This chapter explores the depictions of the barbarians, and indeed the very concept barbaros, in Plutarch’s works. It reviews Plutarch’s rhetoric dealing with non-Greeks, which was circumscribed on the one hand by the Roman imperial political reality and on the other by memories of the old Hellenic valor, which was filtered only through texts and oratory. The chapter examines Plutarch’s play with the established stereotypes in a way that shows ethnic labeling to be elusive. It studies Plutarch’s ethnic taxonomic schemes (i.e. a twofold arrangement of barbarians vs. Greeks/Romans and a threefold scheme of Greeks vs. Romans vs. barbarians), and the subtle moral and political implications thereof. It also looks into the literary significance of the use of barbarians in the narrative and of the mismatch between Greek and barbarian practices as presented mostly in the Lives.

This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

In Chapter 2, I explore Walter Pater’s turn to Classical paganism to formulate his vision of the individual subject as dissipated through a range of spaciotemporal landscapes. Situating Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885) within the context of scientific claims by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Antonio Stoppani, the chapter articulates the way in which Pater’s paganism melds the Classical with recent scientific developments to present a sympathetic fusion of humans, other animals, plants, atmosphere, landscape, cultures, and even architecture. In the process, the chapter also address the ways in whih people such as Stoppani turned to metaphors and methods of comprehension rooted in Classical mythology to formulate, in his case, a pseudo-scientific, Christian conception of the rise of the Anthropocene.

Caesar, a patrician war hero already from his youth, followed the model of the Scipiones in the combination of a patrician pedigree with a "popular" political stance and the pursuit of military glory. Despite his family connection, he was no "Marian" in the strong sense of reviving and refighting the battles of the 80s. By the time of his entry in 63 on the highest stage of politics, he was known as a popularis of a particular sort: one exceptionally skilled at cultivating the support of the Roman People but not a demagogue or even a significant player in the classic popularis proposals for land redistribution, debt relief, or the like. Caesar’s reputation for "largesse" does not seem to have exceeded the norms of his day, or perhaps even what many of his contemporaries considered to be mere necessity. The best evidence suggests that his objective at this time was, as Sallust writes, to obtain "a great command, an army, a new war in which his excellence could shine forth." But that path lay through the Senate. Like many aristocrats Caesar did not shy away from a feud with a powerful figure (Q. Catulus), but that did not put him at odds with the aristocracy as a whole.

This chapter looks at cases where those subject to Roman hegemony attempted to throw off Roman control and also where the power of individuals within the state became so contested that it threatened the constitutional integrity of the republic.In the first half coin evidence is used to look at South Italian communities that sided with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, uprisings of enslaved peoples and Roman responses, and the failed attempt by Rome’s former Italian allies to set up a rival federal state.The second half examines what numismatic evidence can tell us about the autocratic ambitions of Marius, Sulla, and Pompey and ends with a close look at how Sulla’s memory was used during the period of Pompey’s ascendency.