In this collection of essays, an international team of outstanding scholars engage with the ideas and methods of Professor Peter Wiseman's past and present work. They provide a sustained response to the work of one of the most widely respected Roman historians of this generation. The contributions range over myth (Corialanus and Remus), the interplay between historiography, literature and myth-making (on Cleopatra, for instance), and art and story-telling at Boscoreale. They explore Roman drama (Pacuvius) and links between drama and Virgil's Aeneid; they discuss Catullus in Bithynia and Cicero on Greek and Roman culture. Professor Wiseman has been at the forefront of innovative research in Roman history, historiography, literature in context, drama and myth, for many years. His work is marked by the combination of a powerful historical imagination with an acute sense of the limitations of our knowledge and of the need to negotiate with the complexity of our sources.

This is a critical analysis of the pervasive theme of historical myths used by some of the best-known writers of the Late Republic and Augustan periods - from Cicero in the "De Republica" and the first book of Livy to Ovid's "Fasti".

"It is often thought, for no good reason, that myth and history are mutually exclusive. But most mythic stories were believed by their tellers, and some of them were true. Was Lucretia a real woman, raped by the king's son? Did Horatius really hold the bridge alone against an army? Nobody knows; but figures like Spartacus, Cleopatra, Caligula and Nero were certainly real flesh and blood before they became figures of myth. The long history of the Roman People and their city - whether under the kings, the free republic, or the Caesars - generated countless stories, no less mythic than the tale of Troy." --Book Jacket.

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

A new reading of the portrayal of Greek myths in Roman art, revealing important shifts in Roman values and identities.

The scholarship of T. P. Wiseman on the late Roman Republic is remarkable in combining vivid and detailed historical insight into the social, political and topographical realities of that period with a sympathetic understanding of late Republican literature, particularly the poetry of Catullus. Roman Studies contains twenty-eight of his major periodical contributions up to 1983, and published for the first time 'The Masters of Sirmio', which explores the economic, political and literary associations of the great villa on Lake Garda associated with the family of Catullus.

Elizabeth Rawson (1934-1988) was a distinguished specialist in the history, society, and culture of the later Roman Republic and Augustan period. First published between 1971 and 1989, her papers cover the workings of human politics and society, historical and antiquarian thinking at Rome, and literary history. The collection offers an essential contribution to the understanding of the central period of Roman history.