2025 Programme

The last decade has seen a surge of interest in the Social War (91-87), the relatively short if intense and immensely costly conflict between the Roman Republic and a spate of rebellious, largely Italic allies. With the exception of a series of coins minted by the rebels, their voices are almost entirely lost, signifying that we are overwhelminlgy dependent on – mostly early imperial – Greco-Roman literary sources. Consequently, the field remains sharply divided especially as regards the question of the main drivers of the revolt and the foremost political objectives of the insurgents. Indeed, the traditional school of thought that the rebellious Italians were fighting for Roman citizenship (e.g. Brunt 1988) has been increasingly challenged by the view that the rebels instead wanted outright independence and an end to Roman hegemony over the Italian peninsula (Mouritsen 1998). After a brief conspectus of the most probable causes of the war, we will revisit the thorny issue of the aims of the insurgents, giving pride of place to Diodorus Siculus’ hotly debated account of the political organization of the rebellious Italians, to suggest a novel interpretation of the political objectives of the rebellious Italians. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the outcomes and immediate consequences of the armed conflict. Amongst other things, it will be suggested that the Social War (91-87) was hardly over when another wave of mass violence broke out in a civil war one could arguably also term the Social War 2.0 (87-82).

Frederik Vervaet is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Melbourne. He has published and lectured widely in Roman socio-institutional and political history, and Roman public law, recently including a monograph on Reform, Revolution, Reaction. A Short History of Rome from the Origins of the Social War to the Dictatorship of Sulla (Sevilla & Zaragoza, 2023) and co-edited volume (with David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart) on How Republics Die. Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (Berlin & Boston, 2025), entirely available in open access.

20 October

Andrew Jamieson and Claudia Sagona, University of Melbourne

The history of the city of Babylon has many endings. In 539 BCE the Persians conquered the city, effectively removing native kingship and bringing an end to a millennia-old political and ideological system. In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great was welcomed into the city, bringing with him new ideas and practices from the West. The arrival of the Parthians in 141 BCE further diminished the light of cuneiform culture, which decidedly ended around 75 BCE with the writing of the last recovered cuneiform tablet. To most scholars, these last six centuries of cuneiform culture form the slow decline of a great civilization up until its eventual death, after which it disappeared without leaving many traces in the subsequent cultures of the region. In this talk, however, I want to tell a different story—one that reimagines the end of cuneiform culture as a transformation. I will explore how cuneiform culture adapted, persisted, and remolded itself in new contexts, urging us to reconsider its end in an existence beyond the last tablet.

Dr. Céline Debourse is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is a specialist in the scholarly and priestly culture of first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, and an expert in the Akkadian language. Her first book was Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022). She is currently at work on a study of how rituals were textualized in cuneiform culture, and on a book on the twilight of cuneiform culture, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform: Reimagining the End of a Culture (331 BCE–224 CE).