Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics

The summer of 44 B.C. that followed the death of Julius Caesar was a time of political tension for Marcus Tullius Cicero. The future of his beloved Republic was unsure, and Cicero was confronted with the ambition and power of Mark Antony. The correspondences of Cicero’s Att. 14.13 (composed the month after Caesar’s death) illuminate Cicero’s thoughts leading to the openly, invective first Phillipic in the fall of that same year. This inquiry carefully examines Cicero’s complex self-fashioning in an essential passage of the correspondence (14.13B.1-2) to show how Cicero resists compromising his authority and dignitas from a seemingly disadvantageous position.

Occupying a pivotal spot on thenorth-west coast of India in the first centuries CE, the Kingdom of the WesternKshatrapas remains one of the most neglected parts of India’s ancient past. Asa key regional power, and part of the major ocean trade with Rome, this isunfortunate and deserves to be rectified. This piece, by Guy Bud, anUndergraduate at Oxford University, deals with the coins of the region and askswhat their stylistic aspects can tell us about the cultures which mixed in theregion at the time. Looking at the Roman, Hellenistic and local coinagetraditions, the article engaged with the idea of cultural transition andinfluence in this very singular context.

A lively and eloquent piece exploring Hellenistic poet Callimachus' key aesthetic tenets and uncovering the profound legacy he left for the literary world we know today.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth study of the late first century BC epigraphic source, the Laudatio Turiae, otherwise known as the Eulogy of Turia. This oddly under-studied document and artefact, this paper argues, can give us great insight into the social and political environment of the turbulent triumviral period, and also into that of the newly-formed Principate. The Laudatio Turiae is also valuable to modern scholarship as an example of the genre of laudatio funebris, providing us with one of only three surviving examples of this genre dedicated to women. As such, it can also be argued to be a significant source for our understanding of Roman women, both in terms of their role within the specific and pivotal period in which this source was created, and also in terms of more universal and enduring attitudes towards women and their place in society throughout the Roman world. This article looks to address the historical value of the Laudatio Turiae, and also to consider the ways in which its genre alters or limits this value.

‘The wedding of Nisus and Euryalus’ is a hymnic ode after Catullus 61 which plays with the ideas of the shared tragic death of the youth joined in love. The sensory and visual language of death overlays with the images of wedding attendants and celebrations. ‘Our Lord on the Cross’ is from a set of reflections on the 14 Stations of the Cross, for which this was written for the twelfth station, ‘Jesus dies on the cross’. The lamentation includes sections translated from the Biblical book of Lamentations, while also voicing Our Lord’s own strained words on the cross as he watches passersby take little heed of his fate. ‘The pleasures of reading’ is a light parody on all of the places that literature can take us - if only we have sufficient room in our personal libraries to store all of these books!