In Seneca's Agamemnon, Cassandra is both spectator and narrator of her prophecy concerning the king's death and his murder at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In Act IV, she uses the verbal form spectate (v. 758) to address the Trojan ghosts whom she herself has summoned-spectatores emerging from the Underworld. In Act V, she describes the king's death in praesentia and employs the form spectemus (v. 875) to address the external audience. In doing so, she breaks the dramatic illusion and constructs a metatheatrical space to contemplate the violence of the spectaculum.We argue that the inscription of both the internal and the external audience (Kebrat Orecchioni 1987, p. 207) is linked to the need for guarantors of Cassandra's prophecy and of Agamemnon's murder, which she herself narrates and frames as an act of revenge against the Greeks: uicimus uicti Phryges (v. 869, "We vanquished Phrygians are the victors"). Moreover, nearly ten centuries after the Trojan War-at a time when regicide resonated in recent imperial Roman collective memory and public executions were spectacularized-these scenes may have sought to provoke in the ancient real audience a disquiet that went beyond the recognition of Trojan ancestry and the thirst for vengeance.
This article offers a rereading of Plautus' Menaechmi through a combined analysis of dramatic space, institutional vocabulary, and the circulation of stage objects, in order to examine how early Roman comedy actively contributes to the symbolic construction of an emerging imperial experience. Moving beyond interpretations that view Plautine comedy as either a passive reflection of cultural Hellenization or an uncritical celebration of Roman expansion, the article argues that Menaechmi dramatizes processes of cultural appropriation shaped by asymmetries and normative displacements. The study first focuses on the play's geographical imagination, showing how expressions such as Graeciam exoticam participate in the discursive reorganization of the Mediterranean from a Roman-centered perspective marked by expansion and control. It then examines the pervasive use of juridical, military, and economic vocabulary in interpersonal relationships, revealing how republican categories of power are displaced into domestic and erotic contexts. Finally, the article analyzes the palla as a metapoetic stage object whose circulation materially embodies the process of cultural translation that defines the fabula palliata.
This article re-examines the appraisal of agriculture and literature in the proem to Sallust's De coniuratione Catilinae (Sall., Cat., 1-4) and argues that the passage in which the historian dismisses farming and hunting -presented as servile tasks- must be read within the proem's argumentative architecture, which subordinates aristocratic pursuits to the aim of glory. On the basis of a joint analysis of the proems to Sallust's two historical monographs, the article shows that the author's purpose is to legitimise historiography as an alternative path to glory in a post-Caesarian context in which the political arena ceases to be a propitious field for attaining it. It further contends that this reorientation shifts the centre of glory from negotium to the arts of the mind proper to otium. In this framework, the reduced esteem accorded to agriculture and hunting is coherent: not because of their intrinsic nature, but because they do not contribute -within Sallust's programme- to the pursuit of glory that only virtus animi and historiography can secure.
In this research, we explore Cicero's political thought in the face of the political division of the city during the final decades of the Roman Republic. In this sense, we address three specific dimensions that contributed to the definition of a prescriptive project regarding the constitution of the res publica, the people as a political subject, and the phenomenon of violence. These three dimensions are argumentatively linked across a series of texts including the treatises De Republica, De Legibus, and De Officiis, in dialogue with the post reditum speeches, wherein the continuity of public debate can be observed at the level of political-philosophical reflection. These works are part of a shift away from the centrality of oratory as a tool for contesting diverse visions of the res publica in the face of the intensification of violent forms of action imposed upon the city. We contend that, although Cicero maintains a critical stance on the political participation of the people-a view common to other classical authors-his project does not solely seek to establish a superior constitutional order based on natural law to counter it; rather, it attempts to subordinate popularis action to the ethical guidance of the elite. The preservation of the res publica operates as the ultimate end to delimit the field of legitimate action in accordance with the realization of virtue in the governance of the city.
