This article reinterprets an incident that Livy (8.18.4–11) and derivative later sources place in the year 331 BCE: a wave of poisonings whose perpetrators are brought to light after an enslaved woman contacts a Roman magistrate. Its main objectives are to show that the incident is best understood in connection with the transmission of novel—or perceived as novel—pharmacological knowledge, and in conjunction with shifts in the institution of slavery at Rome that were set in motion by the Republic’s expansion; that (...) a key figure in the mythological encoding of this transmission was the legendary Circe; and that moving away from previous scholarship’s concern with the matronae alleged to have carried out the poisonings and focusing instead on “la servant délatrice” (Jean-Marie Pailler) opens up new corridors into the cultural history of this period. (shrink)

This article studies the adoption of the nickname Malleolus by members of the gens Publicia in mid-republican Rome to illustrate the importance of grounding cultural history in the lives of seemingly minor political players and the mundane objects with which they came to be associated. After reviewing the occupational significance of hammers during the First Punic War, I scrutinize the ritual and cultic intersignifications of hammers in fourth- and third-century BCE central Italy in order to set up a comprehensive reconstruction (...) of the social and semiotic networks that structured and mediated the dedication of a temple to the goddess Flora by the brothers Publicii Malleoli at a time of internal political crisis and external conflict. Central to the political and intercultural contests of mid-republican Rome was the generative force of the polyvalent and object-centered cognomen in establishing and promoting individual and collective identities. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of slave religious experience in mid-republican Rome. Select passages from Plautine comedy and Cato the Elder's De agri cultura are paired with material culture as well as comparative evidence—mostly from studies of Black Atlantic slave religions—to reconstruct select aspects of a specific and distinctive slave “religiosity” in the era of large-scale enslavements. I work towards this reconstruction first by considering the subordination of slaves as religious agents before turning to slaves’ practice of certain forms (...) of religious expertise in the teeth of subordination and policing. After transitioning to an assessment of slave religiosity's role in the pursuit of freedom, I conclude with a set of methodological justifications for this paper's line of inquiry. (shrink)