It is often claimed that in the ancient world character was believed to be something fixed, given at birth and immutable during life. This belief is said to underlie the portrayal of individuals in ancient historiography and biography, particularly in the early Roman Empire; and tc constitute the chief point of difference in psychological assumptions between ancient and modern biography. In this article, I wish to examine the truth of these claims, with particular reference to Plutarch and Tacitus.

This article deals with the structure of Appian's Mithridateios. All the manuscripts begin with two chapters that, in his 1785 edition of Appian, Johannes Schweighäuser argued could not represent the opening of the work: a folio had been removed from its proper place towards the end of the work and mistakenly placed at the beginning. All editors followed Schweighäuser until recently, when there has been a tendency to accept the manuscript order of chapters. This creates a very different start for (...) the work, meaning that it begins with the Greek words ὧδε μέν, an impossibly compressed way of saying ‘The following book sets out how …’. By examining the issues involved, particularly the language of Appian and his general practice in structuring the separate works of his Roman History, this article seeks to demonstrate that the Mithridateios cannot have begun as the manuscripts set out. It also argues, however, that the two chapters in question do not fit well at the end of the work, either; and that the reason for this, and for the displacement of the chapters in the first place, is the repetitive summary material at the end of the work. In chapters 118 and 119, it is argued, Appian has used different source material without integrating it properly with what preceded and followed, thus leading to an untidy ending. This was made more orderly by removing chapters 118 and 119 and putting them at the beginning. (shrink)

In his Bellum Ciuile, Caesar reports the events of 1 January 49 with these words : misso ad uesperum senatu omnes qui sunt eius ordinis a Pompeio euocantur. laudat Pompeius atque in posterum confirmat, segniores castigat atque incitat.When the Senate had been dismissed towards dusk, all who belonged to that order were summoned by Pompeius. He praised the determined and encouraged them for the future while criticizing and stirring up those who were less eager to act.This meeting has not attracted (...) much scholarly attention and admittedly for a good reason: other circumstances of the outbreak of the Civil War are, perhaps, more significant for understanding the events as well as the intentions and decisions of the political actors. The importance of this gathering lies, however, not so much in what its role might have been in the developments of the year 49 but rather in the context of the phenomenon of the promagistrates’ interference in the domestic politics of Late Republican Rome. (shrink)

It has recently and rightly been observed that Plutarch is exceptional as a prose author in the finesse with which he employs tragedy in his Lives. And, one might add, in the extent to which he does so. His dislike for the sensationalism of ‘tragic history’ was no obstacle to his use of ‘the sustained tragic patterning and imagery which is a perfectly respectable feature of both biography and history’. The primary purpose of the present discussion is to draw attention (...) to the profound importance of tragedy, particularly of Euripides' Bacchae, to the Carrhae narrative in Plutarch's Crassus. It is argued that details in Crassus'; version of Carrhae recall the tragedy of Pentheus and, in so doing, substantially advance the portrayal of Crassus' character. (shrink)