S. Usher introduces Sallust, himself a disillusioned politician, who envisaged no future greatness for Rome until a single man of vision should have restored the old Republican sense of obligation—the individual's obligation to the state, and the state’s obligation to the world at large.
James Shiel introduces Jerome, a charming letter-writer and worldly-wise mentor of fashionable proselytes, a learned theologian and fiery controversialist. He lived through a critical period in the history of Western civilization, when the Church established its authority and Rome was sacked by a barbarian foe.
Gnosticism was one of those developments of religious thought that, although finally rejected by Christians as heretical, played a major part in the formation of Christian theology during the first three centuries of the Church’s life, writes S.G.F. Brandon.
In the year AD 60, Boudicca, a woman of the royal house of the Iceni led a fierce British revolt against the Roman occupation, during which Londinium was reduced to ashes.
The importance of these much-debated scrolls is here interpreted by Cecil Rothin the light of the events that took place during the first-century Jewish Revolt against the power of Rome.
By his very ruthlessness, Julius Caesar made himself indispensable to the State he had largely been responsible for disrupting. Peter Green assesses the Caesarian legend he left behind him, as well as its malign influence upon later ages.
E. Badian introduces Cicero, the master of Latin rhetoric, who long strove to preserve the traditional Republican oligarchy, but who perished at the orders of a military triumvirate that came to represent “the reality of power” in Rome.
Caesar once crossed the Thames on the back of an animal previously unseen by Britons. Here, C.E. Stevens assesses just how much of a historical anomaly this pairing was.
D.M. Nicol assesses Justinian's valiant attempt to restore the splendours of Imperial Rome, by turning back the clock to the days of Augustus, and making the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake, concluding it “was impractical and largely a failure. But it was a glorious failure."
S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.
