A hallmark of John Matthews's first book, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, is a fine appreciation of the Latin literature of the age not only as a window onto the world of late antique aristocrats but also as an artifact of their ease. We encounter Symmachus celebrating in a letter Ausonius's new masterpiece, the Mosella, “pick[ing] out for special mention that part of the poem which might to our tastes seem the most unsympathetic, the resourceful ‘Catalogue of Fishes’ – where, said Symmachus, were listed more varieties of fish than he had ever seen at Ausonius' table!” (A footnote duly notes, “At Mosella 131 f., Ausonius pays tribute to the gudgeon, not a culinary delicacy.”) We encounter, too, Ausonius and the emperor Valentinian himself, in friendly rivalry (or so Ausonius says) stitching together wedding poems from lines of Virgil, Ausonius's half of the exchange surviving in his Cento nuptialis – “in its concluding section, a hilariously indecent example of the art of quoting out of context.” Yet the characteristic touches of humor here point to a most important theme of Matthews's work on this period and a lesson he offers to all historians: political history cannot be fully understood without an awareness of cultural and social history; both the “public” and “private” lives of a ruling class have to be kept in balance; otium matters as well as office.

While Jerome was busy inventing the Latin Christian Chronicle tradition, two huge political stories were breaking around him in Constantinople in 381. The first was less out of the ordinary. A new emperor was in town, letting loose all that scrambling for office, honour, and alliance, which, as John Matthews's work has done most to illuminate, marked out regime building, late Roman style. This particular scramble was a bit unusual since Theodosius had been in office since January 379, so this was hardly the first few hectic months of power broking. But the emperor had only entered his capital in November/December 380, so his regime was new there, the beating political heart of the eastern Mediterranean. It was also a regime which needed desperately to reinvent itself: because of the second of the stories. The Goths who had killed and defeated Theodosius's predecessor Valens at Hadrianople on 9 August 378 were still at large in the Balkans and entirely unsubdued. Theodosius came from a highly distinguished military family, and could boast his own decent military track record. He had been appointed to beat the Goths and given command of all the affected areas of the Balkans, contrary to normal late Roman political geography, to facilitate unified operations. But, unthinkably, he too had failed to beat the Goths. His army fell apart in the summer of 380, command of the war reverted to the western Emperor Gratian's generals, and Theodosius beat a hasty retreat to Constantinople, tail firmly between his legs.

Constantinople was established and embellished as a new Roman imperial city by the emperor Constantine I in the 320s and 330s. He provided “New Rome,” as he called it, with a solid defensive wall stretching from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, inside which he created a splendid and spacious new metropolis with an oval-shaped forum, an imperial palace, baths, and porticoed thoroughfares plus a local senate. His efforts to consolidate and promote his new city met with mixed success and over the succeeding decades its status and fortunes advanced only haltingly. Rather than become a new imperial home as Constantine had intended, Constantinople was treated by his successors more as a transit camp as they progressed back and forth from Gaul and Italy to the eastern limits of the empire in Mesopotamia and its northern limits on the Danube. Between the death of Constantine in 337 and the accession of Theodosius I in 379 emperors spent an average of less than one month per year in the city. Arguably the longest single stretch was from September 365 to May 366, the duration of the unsuccessful usurpation of Procopius, who was proclaimed emperor at Constantinople by capitalizing on his family connection with the city's founder and on local eagerness for a resident ruler. It is one of the many fourth-century episodes that John Matthews was the first to penetrate and elucidate effectively.

Both of these passages refer to the same person, the famous Syrian ascetic Simeon Stylites. The first, the opening sentence of Theodoret's biography of Simeon, marks him as a powerful and famous philosopher whose physical discipline defined his philosophical achievements. The second, Gibbon's description of Simeon and ascetics like him in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, places the saint in a category of men “who excite only the contempt and pity of a philosopher” and whose labors can be dismissed as perverse manifestations of misplaced social and religious priorities.

The work of John Matthews can be described in much the same terms that he uses to introduce the historian Ammianus Marcellinus in the second edition of his book The Roman Empire of Ammianus. Across a long and distinguished career, Matthews has framed late antiquity in classical terms, but with an eye to bringing out the distinctive contours of the new age. Like Ammianus, Matthews never pretends that the structures and routines of the high empire survive unchanged into late antiquity. Yet, again like his most famous subject, Matthews also recognizes the advantages of using classical tools to draw upon the great range and relative abundance of sources available to reconstruct the history of the later empire.

So the biographer Phocas ends his invocation to the muse Clio that precedes his hexameter Life of Virgil. A grammarian and teacher at Rome, Phocas likely dates to the late fourth or fifth century. His Vita, with a twenty-four-line preface in sapphics, a concluding lacuna, and textual problems in lines 75–83, is the only example we have of an ancient Virgilian biography written in verse.

