This note adduces three passages in Seneca the Elder to reinforce a demonstration in CQ 69, 793–8001 that the text of Plin. HN 7.117 has suffered corruption in one of its clauses and requires emendation to restore Pliny's intent. This additional evidence concerns a trope employed by declaimers which could have predisposed a scribe to alter Pliny's text to state that Cicero proscribed Mark Antony. Such a statement has no place in a list of achievements that otherwise all belong to (...) Cicero's consulship twenty years earlier in 63 b.c. (shrink)

This paper will examine the circumstances that inspired the famous utterance attributed to the haruspex Spurinna, ‘Beware the Ides of March!'1 Recently the argument has been made that this warning to Caesar was based upon an astrological calculation, rather than on the usual arts of an haruspex who read signs of the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificial animals or by interpreting bolts of lightning and portents . As intriguing as this astrological theory is, I am convinced that it (...) is fatally flawed, and I intend to show why it must ultimately be rejected. The question is not merely an academic one, having to do with the methods employed by a particular seer on a given occasion. Rather, if it can be established as even probable that Spurinna based his prophecy upon an astrological calculation, which helped convince the conspirators that Caesar was vulnerable to attack on the Ides as being an unlucky day for him according to the stars, then we are presented with a very significant and hitherto unsuspected instance of astrology influencing the course of public affairs at Rome several decades before astrology came into its own under the early emperors. According to such a reconstruction, astrology played a key role in determining the date of one of the most fateful murders in Roman history. It is the contention of this paper, on the contrary, that there is no reason whatsoever to attribute Spurinna's prophecy to an astrological calculation. (shrink)

This paper will examine the circumstances that inspired the famous utterance attributed to the haruspex Spurinna, ‘Beware the Ides of March!'1Recently the argument has been made that this warning to Caesar was based upon an astrological calculation, rather than on the usual arts of an haruspex who read signs of the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificial animals (exta) or by interpreting bolts of lightning (fulgura) and portents (ostenta). As intriguing as this astrological theory is, I am convinced that (...) it is fatally flawed, and I intend to show why it must ultimately be rejected. The question is not merely an academic one, having to do with the methods employed by a particular seer on a given occasion. Rather, if it can be established as even probable that Spurinna based his prophecy upon an astrological calculation, which helped convince the conspirators that Caesar was vulnerable to attack on the Ides as being an unlucky day for him according to the stars, then we are presented with a very significant and hitherto unsuspected instance of astrology influencing the course of public affairs at Rome several decades before astrology came into its own under the early emperors. According to such a reconstruction, astrology played a key role in determining the date of one of the most fateful murders in Roman history. It is the contention of this paper, on the contrary, that there is no reason whatsoever to attribute Spurinna's prophecy to an astrological calculation. (shrink)

Pliny's celebration of Cicero's consular achievements contains a striking anomaly, namely the assertion that Cicero proscribed Marcus Antonius(HN7.117). That statement turns Cicero, the victim of Antonius’ murderous vendetta, into the one who wielded the executioner's axe, and it abruptly shifts the focus of the passage from 63 to 43b.c.Two slight corrections to the Latin text can eliminate the intrusion of the proscriptions by substituting a reference to the control Cicero exercised in 63 over Gaius Antonius, his consular colleague and an (...) old ally of Catiline. In hisIn Pisonem(§5), Cicero takes credit for combatting the threat posed by his colleague, and it is highly probable thatHN7.117 mentioned Gaius (not Marcus) Antonius as well, since Pliny's summary of Cicero's consular deeds and honours is nearly identical to the one found inPis. 4–6. The beauty of the emended text is that it restores both historical fact and a logical progression to the overall structure of Pliny's encomium. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a new and more satisfactory context for a fragment from one of Ennius’ tragedies preserved in Cicero and discussed by a late scholiast on the Ciceronian passage. It will be shown that the scholiast, or more likely the source upon which he drew, had in front of him a bit more of the Ennian passage than the partial line preserved in Cicero and that the scholiast drew a false conclusion concerning the identity (...) of one of the interlocutors from the way in which one speaker addressed the other. Previous scholars have sought to remove the inconsistency in the scholiast's sketch of the scene either by changing the locale of the dialogue or by correcting the scholiast's identification of the out-of-place speaker. It will be shown that a more productive line of investigation is to seek to discover the underlying cause of the scholiast's apparent error. The identification of the cause not only sheds light on the fate of Ennius’ text in Late Antiquity but permits us to restore, by means of conjecture, an additional word to the corpus of Ennius’ tragedies, a word that is a favourite of his in the Annales, but until now has not been attested in a Roman tragedy before the age of Seneca. (shrink)

This paper seeks to dispel the notion that Mark Antony and the Senate indulged in a cat-and-mouse game over the control of Caesar's archives in the weeks immediately following the Ides of March. At stake was whether unpublished documents drawn up by Caesar before his death should be ratified and put into force. The belief that the Senate and Antony contended over this issue and that Antony got the upper hand rests primarily on what I hope to show is a (...) misinterpretation of two key passages in the Philippics. Moreover, since the standard interpretation of these two passages appears to be supported by Dio's account of how Antony cajoled the Senate into permitting him a freer hand to review and publish documents found in Caesar's archives, it will be necessary to have a closer look at Dio's probable sources for this particular section of his history. (shrink)

This paper seeks to dispel the notion that Mark Antony and the Senate indulged in a cat-and-mouse game over the control of Caesar's archives in the weeks immediately following the Ides of March. At stake was whether unpublished documents drawn up by Caesar before his death should be ratified and put into force. The belief that the Senate and Antony contended over this issue and that Antony got the upper hand rests primarily on what I hope to show is a (...) misinterpretation of two key passages in the Philippics. Moreover, since the standard interpretation of these two passages appears to be supported by Dio's account of how Antony cajoled the Senate into permitting him a freer hand to review and publish documents found in Caesar's archives, it will be necessary to have a closer look at Dio's probable sources for this particular section of his history. (shrink)