Bücher der Reihe Ashley and Peter Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture

With close readings of suppliant dramas by each of the major playwrights, this book explores how Greek tragedy used tales of foreign supplicants to promote, question, and negotiate the imperial ideology of Athens as a benevolent and moral ruling city.

Comparing and contrasting speeches attributed to barbarian leaders by ancient Roman historians, this book offers a systematic examination of the ways in which those historians valorized foreigners and presented criticisms of their own society.

This provocative new companion to Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History shows how viewing an array of Latin texts through the lens of conspiracy theory reveals a host of socioeconomic tensions from the Roman Republic through the age of the emperors.

The first comprehensive examination of the Roman Forum in late antiquity, this book explores the cultural significance of restoring monuments and statues in the city's preeminent public space, demonstrating shifts in patronage, political power, historical

';Explore[s] with impressive scholarship cases of unlawful killing in the regnal period, the early and mid-republic and the post-Sullanera.' UNRV.com Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder. With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence. Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's ';murder law,' arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.