Michael Kulikowski

Michael Kulikowski teaches at Penn State. His books include Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine, Imperial Tragedy: From Constantine’s Empire to the Destruction of Roman Italy and Roxy Music . . . On Track.

Kings and Kinglets: Cassiodorus

Michael Kulikowski, 12 August 2021

Ancient​ Latin literature has reached us along an improbably narrow path. Two millennia of rats, fire and floods were as nothing compared with three historical bottlenecks. Only one of these was technological and, perhaps surprisingly, it was not the invention of the printing press but of the codex. The rapid replacement of papyrus rolls by the bound codices we know as books, complete by...

Letter

All Together Now

17 June 2021

Ian Penman gets it mostly right, but there’s more to say about why the Beatles have inspired more cover versions than the Stones. The Beatles, like Bob Dylan (and to some extent Van Morrison and Ray Davies), wrote songs in the same way Schubert or Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote songs. However deeply layered and baroque their own studio versions could be, the elements of the songs are separable...

A Marketplace and a Temple: Ancient Urbanism

Michael Kulikowski, 18 February 2021

‘Aculture, we all know, is made by its cities,’ Derek Walcott said in his Nobel lecture. Greeks and Romans would have agreed. Although 90 per cent of the ancient population, perhaps more, lived on and worked the land, the thought-world of Mediterranean antiquity was based on the city. It was where all the life that mattered – public life, that is to say, the life of the...

A Very Bad Man: Julius Caesar, Génocidaire

Michael Kulikowski, 18 June 2020

Consider​ the many things that would not exist without Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars: Asterix and Obelix; The Wicker Man; Gauloises cigarettes; the little Airfix Romans and Britons that many of us grew up with. Even today, Caesar’s legionaries and their colourful Gallic foes are bread and butter for companies that sell expensive toy soldiers to middle-aged schoolboys. One...

How to End a Dynasty: Rehabilitating Nero

Michael Kulikowski, 19 March 2020

Threecenturies after the death of the emperor Nero, his name had become a byword for the very worst kind of ruler. For Ausonius of Bordeaux, in his didactic poem the Caesares, Nero was a savage and baleful matricide (saevus, dirus and matricida). By this time, the bad Nero was the only version anyone knew, his reputation distilled from the works of Tacitus and Suetonius, one of them a...

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