Marko Marinčič / The roMan eMpire as a paradigM in poliTics and liTeraTure
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DOI:10.4312/ars.16.1.5-6
Marko Marinčič
The Roman Empire as a paradigm  
in politics and literature
This thematic issue is not simply about political appropriations of Rome and its empire 
in later times (e. g. Byzantium as a New Rome, the Holy Roman Empire of the German 
nation, the US as the final goal of the translatio imperii from the East to the West, etc.). 
Instead, it is dedicated to the role specific paradigmatic patterns related to the Roman 
Empire played in political imaginaries and literature. It starts with two articles dedicat-
ed to imperial themes and topoi in Augustan poetry. Francesca Boldrer (“Qua maxima 
Roma est: Properzio, il principato augusteo e le trasformazioni dell’elegia romana”) 
shows how the Augustan principate influenced the elegy as a poetic genre that had 
come into prominence during the last decades of the Republic and, within the inner 
development of Propertius’ elegy, assumed a more specifically aetiological character, 
thus opening up an intriguing dialogue between elegy and Augustan politics. Elisa-
betta Pitotto (“Potere imperiale romano e strumenti eulogistici greci: Virgilio, Eneide, 
VI 860-886 e Orazio, Odi, IV 2 come casi di studio”) enquires into celebratory themes 
and topoi as an element of Augustan poetry that is at the heart of an emerging new era 
of Roman literature. She shows that, in accordance with the classicizing tendency of 
the period, the two poets do not limit themselves to imitating the celebratory patterns 
of their Hellenistic precedents, but creatively rework traditions that go back as far as to 
Ibycus, the court poet of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, in the 6th century BC. 
Paolo Di Benedetto (“Costruire e ri-costruire la storia e l’identità d’Asia in età 
imperiale: le Amazzoni in Ionia e in Eolide”) offers an exciting insight into the cultural 
self-understanding of Greeks under Roman rule. Specifically, the myth of the Ama-
zons, who in the Greek collective imagination represented the “Other”, was revived in 
Greek cities of Asia Minor as a foundation myth reaffirming the cultural identity of the 
Greeks, their antiquity and “priority”. 
Two contributions are dedicated to “paradigmatic” Rome as seen through the eyes 
of Christian authors. David Movrin (“He is Human, Too”: The Empire and Its Emper-
ors in Athanasius’ Vita Antonii”) takes up a telling detail from Athanasius’ Vita Antonii, 
where the hermit saint is corresponding with Constantine, Constantius and Constans. 
While Eusebius had presented the emperor as a sort of a bishop, the Greek Vita Antonii 
offers a different image of the secular ruler; its author seems to be sceptical of imperial 
power and looks for a spiritual alternative to earthly rule. Movrin shows that Sulpicius 
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Marko Marinčič / The roMan eMpire as a paradigM in poliTics and liTeraTure
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Severus followed this pattern in his Vita Martini. Matej Petrič (“Krščanski imperij in 
cerkvena zgodovina: primer Rufina iz Akvileje”, “Christian Empire and Church His-
tory: The Case of Rufinus of Aquileia”) deals with another creative response to Euse-
bius, the appendix on the events of 325–395 that Rufinus of Aquileia added to his 
Latin translation of Eusebius’ Church History. Rufinus departed from Eusebius’ idea of 
Church history as a serious, impartial historiographic genre by privileging oral sources 
and replacing documentary material with accounts of miraculous events.
The next section is dedicated to the reception of the Roman Empire and of Ro-
man ideas on empire in modern political thought. As Gregor Pobežin (“Sallust and 
Jean Bodin: the Inevitable Loss of the Commonwealth”) demonstrates, Jean Bodin, a 
prominent political thinker of 16th century France, comparable in resonance to Leon-
ardo Bruni and Niccolò Machiavelli, followed a number of his contemporaries in his 
admiration for Sallust, who was then read as a theoretician of sedition and a world in 
turmoil. As Pobežin shows, however, there are little grounds in Sallust for Bodin’s legal 
and historical framing of absolutist sovereignty. Brane Senegačnik’s contribution (“La 
via romana e la possibilità di un’identità culturale aperta”) is a reappraisal of Europe, 
la voie romaine by the French philosopher Rémi Brague (1992), who argued that the 
essential trait of the Roman Empire that determined the evolution of European culture 
was its “eccentricity”, the reliance of its identity on foreign sources. This pattern, as 
Senegačnik suggests following Leszek Kołakowski, might seem viable in real history 
as far as it is based on a minimal common denominator of cultural identity and on 
universal anthropological realities, which are transcendent in nature. 
In her article (“Kleopatra, Imperialismus und Orientalismus: Ungezähmte Orienta-
lin, tapfere Herrscherin oder elegische Herrin?”), Darja Šterbenc Erker traces the origins 
of the image of Cleopatra as femme fatale to her role as an anti-paradigm in Octavian’s 
propaganda war against Mark Antony. She explains the ways in which the complexities 
of the image of the Oriental queen as presented in Propertius, Virgil and others was 
diluted when the historical character, transformed through the lens of Western imperial-
ism and Orientalism, entered film and popular culture in the 20th century. 
The initiative for this collection of papers originated in the research project “Em-
pire and Transformation of Genre in Roman Literature”, funded by the Slovenian Re-
search Agency (J6-2585). A live conference on the topic was planned for 2021 but 
had to be called off for obvious reasons. In spite of this, the virtual exchange of ideas 
between the contributors amounted to forming an ad hoc research group that is sup-
posed to come together again, in person, at a forthcoming international event. 
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