Volume 1, Issue 2

Herodotus’ narrative of the life of Cimon the Elder (6.103.1–4) pays particular attention to Cimon’s Olympic tethrippon victories and especially his arrangement with Peisistratus over the 532 BCE victory. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Cimon’s athletic career as well as his deal with Peisistratus in the context of sport practices, ideologies and intra-elite conflict during the sixth century BCE. An analysis of known instances of civic affiliation changes of Olympic athletes throws light on the logistics of the arrangement between Cimon and Peisistratus. Moreover, the commoditization of an Olympic victory implicit in the Cimon-Peisistratus arrangement is symptomatic of a perception of sport victories as individual achievements and privileged possessions of elite athletes. After a review of the relevant evidence, I argue that this perception was shared by other socially prominent sixth-century Athenian athletes as well, especially members of the Alcmeonid and the Philaid clans, who often exploited sport victories and their commemorations for elite power struggles. This perception became increasingly at odds with a shift, detectible more clearly starting in the last quarter of the sixth century BCE, towards modes of elite victory commemoration that highlighted divinely endowed talent, personal accomplishments and familial traditions but also emphasized strongly the rewards that accrued to the city by the generosity and the athletic skills of the aristocratic victor.

After the conquest of the Achaemenid empire, Alexander of Macedon entrusted numerous provinces to Iranian satraps, many of whom had administrative experience under the earlier Persian kings. Modern scholarship has highlighted Alexander’s subsequent elimination of Iranian governors and replacement of most with Macedonians or Greeks, explaining the retention of a handful as the result of their superior loyalty. This study differs by exploring the Iranian satraps’ agency in obtaining and preserving authority under the new regime. It focuses on Oxydates and Atropates, the governors of the strategic province of Media, and the reasons for the former’s removal and the latter’s long-term success. While logistical and military support of Alexander was a prerequisite for survival, even more significant was the denunciation of rivals for military failures or disloyalty. Oxydates probably succumbed to charges by fellow Iranian nobles, but Atropates orchestrated complaints against the Macedonian generals in Media and profited greatly from their execution, winning royal favor and an advantageous marriage alliance in Alexander’s court. The deaths of Hephaestion and Alexander contributed to the reduction of Atropates’ satrapal position, but his skillful opportunism culminated in the foundation of a new kingdom in the era of the Successors.

It is now generally accepted that the cult of the Theos Tauros at Thespiai is linked with the Roman senatorial family of the Statilii Tauri – and particularly with their most prominent member, T. Statilius Taurus ( cos. suff . 37, ord . II 26) –, who were active in the Boiotian city in the late first century BCE-early first century CE, as illustrated in an eclectic epigraphic dossier. Two honorific inscriptions recently published in Paul Roesch’s Les Inscriptions de Thespies shed new light on the dossier, for they reveal, if the readings are correct, the existence of an as yet unknown member of the Statilii Tauri. As well as investigating this new avenue and its consequences for the longevity of relations between the Roman family and the Boiotian city, this study reassesses the cult of the Theos Tauros at Thespiai, along with its place in the wider context of cults for Romans in the Greek world. It also explores various aspects of the dynamics of Roman relations in Greece in the post-Actium era, notably through the complex networks between the Statilii Tauri and members of a local Boiotian elite.

Magic is usually assumed to have been ubiquitous and culturally significant in the early Roman Empire, something exemplified by Pliny the Elder’s claim that “there is no one who does not fear to be spell-bound by curse tablets”. 1 A variety of written and material evidence is commonly taken to be indicative of both the regular use of magic and widespread anxiety about its deployment. However, this paper argues that if we attempt, having determined a contextually appropriate definition of magic, to gauge the prevalence and significance of magic in this period, it can be seen to have had little cultural salience. Not only is evidence for its presence more equivocal than usually presumed, but magic is found to be strikingly absent from major popular cultural sources that shed light on the presuppositions and preoccupations of most of the empire’s inhabitants, and to have had little explanatory or symbolic utility. The paper then proceeds to suggest possible reasons for magic’s lack of salience in the early Empire, including the role of various sceptical discourses concerned with the supernatural in general and magic in particular, and the consequence of the largely agonistic context of its use on the limited occasions that it was employed.

At the beginning of the section of the Tactica concerning the Ῥωμαῖα ἱππικὰ γυμνάσια, Arrian states that it will be hard to explain the terms adopted in cavalry exercises, as the majority of them are of Celtic and Iberian origin ( tact . 33, 1). This sounds like an hyperbole, because just three Celtic terms (πέτρινος, ξύνημα, τολούτεγον) and one Iberian term (Κανταβρικὸς κύκλος / Κανταβρικὴ ἐπέλασις, which rather refers to an Iberian practice) occur. The Celtic terms are lexical (ξύνημα and τολούτεγον) or semantic (πέτρινος) hapax legomena . Even if a linguistic analysis (Holder, Dottin, DeVoto) would lead to the supposition that these are loan words – rather than foreign words –, literary and epigraphic clues will show that Arrian’s direct acquaintance with Iberian’s and Celts’ reality is not implausible. To the subject of Arrian’s description a transposition of the terminology from Latin to Greek was also required. Such a transposition can be clearly noticed not only in the “panegyric on Roman borrowings from other peoples” (E.L. Wheeler) – which includes easy identifiable Realien  – but also in the description of the army officers involved in the γυμνάσια ( tact . 42, 1). The identification of these figures is, at face value, quite hard: the terminology reflects Arrian’s difficulty translating into Greek the titles of figures who were peculiar to the Roman army (i.e. duplicarius, sesquiplicarius ). It is only through later lexica and Latin sources that we can understand to whom Arrian is referring. The Tactica was perhaps conceived by Arrian as a literary re-elaboration of the Adlocutio Hadriani in Lambaesis and a subtle encomium to emperor Hadrian. Therefore, such a presence of multilingual loan words and calques seems peculiar to Hadrian’s opening to foreign military cultures that Arrian praises at the end of his treatise ( tact . 44, 1–2).

Cassius Dio 79.1.2–4, in tandem with other literary and material sources, serves as valuable evidence for several significant aspects of Elagabalus’ legitimization campaign. Further analysis suggests that Elagabalus’ legitimization campaign may have influenced Dio’s account of Macrinus’ reign, especially with respect to Dio’s decision to include in his narrative a version of the story of Caracalla’s murder that was unsympathetic to Macrinus.

This article suggests that the Arabicization of Iraq, Syria and Egypt in the seventh and eighth centuries was made possible by the urbanization of the region. I discuss three relevant points: the manner of conquests, the establishment of Arab urban centers, and the migration of Arabs and non-Arabs to these towns. The article suggests that establishing garrison towns, the concentration of Arabs in these towns, and the subsequent migration of local populations to these towns established the Arabic language as a majority language of prestige. The Arabs’ need to communicate for practical reasons enticed them to use simplified registers known in similar modern contexts of language contact as foreigner talk registers. Imperial migration policies permitted Arabs to migrate to the garrison towns only if they belonged to the same tribes that took part in the initial conquest of the province, which permitted only a limited number of Arabic dialects to mix for a long time in the new urban centers. Eventually, the differences among the dialects were leveled and the structures regularized. A new urban koine emerged in every garrison town that was both different from the original dialects of Arabic in the peninsula and from each other. The article suggests that these linguistic processes of simplification and koineization shaped the input that was learnt by the local populations, and caused the differences between the old dialects of Arabic and the new urban dialects in the Arab world.