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• Trauma, Memory and Witnessing in Seneca’s Moral Epistles

  215–232.

  Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

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  2

  Spurred by the recent identification of fragments from Seneca the Elder’s historical work, ab initio bellorum civilium, this paper investigates how Seneca the Younger navigated Roman memory culture in light of the enduring, intergenerational trauma of selective imperial silencing.  It examines the complications heirs faced when preserving banned texts in an atmosphere of imperial censorship in a twist on traditional pietas that required one to preserve their father's memory. Against this historical background, and given emperors’ claim to absolute exemplarity while alive and the speedy reversal of those honors upon their deaths, Seneca’s Moral Epistles can be seen as a strategic attempt to reclaim some control over his own posthumous reception, entrusting the image of his life and of his death to a future community of like-minded individuals.

• Continuities in late antique literacy: the evidence from North Africa and Gaul

  177–185

  Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

  Views:

  230

  In this article I reconsider the evidence for ancient literacy from late antique North Africa and Gaul in order to reassess how the end of the “epigraphic habit” in the third century may have changed the popular contexts and notional associations of writing. Analyzing evidence for the Christian “epitaphic habit,” as well as for the production of legal and economic documents between the third and sixth centuries CE, I propose that late antique uses of writing attest to numerous continuities with their early imperial counterparts, including an interest not only in the pragmatic but also the performative character of ancient literacy.