In the summer of 253 CE, Aemilian was acclaimed emperor by the legions in Moesia. It was not an unusual event at the time when successive rulers were proclaimed by their soldiers in the Lower Danube. However, given the absence of kinship links between Aemilian and his predecessors, the legitimation of his position could not be based on dynastic principles. Moreover, allusions to religious themes were abundant on coin types struck for him at the Roman mint. I am particularly interested in reverse types featuring Diana Victrix and Hercules Victor, where both deities were represented as the source of Aemilian’s victories. In this sense, the presence of Aemilian in Italy not only shifted the dynamics of politics in Rome but also affected representational patterns on imperial coinage.
Pliny the Elder and the perception of political crises in Rome. The scope of Natural History makes it a primary testimony on the perception of crises in Rome in the first century CE, during a period when the empire enjoyed the stability brought by the rise of the Flavian dynasty and the establishment of the Roman peace (pax Romana). However, an examination of the treatment given to Rome’s more turbulent history, even recent events (for example, the Mithridatic Wars or the civil war between Caesar and Pompey), reveals a systematic softening of the dramatic nature of these events, in favor of a moralizing discourse. From this perspective, luxuria, a traditional object of moralist disdain, represents the greatest danger: the loss of collective identity and, above all, the loss of knowledge and memory of the world. This observation, repeated several times, prevents Pliny from reflecting on the contradiction between the pacification of the world and the resulting decline of knowledge. On the other hand, Natural History offers original solutions to this “crisis of culture,” asserting the importance of nature as a means of rethinking authority and humanity’s place in the world.
Magnia Urbica, the last ‘Soldatenkaiserin’. The paper focuses on the analysis of epigraphic and numismatic evidence on Magnia Urbica, the wife of Carinus, the last soldier emperor. The study will be conducted by comparing the official representation of the Augusta, which can be deduced from imperial coinage, and its reception by the community, as evidenced by inscriptions. Some considerations will also be offered on the significance of the title mater castrorum and its usage throughout the 3rd century AD.
Two milestones from Moesia Inferior, dating under Maximinus Thrax, mention reparations of roads and bridges. The author proposes a revision of an inscription from the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby and tries to connect these reparations with historical events which took place in the province during the reign of Maximinus.
Do ut des: the crisis of faith. The pact with the devil, or the extreme pragmatism of a legal principle in the poem Lapsus et conversio Theophili vicedomini (Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, 10th century). The theme of the pact with the devil has its origins in the Greek Middle Ages, in texts that were believed to recount events which had truly taken place. Through a series of translations, this motif entered Latin-language culture and was eventually integrated into the literary repertoire – apparently beginning with the work of Hrotsvitha, the author of two poems that explore the theme in two distinct versions, differing primarily in their motivational frameworks. Although in both versions the pact with the devil involves a nearly identical crisis of faith, it was the Legend of Theophilus that resonated more closely with the sensibilities of Latin audiences. In the following pages, we propose a concise analysis of this crisis as portrayed in Lapsus et conversio Theophili vicedomini, and aim to position the poem – within this interpretive framework—among the broader corpus of texts that contributed to the emergence and evolution of the theme.
