Professor%20Rhiannon%20Ash: List of publications

This article considers the characterisation of two intertwined but increasingly contrasting figures from Cicero’s letters, namely the younger Marcus (Cicero’s son) and Quintus Cicero (Cicero’s nephew), reconstructing and adding nuance to significant moments in their lives as depicted in Cicero’s writings. By tracing diachronically the two cousins’ depictions across his letter collections, this article takes us into the deep recesses of family life and explores expectations about educational and career trajectories of young aristocrats. It also shows how the cousins’ portraits shadow and develop in intriguing ways the relationship between their fathers, Cicero and his brother Quintus, adding further foiling and complexity to all four portraits. The trajectories of the boys’ lives, initially so closely entwined and unfolding in parallel, gradually diverge: the firecracker Quintus becomes increasingly alienated and angry, while the jovial Marcus, constantly indulged by his father, can apparently do no wrong, despite unwitting hints in the letters that he is not the paragon that Cicero assumes him to be.

Within the narrative for A.D. 32, Tacitus recreates a spirited speech delivered before the Senate by the eques Marcus Terentius (Ann. 6.8), defending himself retrospectively for having been a ‘friend’ of Sejanus. This speech, the only extended speech in oratio recta to feature in Annals Book 6, is historiographically rich and suggestive. This article first analyses the speech as a compelling piece of oratory in its own right. It then explores the provocative mirroring of another important speech in Curtius Rufus (7.1.19–40). This is where the general Amyntas, defending himself before Alexander the Great against charges of participation in an alleged conspiracy, refuses to deny his friendship with the conspirator Philotas (now dead). Scholars have rightly acknowledged the significant intertextuality of these two speeches in Curtius Rufus and Tacitus. Yet the interest in this mirroring between Amyntas and Terentius has overshadowed another important intertext. This article demonstrates how Tacitus also engages with a programmatic moment from the opening of Virgil's Aeneid when Aeolus is cajoled by Juno to unleash a devastating storm. Terentius wittily casts Tiberius as a powerful divinity whose whims had to be obeyed and himself as a helpless Aeolus doing his will. This article demonstrates that the two passages from Virgil and Curtius Rufus underpinning Terentius’ speech work together powerfully, challenging Tacitus’ readers to reflect on the difficulties of ‘speaking to power’ and on the compromises involved for men like Terentius in negotiating the complex political realities of the imperial system.

The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War represents a close and coherent study of developments and discussions concerning the concept of civil war in the late republican and early imperial historiography of the late Republic.

An exploration of the theme of war as spectacle in classical antiquity and its reception in subsequent centuries.

Revised version of Wellesley's translation, with a new introduction and notes.