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Mark Anthony Jarman’s characters are often down and out, and often wandering and wondering. Using theories of wonder, this essay argues that wonder plays a key role in many of Jarman’s stories—stories that are marked not by narrative or psychological closure, but by a sense of wonder as characters muse on their lot in life. After briefly considering Jarman’s role within Canadian literature, including his innovative approaches to the short story form, and his odd status as an influential yet often ignored writer, the essay moves to a discussion of the various ways that wonder is at play in his works, both as a verb and a state. Jarman’s characters are frequently in doubt, and the act of wondering takes us into their drifting, self-reflecting minds. However, there is also the sense of wonder as the miraculous. Jarman’s narrators find optimism in the world around them, thanks to flashes of the beauty of the unlikely. Wonder, thus, has a crucial structural function.

In the present study, I focus on the significance of Capua in Roman politics between 59 BCE, when the town officially became a colony, and 36 BCE, when Octavian settled new colonists in the town. I argue that, despite the numerous promises of Roman politicians, only in 36 BCE new Roman colonists were introduced to the town, even though a colony was formally created before that time. Moreover, I explain the causes and circumstances that prompted Caesar not to establish a colony in Capua after 47 BCE, as well as the reasons that led Mark Antony to found a colony there. I highlight Capua as a flashpoint between Mark Antony and Octavian and argue against the traditional view that Octavian founded a colony there immediately after the Battle of Philippi.

The Japanese director Ninagawa Yukio, who directed all four of the Roman plays between 2004 and 2014, noted the challenge he faced in making Shakespeare’s Roman settings accessible for native audiences, his typical strategy being Japanisation. Ninagawa’s Brechtian strategy works two ways in offering audiences a helpful perspective on cultural difference while harnessing Shakespeare’s humanism to the anti-rational energies of his theatre that modernity had earlier suppressed. This article explores the mythopoeic aspect of Ninagawa’s project first in the context of comparative religion and then with an analysis of his Antony and Cleopatra (2011), which was innovative in casting a Japanese-Korean actress from the western Kansai region as Cleopatra against an established Tokyo actor. The polytheism that native Shinto has in common with ancient Roman religion is a significant subtext.

“She did make defect perfection” (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.242): by this formula, Enobarbus sums up the essence of Cleopatra’s inimitable charm. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is a study of women and women: in other words, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is less fiction than an investigation of the other sex. “Was will das Weib?” asked Freud (if we are to believe Marie Bonaparte’s testimony), thus admitting that the great question psychoanalysis has been unable to answer is the enigma of feminine desire. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra represents this enigma, which takes the form of a perfection resulting from a series of paradoxes: beauty and maturity, cunning and folly, fidelity and betrayal, jealousy and indifference, majesty and debauchery, expense and economy, audacity and fragility, truth and lies. Cleopatra’s perfection is the sum of all possible paradoxes. What is the point of this dizzying interplay of paradoxes? What is the resulting perfection?

Retching is important for Roman cultural history and medicine; in this article I assess vomit’s appearances in Latin literature. Humor is created by the detailed revelation of habitual, inappropriate, and excessive behaviors by named targets, such as the emperors Claudius and Vitellius, and Mark Antony, accused by Cicero in Philippics 2, especially. Alcohol abuse and gluttony feature in invective against character types who vomit, such as the stock figures of the drunken hostess and faithful wife at sea in Juvenal 6, Martial’s lesbian Philaenis, and the cautionary tale of the patient who relapses and dies to which the hungover Stoic student is subjected in Persius 3. I end with the self-mocking visualizations of (bad) poetry as vomit in several Horatian passages alongside Nero’s voice-training purges.

