Varro distinguished three kinds of acting - making, acting, and a third that he identified with the verb gerere . The distinction between making and acting, Agamben notes ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty , 82-3), is ultimately from Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiesis , . . . . Continue Reading »
As Agamben ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty ) explains it, the shift from officium as status-specific behavior to something more like our conception of duty begins with the extension of officia to cover the human situation in general. This is already evident in the usage of Cicero and Seneca. In . . . . Continue Reading »
Cicero’s de Officiis played a massive role in the development of Western ethics, since it was considered to be a book “concerning duties.” Agamben ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty ) points out, however, that the book is not really a book of ethics but a “treatise on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Anthony Ossa-Richardson’s richly detailed The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought is mainly about the role that ancient oracles played in modern thought, but he begins with a fascinating overview of the place of oracles in the classical world and the Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
As Raymond Van Dam points out ( Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge ), one of Zosimus’s main complaints against Constantine was that he stopped the Secular Games ( Ludi Saeculares ), founded in 17 BC by Augustus and celebrated every saeculum (110 years) since. “Games” . . . . Continue Reading »
In the title essay of his 1980 collection, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion , the Dutch classicist Hendrik Wagenvoort traces the Roman notion that their success was a result of their piety back to the Roman conquest of Greece. How, the Greeks wondered, could the culturally inferior Romans . . . . Continue Reading »
In the aforementioned article, Charlesworth points to a passage from Procopius where he describes a bronze equestrian statue of Justinian, which was, the writer says, “arrayed as Achilles.” Charlesworth observes: “why should Justinian, in the sixth century, have chosen Achilles? . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 1943 article in the Journal of Roman Studies , MP Charlesworth notes that for the Romans pius , felix , and invictus were intimately, even causally, connected: “because the Emperor is pius the gods will render him felix (for felicitas is their gift to their favourites) and his felicitas . . . . Continue Reading »
The notion that Greek culture is derivative from the East is an ancient one. Eusebius made the claim in his Praeparatio Evangelica . As summarized by Raoul Mortley ( The Idea of Universal History from Hellenistic Philosophy to Early Christian Historiography , 65), Eusebius claimed: “In a . . . . Continue Reading »
In his study of Pietas from Vergil to Dryden (73-5), James Garrison describes how Prudentius depicts the conversion of Rome to Christ while maintaining its fundamental Romanitas . Pietas , that original Roman virtue transferred from Troy, indicates both the continuity and discontinuity. “To . . . . Continue Reading »
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