A central concern of Plutarch’s works is what constitutes a good and honorable life, and they commonly claim to “improve” the character and behaviour of their elite readers, especially in politics and leadership. This chapter assesses this educational approach across the whole corpus, paying particular attention to works of literary criticism, works of practical morality, political texts, and the Parallel Lives. It highlights, among other themes, the importance both of comparison (syncrisis) and of examples (paradeigmata) drawn from history, literature, or everyday life to stimulate reflection. Though profoundly influenced by Plato, Plutarch is particularly concerned with the practical application of philosophical principles to real-life situations, whether faced by the statesmen of the past or by his own readers. Indeed, rather than preaching simplistic lessons, many of Plutarch’s texts bring out how complex moral judgments can be in practice and invite readers to think deeply about morality, literature, and politics.

After rejecting as tendentious ancient and modern accounts of declamation that stress the difference between classical past and imperial present, this chapter explores the ways in which audiences could relate to declamation's classicism. It was the almost universal assumption of antiquity that history was useful, and declamation, which frequently uses the same materials and even the same language as contemporary biography and political oratory, was no exception; indeed, this was a natural continuation of educational practice. Declamation offered not simply examples to follow or avoid, but also helped in gaining a sense of the distinctive qualities of a situation, appreciating a situation’s true scale, and recognising abiding truths about human life. Many of the imagined speakers of declamations actually model these processes for us in their speeches, a phenomenon I term 'meta-exemplarity'. Finally, I consider what was distinctive about declamation's invocation of the past, vivid, oblique yet powerful, and open-ended. Imperial declamation accordingly represents an important development in the historiographical culture of ancient Greece.

In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

Given the apparent importance of exempla to Cicero’s project in De Officiis, any account of Cicero’s philosophical method in this work is forced to grapple with the question of how these historical insets function within the text. Yet understanding how, exactly, they contribute to the reader’s moral progress is an interpretative challenge: Cicero’s treatment warns us against taking them simply as models for imitation. Instead, I argue, Cicero focuses on three different, but related, functions for his exempla within De Officiis. First, looking at the behaviour of others can help us to develop the analytical skills necessary to correctly deliberate about our own actions. Secondly, exempla work to verify the theoretical claims of the text. Finally, they show the beneficial outcomes of following the teachings of the text, in terms of the glory and praise that accrues to those who engage in correct action – though, as we shall see, this strategy is only effective because of Cicero’s radical redefinition of the concepts of glory and praise.

On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed.

In Cicero’s Lucullus of 45 BC, we find a moment often ignored by scholars, in which the proponent of anti-skepticism and Antiochus’ Stoic dogmatism in the dialogue, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, draws a lengthy analogy from oratorical practice to critique one of Cicero’s arguments as the proponent of Academic skepticism. Fortunately for us, the analogy opens a rare window onto the oratorical appropriation of certain politicians as exemplary populares.1 And so Lucullus argues.

his chapter will discuss some of the ways that recent scholarship on cultural memory has contributed to thinking about the role of exempla in Roman culture, and particularly to the development of the idea of the ‘site of exemplarity’.1 It will also suggest how insights found in this scholarship might sharpen our appreciation of some of the challenges that face modern scholars who are studying cultural memory in antiquity, especially when it comes to the Roman republic from which so little written testimony survives. These themes will be focused through the discussion of the somewhat obscure case of Vibellius Taurea, a bold native of the city of Capua who clashed with the Romans during the Second Punic War.

Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.

The Introduction frames the study as an argument about the use of biblical figures within the narrative of On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). Bay maintains that a survey of the scriptural characters that appear in this text suggest that these remembered heroes were an important tool for how Pseudo-Hegesippus conceived of and communicated late Second Temple period Jewish history from a late antique Christian perspective. This chapter also recommends the Old Testament exempla of On the Destruction of Jerusalem as a good place to start literarily for approaching and understanding the background, aims, and inner logic of this text. Bay further explains how the biblical exempla of Pseudo-Hegesippus often appear within speeches placed into the mouths of historical characters in the narrative, a typical literary feature of ancient historiography. Finally, the Introduction helps situate this study within the history of scholarship – not only within the little work done on Pseudo-Hegesippus, but also in the context of various scholarly discussions in Classics, biblical studies, early Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and late antique literature.