Despite longstanding archaeological research in Nicopolis ad Nestum in Roman Thracia, the site still has not yielded any conclusive evidence on its foundation date. Instead, the debate has long been focused on scanty numismatic and ancient literary sources, pointing largely to city’s Trajanic origins. Latest attempts to re-evaluate the situation in favour of an earlier enterprise taken by the triumvir Mark Antony in the last years of the Roman Republic are much disputable. Along with many arguments denying Nicopolis’s Antonian foundation, the present paper discusses several neglected documents – military diplomas, issued to veteran-sailors from the Ravenna fleet in the summer of AD 142 after 26 years of service. Three copies speak of “Nicopolis ex Bessia” as sailors’ home, which is to be identified with Nicopolis ad Nestum. Peculiar expression “ex Bessia” is not to be understood strictly formulaic as “city ex province” (i.e. “ex Thracia”), as is the case with the majority of later documents, but rather as a residual practice from the 1st century in designating the tribal home of the veterans. In a larger sense it is the territory (or at least part of it) of the Thracian Bessi. The evidence is met by Pliny (NH 4.11.40), and his “Bessorumque multa nomina” inhabiting the Middle Mesta (Nestus) region. Thus “Nicopolis ex Bessia” has entered military records upon soldiers’ recruitment in AD 116, marking a new-born civic foundation and the still incipient phase of organizing the urban territory within the larger tribal area of the Bessi. Therefore, the discharge documents in question can only confirm the information from other sources and in the same time to narrow the foundation date of Nicopolis ad Nestum under Trajan somewhere between AD 107, after the Dacian wars, and the emperor’s Parthian campaign of AD 116.

The late antique author Macrobius preserves a pun by Asinius Pollio on the Latin words scribere/proscribere. It is difficult to translate the pun in a way that accurately conveys the full semantic force, social anxiety, and the status dissonance inherent in the unequal relations of power that characterized the Roman elite class. With some imagination. Pagán constructs the kind of situation in which such a quotation may have been uttered, and in so doing, suggests translating scribere/proscribere using the English idioms \"strike up/strike down.\" Gaius Asinius Pollio (75 B.C.E.-5 C.E.), consul in 40 B.C.E., was a leading Roman senator in the final years of the Republic and the beginning of the principate.

Largely ignorant of Islamic science and technology, which since at least the eleventh century had postulated the possibility of void or empty spaces in nature-and had created suction pumps long before they were deployed by French and Italian hydraulic engineers-the great argument of seventeenth-century European philosophers was over space, or, more accurately, empty space. For Hobbes, in Part IV of the De Corpore (composed in the late 1640s, but not published in English until 1656), the universe was replete with matter on either a vast or infinitesimal scale: . . . the Immense Space which we call the World, is the Aggregate of all Bodies; which are either Consistent & Visible, as the Earth and the Starres; or Invisible, as the small Atomes which are disseminated through the whole space between the Earth and the Stars; and lastly, that most Fluid Aether, which so fils all the rest of the Universe, as that it leaves in it no empty place at all.4 Aether was the mysterious and unobservable fifth element of Platonic cosmology. A theoretical \"perfect vacuum\" (sometimes known as \"free space\") cannot be achieved on earth even in the modern laboratory, where ultra-high vacuum chambers are deployed to create pressures as low as one trillionth (10-12) of atmospheric pressure. Even the vacancy of the intergalactic void-the deep spaces that come closest to a \"perfect\" or \"hard\" vacuum-contains some residual phenomena: scattered hydrogen atoms, gamma and cosmic rays, and neutrinos.

Abstract In sections 34-35 of the First Philippic, Cicero makes a powerful threat against Antony by engaging in allusive role-play that makes dual use of Marcus Antonius orator as an exemplum. Cicero first declares himself Antonius to Antony's Cinna, thus acknowledging the limitations of rhetoric in the face of violence and indicating that he is prepared to accept a martyr's role. Second, Cicero invites conflation of himself with Marius/Cinna and Antony to his grandfather Antonius, thereby declaring that Cicero had decided to oppose Antony and work towards Antony's destruction. This role-play represents not only a powerful warning to Antony, but also a sign of Cicero's change in attitude towards Antony, an attitudinal change reinforced by Cicero's wordplay on reversio. The allusive threats in sections 34-35 also indicate that Cicero had decided by no later than 2 September 44, and not with the dissemination of the Second Philippic, that there would be no reconciliation between himself and Antony.