In Pliny’s Shoes

(by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy) During this week I am completing a quite difficult essay for The Open University, Faculty of Humanities, regarding the extent to which Aeneas is the master of his own fate in the Aeneid.

by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy - The end of the calendar year usually brings a number of very interesting events led by professional associations. This year was no exception, albeit most were by teleconferencing systems of course. We tend to take a bit

(by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy) During the period covering the middle Republic and the Principate, the Roman ruling elite had established what is known as the cursus honorum. A mostly unavoidable sequential order of public offices to be held by aspiring politicians informally

by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy - Don’t you get the feeling that politics is omnipresent? That the political lens has invaded everything and everywhere? Few topics can be discussed without somebody in your entourage looking at it through an ideological -even partisan- prism

by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy «His only fault is that he has no fault» is the famous quote that, allegedly, Pliny the Younger stated in the first century A.D. (for the purists: I have not been able to find it in his surviving

(by Ricardo Cortés-Monroy) « Amicitiae tam superiores quam minores » (Pliny the Younger, Letter 7.3). When a couple of weeks ago I was deepening my study of the Roman institution of patronage, I encountered this revealing phrase of Pliny the Younger.