bce and for his later deification. They also clearly articulate her methodology for using numismatic sources in historical research. A short introduction attempts to put these notes in their scholarly context and points toward Miss Taylor’s planned work, much of it uncompleted at the time of her death.
'ET TU, BANNON?' shouted the front page of the New York Post on 4 January 2018, after some of Stephen Bannon's private comments about Donald Trump had been made public. This was not the first time ...that New Yorkers were presented with the comparison between the US President and Julius Caesar: the previous summer, the annual Shakespeare production in Central Park had invoked the wrath of Trump's supporters. Yet the president's camp has itself indulged in analogies with Caesar, as well as other characters from Shakespeare's plays. This should be all the warning one needs against the use of Shakespearean paradigms to try and interpret contemporary American politics. There are, however, many examples of attempts to identify Shakespearean precursors to Trump - ranging from Macbeth to Richard III and King Lear - in what has become a subgenre of media coverage of his presidency. Most of these venture a critique of the president-as-demagogue. Shakespeare has also been recruited by a figure like Bannon (whose Shakespearean enthusiasm is eccentric, but certainly not innocuous) into the ambit of white supremacist populism. Teased out, this narrative offers a cautionary tale for scholars in early modern studies, and prompts us to reflect critically both on defences of Shakespeare's centrality in the classroom and on the practice of what Jeffrey R. Wilson has called 'Public Shakespeare'.
Landscape plays a vital role in the development of military campaigns through the definition of geostrategic landmarks that structure the control of the territory, the imposition of constraints to ...the movement of armies and the identification of features that facilitate defence against attackers. These factors are linked to the study of past spatial mobility which is typically done by finding optimal pathways between pairs of points using Least-Cost Path analysis. This emphasis on optimality may not be ideal for case studies that need a general approach to spatial connectivity such as the study of conflict-related dynamics. Connectivity modelling based on Circuit Theory (CT) is an alternative approach to spatial mobility that captures the connectivity of an entire region identifying not only optimal paths but also bottlenecks, dead-ends and any other spatial feature that may impact movement. We present here a framework to study landscapes of conflict using connectivity modelling; the framework combines CT, visibility analysis and statistical hypothesis testing to understand the reasons behind the assault and destruction of Puig Ciutat (NE Iberian Peninsula) during Julius Caesar’s civil war. Results suggest that the site exerted decisive control over a highly connected area linking two possible logistical bases (Emporion and Massalia) to the armies fighting at Ilerda (49 BC).
Commentary on Robert Herrick's epigram "The Parcæ, or Three Dainty Destinies. The Armilet" has concentrated on its reimagining of the grim and dreadful Fates or "Parcæ" of classical mythology as ...pretty girls and pointing out precedents for bracelets made of hair in poems by John Donne and in seventeenth-century culture more broadly. While the surprising "daintiness" of the "Destinies" and the nature of the object they are crafting certainly merit that attention, the witty turn at the poem's end has not been explicated or acknowledged in critical discussions. That turn involves a complex and indirect pun on the unstated but implied verb "die," with the sexual implications that that word often carries in Renaissance literature. It is important to recognize this pun because a witty concluding turn is often regarded as a hallmark of the epigrammatic form; indeed, Julius Caesar Scaliger, arguably the most important literary theorist in the early modern period, called it the anima or soul of the epigram (Citroni 39).
In 2016 Rob Hastie was appointed to the Artistic Directorship of Sheffield Theatres, the largest complex of theatres outside of London, comprising the thrust-stage Crucible, the shape-shifting Studio ...and the proscenium-arch Lyceum theatres. In this interview he talks about his recent productions of Coriolanus (2020) and Julius Caesar (2017), the dynamics of directing in different theatre spaces, the processes of creating theatre, and why Shakespeare's plays matter today.
Cicero’s rhetorical theory offers an important critique of efforts to systematize persuasion. His resistance to this systematization is grounded in his reconception of the orator’s virtus, which, ...amidst the crisis of the late Roman Republic, he reimagines as a capacity to endure risk in confrontation with an unruly public. In order to stress this risk, he must at the same time valorize the uncertainties of language: the absence of predictable, manipulable links between speech and audience response. Because this model of eloquence implies that the rhetorical audience cannot and should not be systematized, it places surprising pressures on Cicero’s elitism. This article examines Cicero’s antipathy toward the routinization of rhetoric, contrasts it with the more rationalized model of speech in De analogia, Julius Caesar’s fragmentary work on style, and considers how Cicero’s stress on the autonomy of the rhetorical audience can be recovered as a resource for democratic theory.
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