This book surveys the Severan period's many developments in literature, philosophy, religion, art, archaeology and culture.

Septimius Severus emerged victorious from the civil war of AD 193; he was not part of the traditional political elite, but instead a military commander from Africa, with a Syrian princess as his wife. To garner popular support and to legitimise his power Severus conducted an intensive propaganda campaign. This is the first monograph to examine the Secular Games (ludi saeculares), the magnificent festival which celebrated Septimius Severus as a bringer of peace and prosperity, and which also symbolised a new imperial ideology based on autocracy rather than the Antonine ideal of co-operation between ruler and Senate.

Exploration of the role played by deities in the negotiation of imperial power under the Severan dynasty (AD 193-235).

The Roman sophist Claudius Aelianus, born in Praeneste in the late second century CE, spent his career cultivating a Greek literary persona. Aelian was a highly regarded writer during his own lifetime, and his literary compilations would be influential for a thousand years and more in the Roman world. This book argues that the De natura animalium, a miscellaneous treasury of animal lore and Aelian's greatest work, is a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. Aelian's fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics. This study also considers how Aelian's interests in the De natura animalium are echoed in his other works, the Rustic Letters and the Varia Historia. Himself a prominent figure of mainstream Roman Hellenism, Aelian refined his literary aesthetic to produce a reading of nature that is both moral and provocative.

The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.

Ancient autobiography has been the object of several studies and meetings. However, these have focused chiefly on the philosophical and literary aspects. This book aims to examine the development of political autobiography and memoirs in the Greek and Roman world, stressing, instead, the relation of a single work with the traditions of the genre and also the influence of the respective aims of the authors on the composition of autobiographies. At times these works were written as a means of propaganda in a political struggle, or to defend a past action, and often to furnish material to historians. Nonetheless, they still preserve the personal viewpoint and voice of the protagonists in all their vividness, even if distorted by the aim of defending their record. Political Autobiographies and Memoirs in Antiquity will be a highly valuable and useful reference tool for both scholars and students of Greek and Roman history and literature.

This historical commentary examines books 79(78)-80(80) of Cassius Dio's Roman History, which cover the period from the death of Caracalla in A. D. 217. to the reign of Severus Alexander and Cassius Dio's retirement from political life in 229. Cassius Dio, a Roman Senator, provides a valuable eyewitness account of this turbulent period, which was marked by the assassination of Caracalla, the rise of Macrinus, Rome's first equestrian emperor, and his subsequent overthrow, the tempestuous, and by all accounts peculiar, reign of Elagabalus, and the continuation of the Severan dynasty under the young Severus Alexander. In addition to elucidating important passages from these books, this study assesses Cassius Dio's political life and its relationship to his literary career; his call to history and time of composition; his historical method; and his attitude toward and subsequent presentation of the later Severan dynasty. In its investigation of books 79(78)-80(80), the work assesses an important stretch of Dio's actual text, which for other parts has been preserved largely in epitome and excerpts. Finally, the work aims to fill a gap in scholarship, as no commentary on these books of Cassius Dio's history has been produced since the nineteenth century, and its publication coincides with a renewed interest in the history and historiography of the Severan period.

How the maternal image of the empress Julia Domna helped the Roman empire rule. Ancient authors emphasize dramatic moments in the life of Julia Domna, wife of Roman emperor Septimius Severus (193–211). They accuse her of ambition unforgivable in a woman, of instigating civil war to place her sons on the throne, and of resorting to incest to maintain her hold on power. In imperial propaganda, however, Julia Domna was honored with unprecedented titles that celebrated her maternity, whether it was in the role of mother to her two sons (both future emperors) or as the metaphorical mother to the empire. Imperial propaganda even equated her to the great mother goddess, Cybele, endowing her with a public prominence well beyond that of earlier imperial women. Her visage could be found gracing everything from state-commissioned art to privately owned ivory dolls. In Maternal Megalomania, Julie Langford unmasks the maternal titles and honors of Julia Domna as a campaign on the part of the administration to garner support for Severus and his sons. Langford looks to numismatic, literary, and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the propaganda surrounding the empress. She explores how her image was tailored toward different populations, including the military, the Senate, and the people of Rome, and how these populations responded to propaganda about the empress. She employs Julia Domna as a case study to explore the creation of ideology between the emperor and its subjects.