Sublime

who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired)

Scholars cite the fact that Seneca was clearly a moderate person all his life, temperate in alcohol and food, and probably—despite a few slurs in the gossipy history of Dio—not particularly prone to sleeping around. 18 But of course not all adulterers are promiscuous. Seneca may not have made a lifelong habit of sleeping with dozens of married

In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses). As the currency of that phrase even now shows, it was a brilliant dismissal of the limited horizons of the

A little jackdaw, who dresses himself up in fine feathers as a grand peacock, is rejected as an imposter by the peacocks and rejected again, this time as a bird getting above himself, when he tries to return to the jackdaws. It is the Trimalchio story in a very different guise and from a very different point of view.

Notre

aesthete

Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity. He has gone down in history as the mad patrician who not only arranged to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the tribunate but also put two fingers up to the whole process by choosing an adoptive father younger than himself.