‘For him the streets of the great city of learning which we wished to build lay all clearly laid out before his mind’. These words describe the first Rathbone Professor, the imposing John Macdonald Mackay – who arrived in Liverpool, after a spell in St Andrews, at the precocious age of twenty-eight. Mackay was always portrayed in the image of the modern-day prophet. This was not only a matter of his posture, seen in a famous Liverpool picture in which he is represented pointing the so-called New Testament group of his fellow university progressives to the Promised Land (Figure 1), but also of his rambling style of speech (his lectures lasted nearly two hours) and in the characteristic pause, as the archaeologist John Garstang observed, after you addressed a question to him: ‘an interval during which his eyes roamed among things unseen’. Lytton Strachey, briefly a pupil, put it more brutally: ‘Professor Mackay is very weird and somewhat casual’. But with all this, as my opening quotation suggests, Mackay was one of the chief architects of the faculty and university; discoursing passionately, for example, on the need for Liverpool to maintain its distance from the ‘repellent American type’ (of which he evidently knew very little). By comparison with the great Mackay, and still more with my immediate predecessors, I feel I must begin by lowering expectations.

Atticus: Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur, saepe a me lectus in Mario. Sin manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim est sane uetus.

Qvintus: Manet uero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. Sata est enim ingenio; nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae uersu seminari potest.

Atticus: Indeed I recognize that grove and this Arpinate oak, which I’ve often read about in the Marius. If that oak still stands, it must be this one; for old it certainly is.

Quintus: Of course it stands, my dear Atticus, and it will always stand, for it has been planted in the imagination. Indeed no farmer’s cultivation can produce a plant as long-lasting as that which is sown by the verse of a poet. De legibus 1.1

The image of the Marian oak begins De legibus with almost postmodern abruptness. This is in part due to the absence of an authorial preface, such as the long statement of purpose partially preserved in De re publica 1.1–14, which leaves De legibus without a chronological or situational frame of reference. The result is that the treatise begins in a particularly Platonic fashion, as the contemplation of an object in the natural landscape proceeds into a discussion of its symbolic meaning, setting up the dichotomy between perception and reality, ficta and vera, the past and its memory.

The interaction between Roman religion and Ovid’s ostensibly religious poem, Fasti, has only begun to be appreciated in the past twenty years or so. Before this time, scholars were typically either uncritical of Ovid’s poem – taking it at face value as a quarry from which to mine reliable gems of information on Roman religion – or far too critical, chastizing the poet for what they saw as errors from a man ignorant of his own national religion. From the mid 1980s, however, there has emerged a better understanding of the complex nature of Roman religion. Scholars now stress the fundamental role of exegesis (multiple interpretation) in a religion which has no underlying orthodoxy. As such, it is argued that Roman religion was not something concrete, tangible, and external, to which literature related faithfully or otherwise, but that literature had a central role in articulating the dynamics of the religious experience of the Romans.

One can now duly expect and appreciate, therefore, a variety of contrasting views on Roman religious activity presented in Fasti, without resorting to arguments about Ovidian ignorance or the apparently incomplete state of the poem itself.

The anonymous Epitome de Caesaribus (25.1) introduces the emperor C. Julius Verus Maximinus (235–8 CE) for the first time as ‘Maximinus Thrax’. This is now a generally acceptable name for the emperor, despite the fact that it appears only once, here in the fourth century. So iconic is this geographical label, however, that the curious treatment of his origins by the most detailed sources, Herodian and the Historia Augusta, can be obscured. While both state that his birthplace was Thrace, they also point out that his origins were racially mixed. Herodian, a contemporary historian, calls Maximinus the son of mixobarbaroi, ‘mixed-barbarians’; a century and a half later, the Historia Augusta, in a long, largely fanciful biography, calls him a semibarbarus, a ‘half-barbarian’. His brief rule was therefore remembered as inaugurating a precedent that would come to plague the empire for decades: an emperor of dubious, even mongrel origins, elected by the troops, would bring cruelty and chaos to the state. This article considers how the Historia Augusta in particular used racial terms to highlight the difference between the legitimate rule of the senate and the illegitimate subversion of its authority by a half-barbarian from the periphery of the empire. This racial profile was fully formed only in the fourth century and is reflected in a range of other sources, demonstrating that contemporary political concerns brought to the fore debates on the dangers of racial mixing.

Introduction

The reign of Marcus Aurelius, although he was acclaimed by ancient and modern commentators as an exemplary ruler, saw many calamities. Marcus was preoccupied with wars for the better part of his reign; the pestilence brought back to Rome from the east by Verus and the Roman army remained endemic in the city for many years to come, and the German wars from the late 160s well into the next decade posed great danger to Rome and caused great anxiety. In addition, a coup was executed. The usurper, Avidius Cassius, was the ruler of the Roman East for three months, enjoying support amongst the local population. After Verus’ death, the emperor embarked on war against the German tribes, but not before summoning priests and magicians from all over the world to help him, many of whom came from provinces far and wide. This attentiveness of Marcus Aurelius to religious issues (the representation of religious themes on his coins and monuments and his religious policy as a whole) introduced some changes to the Roman imperial tradition. Moreover his adaptation of policies that reflected new beliefs and the abandonment of old ones, was indicative of the political, social, and cultural developments during his reign. The desperation of the emperor is made most visible in the pages of Lucian’s Alexander.

Prelude (290–409): Ceyx, king of Trachis, just west of the Malian Gulf, was the son of Lucifer, the morning star, and he bore witness to his birth by the radiance of his face (271–2). He was a man of peace, unlike his brother, Daedalion, a fierce soldier, who, in a frenzy of grief at the murder of his daughter by Diana was pitied by Apollo and turned into a hawk (339–45). This was followed by another weird episode – the appearance of a monstrous wolf, which, after causing widespread destruction, was turned into a stone by Thetis (365–406). A (410–73): Worried by these strange events, Ceyx decides he must consult the oracle of Apollo. He cannot, however, go to Delphi, which is not far south, because it is being blockaded by Phorbas and the Phlegyans. So he prepares to go to Claros on the coast of Asia Minor. As the ship moves out to sea, Ceyx stands on the poop waving to his wife (A 465).

Alcyone waves back, even though she is prostrate on the ground – collapsaque corpore toto est (460).

Ovid gives a beautiful description of how first Ceyx himself ceases to be visible, then the hull moves out of sight and only the sails on the yard-arm can still be seen; finally, they, too, disappear over the horizon (A 466–71).