Recent scholarship has examined Pliny's efforts to embed his acts of patronage in the rhetorical context of paternity. This paper examines how Pliny employs the discourse of paternity in representing himself as a mentor and exemplary model for young men, with particular focus on Book 8 of the Letters. Though he lacks a child or adoptive heir himself, Pliny embeds his work in a tradition in which Roman writers from the Elder Cato onward presented literary authority as coextensive with paternal (...) authority. In Ep. 8.14, Pliny presents an idealized image of education by fathers or paternal surrogates that legitimates both his receipt of benefits from his mentors and his own efforts to instruct young men in the manner of a father. Pliny presents his published work as a model for Genialis in Ep. 8.13 and his personal life as an example for Junius Avitus in Ep. 8.23. Ep. 8.10, 11 and 18 provide further contexts for Pliny's discourse of paternity. Two additional examples of the creation of relatedness in elite Roman culture are briefly discussed. I consider in conclusion how study of Pliny's Letters may contribute to the larger cross-cultural project of understanding how otherwise unrelated persons, through informal activities such as mentorship, may construct relationships more salient to them than their biological or legal kinships. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss Cicero's practice of submitting his texts to others for comment, arguing that the mutual reading and correction of friends' works played an important social function. By discussing what would make a text better, Cicero and his collaborators worked to forge and maintain social ties. In addition, I pursue an important corollary: for a text to provoke this activity, it must present itself as unfinished or in progress. Cicero was aware of this corollary, and in the (...) Brutus he used images of textual incompletion to critique Atticist and Caesarian theories of style as solitary, antisocial, and implicitly autocratic. This led him to formulate an important new literary politics, which he put into practice in the years after Pompey's defeat in the civil war. (shrink)

The absorption of the Greek world into the Roman empire created intellectual problems on several levels. In the first instance, Greek confidence in the superiority of Hellenic culture made explanations for the swiftness of Roman conquest all the more necessary. In accounting for Rome's success, Greeks focused on the structure and character of the Roman state, on Roman attitudes towards citizenship, and on the nature of the Roman constitution. Greeks initially attempted to understand Roman institutions and beliefs by assimilating them (...) to paradigms within Hellenistic political thought. On the one hand, this process tended to obscure substantial differences between Greek and Roman political theory. At the same time, appreciation of Rome's relations with Italy created a means through which Greeks could imagine their own integration into the Roman community. Among the conceptual models available to Greeks of this age, only the polis provided a paradigm for a collectivity in which individuals had equal rights and toward which they directed their patriotic sentiments. That Roman Italy was not a polis did not force the coinage of new terminology: the polis formed a conceptual boundary that Hellenistic political philosophy never truly escaped. Repeated construals of Roman ideas and institutions on analogy with polis-based models ultimately forced a shift in the semantic fields of Greek political terminology and altered Greeks' conceptual archetype of the political collectivity. This process provided a framework within which Greeks could justify their wholesale participation in imperial culture and political life: they could, on these terms, argue that the gradual evolution of the world toward a single, unified empire actualized man's natural tendency to center his life around a single polis. (shrink)

During the last decade corporate reputation as one of the central efforts of corporate citizenship behavior has gained increasing attention in scholarly research, as has the way that reputation can serve as an instrument for business purposes. This poses the question of how such reputation will be achieved. To answer these questions this article examines Cicero’s considerations concerning the interrelation of honorableness and beneficialness made in his work ‘On Duties’. Based on Cicero’s understanding of universal natural law and his idea (...) that reputation derives solely from honorable behavior and the orientation in the common good, we show that also corporate reputation is achieved only if it is based primarily on ‘honorableness’, and that reputation is lost if financial interests override the intentions of honesty of a company. (shrink)

Tacitus' claim that history should inspire good deeds and deter bad ones should be taken seriously: his exempla are supposed to help his readers think through their own moral difficulties. This approach to history is found in historians with clear connections to Stoicism, and in Stoic philosophers like Seneca. It is no coincidence that Tacitus is particularly interested in the behavior of Stoics like Thrasea Paetus, Barea Soranus, and Seneca himself. They, and even non-Stoic characters like Epicharis and Petronius, exemplify (...) the behavior necessary if Roman freedom was to survive the monarchy. (shrink)

This article argues that there is a sharp opposition in Stoicism between two lines of polit cal thought: the opposition has its source in the abstract and utopian Zeno´s _Politeia_. This work would contain incentives for different and opposing developments that probably, materialize?, probably, in Persaois of Kition and Sphaerus of Borysthenes first, secondly, then in Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus, and, finally, in Panaetius of Rhodes and Blossius of Cumae.