Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History
Publication Year: 2004
Published by: University of Texas Press
Cover
Frontmatter

Acknowledgments
Completion of this project was made possible by generous grants from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. I would like to thank Rhiannon Ash, Susanna Morton Braund...

Introduction
On October 12, 1973, the United States Court of Appeals ordered President Richard M. Nixon to produce White House tapes and documents that had been subpoenaed in July. Ten days later, Nixon announced his compliance. District Court Judge John J. Sirica requested, among others, tapes for June 20, 1972 (three days after the burglary at the Watergate Hotel). But there was a problem. Rose Mary Woods...
Part One: Betrayed Conspiracies

Chapter One: Sallust: The Catilinarian Conspiracy
Cicero’s invitation to Lucceius to write an individual monograph about his consular year and its most famous event, the Catilinarian conspiracy, indicates that such a narrow topic was considered a suitable subject for a shorter historical monograph:
So you may also likewise isolate the domestic conspiracy...

Chapter Two: Livy: The Bacchanalian Affair
The Catilinarian conspirators needed to hide their activities so that their plans could come as a complete surprise to a public caught unaware. Meeting in secret, they depended upon one another’s silence to ensure that the conspiracy went undetected. But first, the involvement of a woman brought the matter...

Chapter Three: Tacitus: The Pisonian Conspiracy
Perhaps no other extant Roman historian is as obsessed with conspiracy as Tacitus. From the outset, the Annales would have us believe that Tiberius owed his rise to power to secret machinations. In the first ten chapters alone,Tacitus casts suspicion on the rise of Augustus and the deaths of Lucius, Gaius, Hirtius,...
Part Two: Successful Conspiracies

Chapter Four: Josephus: The Assassination of Caligula
Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus could narrate the Catilinarian, Bacchanalian, and Pisonian conspiracies in spite of the veil of secrecy and silence that shrouded the events. In each case, women (and in one case, foreigners) betrayed the conspiracy and saved Rome from the internal threats posed by Catiline and his forces, by the...

Chapter Five: Appian: The Assassination of Julius Caesar
We come at last to perhaps the most renowned event in Roman history, and certainly the most commemorated assassination of a Roman statesman in Western thought. Caesar’s death had been contrived by the most upstanding citizens of the day, men whose lives were measured by their belief in, and their adherence to, an intangible mos maiorum (ancestral custom). Leading the...

Conclusion
The prevalence of conspiracy in the Roman literary imagination is testimony to the fear that it generated and the need to assuage that fear by retelling the stories of how conspiracies were detected, suppressed, and punished.We have examined five conspiracy narratives with a view to the mode of presentation, the hermeneutic principle, and...
E-ISBN-13: 9780292797185
E-ISBN-10: 0292797184
Print-ISBN-13: 9780292705616
Print-ISBN-10: 0292705611
Page Count: 207
Publication Year: 2004
OCLC Number: 60745560
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