The Conclusion brings the works chapters into a synthetic discussion of what this book is designed to do: introduce On the Destruction of Jerusalem to contemporary scholarship and point to the ways in which it can enhance our knowledge of historiography, speech-writing, exemplarity, anti-Judaism, Classicism, biblical reception, and Greek-to-Latin literary adaptation in Christian late antiquity.

Artists and writers placed the figure of a boy king centrally, using images and stories of historical and biblical child rulers as exempla. This chapter focuses on narrative and artistic traditions of models of child kingship to illustrate the positive cultural associations between childhood and kingship. Scholars have almost exclusively assessed cultural representations of rulership from the perspective of an adult king. But authors used a parallel range of models to contextualise and legitimise a boy’s succession and rule. The chapter looks first at Old Testament kings such as Jehoash and Josiah, then turns to representations of the humble child David, which were especially prominent in coronation ordines and psalter illuminations. Growing interest in Latin, vernacular and visual depictions of Jesus’s childhood is considered in the third section. Interrogating the circulation of these positive biblical models challenges the dominant narrative linking child kingship with disruption and political disorder. The chapter’s final section therefore turns a more rigorous spotlight on the oft-cited Ecclesiastes 10:16 verse which warned that a boy king would bring ‘woe to the land’.

This chapter argues that Plutarch’s moralising works (especially the Progress in Virtue and Parallel Lives) show signs of having been significantly influenced by Roman exemplary ethics. Plutarch brings Roman ideas about exemplary ethics and imitation to bear on the Greek philosophical tradition, and his critique of Platonic mimesis is emboldened by the critical Roman framework which he must have encountered as a lived Roman tradition, not just in the Latin literature that he may have read as a source for his Roman lives and other writings, but also in day-to-day experiences with his Roman friends, such as Sosius Senecio, to whom he dedicates both Progress in Virtue and the Parallel Lives.

This paper investigates the largely inaccessible ancient audiences of early Roman epic and historiography, using points of intersection in our evidence for Ennius’ Annals and Cato’s Origins to consider each work’s audience in relation to the other’s. My means of approach are two. First, I explore differences in how Cicero responds to each of those works, with glances across to his surviving responses to Fabius Pictor’s history of Rome, finding that Cicero frequently cites the Annals to illustrate the forging and articulation of Roman ethical identity at exemplary moments in the past, but neither he nor any other source cites Cato or Fabius for any such purpose. Second, I consider the distribution of collectives across the surviving fragments of both works. Terms for the Roman collective are relatively abundant in Ennius’ Annals, and that collective is featured in heroic action, but in the Origins the Roman collective is much less obtrusive than might have been expected in a work notorious for suppressing the names of more recent historical leaders. The two findings suggest that it was the Annals that had the broader appeal, the readier ability to speak to and for Romans across the board.

Given its absence from the university curriculum and the apparent indifference of ‘scholasticism’ to the subject, it has been assumed that medieval university scholars neither wrote nor read history. Although the universities were indeed not centres of historical writing, several friars and monks who had studied at university did write history, and many university alumni owned historical works and donated them to their college and university libraries. Moreover, evidence for university scholars’ interest in history increases considerably when one discards the modern historicist/positivist definition of historiography and regards it instead as its medieval readers did, as encompassing texts about past deeds and sayings which offered timeless moral and practical lessons. This chapter argues that university scholars’ reading and writing of history was closely tied to their interest in the classics and devotion to pastoral care. It also identifies the historical works at the universities and their owners and donors.