Throughout Roman history, members of the imperial family featured regularly in central coinage, on reliefs and statues, and in inscriptions – both in Rome and the provinces. Roman emperorship was ...a de facto dynastic system, which explains the sustained emphasis on imperial fathers, mothers, wives and children. Only very rarely was lineage wholly ignored. This posed major problems for imperial representation under the so-called Tetrachy; an explicitly non-dynastic imperial system, not organised by bloodline but governed through collegiate rule. How could such ‘corporate government’ present itself in a society that was used to dynastic terminology when indicating predecessors and intended successors? This article explores some of the alternative modes through which tetrarchic representation aimed to present non-dynastic rule, and shows how these alternatives proved ultimately unsuccessful. Apparently, the constraints of tradition in imperial imagery were too stringent to overcome.
The Roman imperial court was virtually inseparable from Emperor's person. As such, it inevitably accompanied any Emperor on his travels within the Empire. In the late 3rd century, after Rome had lost ...its status as the imperial city, many other cities began to serve as residences of Emperors, who found themselves frequently on the move. An obvious question concerns possible motivations of Emperors to travel. Energetic Emperors usually did travel to personally attend places of crises or make sure that their policies were duly implemented. Up to the late 2nd century, however, their travels were not politically imperative. Also, we may well ask ourselves, whether every member of the court had to be on the move along with the Emperor, especially in conditions of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, when the court experienced a rapid growth in size. Our sources supply only meagre informations, leaving us with mere guesswork for answering this question. For the same reason, the questions of speed, frequency or difficulties of such travels are open to speculations, too.
The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as ...a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that Caligula was insane. But was he? This biography tells a different story of the well-known emperor. In a deft account written for a general audience, Aloys Winterling opens a new perspective on the man and his times. Basing Caligula on a thorough new assessment of the ancient sources, he sets the emperor's story into the context of the political system and the changing relations between the senate and the emperor during Caligula's time and finds a new rationality explaining his notorious brutality.
The development of cultural routes is a valuable tool for intercultural dialogue at grass-roots level and contributes to social cohesion through the development of inspiring themes and participatory ...activities. At the same time they are an ideal way for the Council of Europe to put into action the values it promotes of democracy and human rights, including access to culture for all. The offer of various cultural routes at the European level is exceptionally rich, the choice of major cultural routes of Europe being defined by the basic criteria of the Council of Europe. The paper focuses on cultural routes development in Romania, as a valuable asset, having all required features and offering corresponding content, information and facilities to the benefit for both local businesses and tourists. A general framework for evaluation and impact measurement of cultural itineraries is presented, setting into value the results of the two projects developed by Romanian authorities, co-financed by the European Commission
The Acts of Peter (hereafter Acts Pet.) contains an account of the destruction of an imperial statue by an exorcised demon, a statue that is subsequently miraculously restored by its owner Marcellus ...with the help of prayer and the apostle Peter. Although scholars seldom examine this episode in significant detail, when they have addressed it, they have for the most part agreed that it is an indication of the anti-imperial stance of the text generally and an attack on the legitimacy of the imperial cult more specifically. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, given that the majority of the other apocryphal Acts of the apostles (hereafter AAA) do seem to exhibit this vein of hostility, and this corpus is often interpreted as something of a homogeneous whole.
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