Scholarship on Phocas has consistently traced his Vita back to earthlier sources than Clio. These are the Virgilian biographies of Suetonius and the fourth-century CE Aelius Donatus, who, the evidence is strong, essentially reproduced the now lost Suetonian text. (The abbreviation VSD conventionally designates Donatus's work, with its presumed origins in Suetonius.) While some identify Suetonius as Phocas's model or maintain an agnostic stance with regard to which of his precursors Phocas used, the majority position is that he relied upon his fellow late-antique biographer Donatus. Lending credence to this viewpoint is Phocas's treatment of how Virgil got caught up in the land confiscations that followed the Battle of Philippi (92–113).

One of the earliest surviving verdicts on the emperor Theodosius was pronounced in (probably) 382, by the recent bishop of Constantinople, Gregory of Nazianzus, some two-thirds of the way through his vast poetic apologia, De vita sua. Emperors were never to be judged casually, least of all when they were potentially within earshot – as Theodosius must have been, of a poem intended for the Christian elite of Constantinople. Yet Gregory begins in a resoundingly minor key: Theodosius was “not a bad man, in respect of faith in God” (DVS 1282), at least “as far as the simpler sorts [can] grasp” this (1283); and he was “exceedingly overcome by the Trinity” (1284). Defeat is not usually expected of rulers, but Theodosius's submission was acceptable as “the principle for all hearts which operate on a solid basis” (1285–6). This modest praise is then opened to question, as Gregory begins to weigh the emperor on a balance that is calibrated with elaborate (and surely deliberate) obscurity. Theodosius was not so great in fervor of spirit as to equate the present to what was past by using the opportunity to heal completely the misfortunes inflicted by opportunists past (1287–9). Or rather (and only gradually do we realize that Gregory has here played his favorite trick of rehearsing conventional wisdom in order to pick it apart), Theodosius was equal to the task in fervor, but not in – and here Gregory pauses, wondering aloud whether what the emperor lacked was “bravery” or “brazenness” (1290–1).

While on an embassy to the court of Attila in 449, Priscus of Panium reported that his party encountered an embassy to the Huns from the “western Romans.” These Romans had issues with the Huns that were completely independent of those that had brought Priscus to the lands north of the Danube, and it seems that he regarded them as members of a different state. He referred to his own people as “the eastern Romans,” and, as various sources preserve his words, writes of Rome as a geographical area ruled by multiple “kings.” Priscus's language is scarcely unusual for this era. In a very different context, Anicius Achilleus Glabrio Faustus, who received the great law code commissioned by Theodosius so that he could bring it to the senate at Rome, is described as a man who was honored in “both courts.” Theodosius himself said that he had conceived the project of the code as a gift to “his world,” which, by implication, only included the world ruled by Valentinian III once that emperor had agreed. A generation earlier, the general Arbogast had refused to accept that another Valentinian (Valentinian II) could dismiss him from office on the grounds that he was not responsible for his appointment, while nearly fifteen years before, the uncle of that same Valentinian had not presumed to appoint an emperor to replace his own uncle, Valens, as ruler of the east once Valens had fallen victim to the Goths at Adrianople.

THE NURSING SHE-WOLF AND THE GODDESS OF SUCKLING

In the infancy narrative of romulus and remus, the wolf does not prey on any of the protagonists. The true predator, in this legend, is the war god Mars, who raped a virgin in her sleep, impregnated her, and then took off. To be fair to this otherwise deadbeat father, he sends a couple of animal associates – the she-wolf and the woodpecker – to watch over his two sons. It is bloody business to rape a virgin, and bloodier still must have been Rhea Silvia's delivery of the twins. Blood flows at the twins' conception: A virgin, whether raped or willing, usually bleeds at the moment of deflowering. Blood flows at the twins' birth: Human birth is always bloody. Blood flows again, more unpredictably this time, when the city is founded: Romulus, it is known, slayed his own brother Remus and remained Rome's sole founder. Blood signifies violence (sometimes) and pain (usually) but also the historical necessity of Rome's birth through the hurt of the woman who facilitated the event and the death of our hero's antagonist – who also happens to be, alas, his only brother. Blood, however, is not the only bodily fluid that visibly flows in this story of early Rome: Without the milk of the she-wolf – milk meant for wolf cubs but eagerly sucked down by two ravenous human babies – Rome's founder surely would have succumbed.

RECYCLING THE SHE-WOLF AND THE DIPTYCH OF RAMBONA

Rome is a palimpsest, it is often said: as the shapes of old writing remain faintly visible under more recent layers of text on a manuscript repeatedly inscribed, traces of the city's past also may be read underneath its current appearance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it well in 1854: “It's a palimpsest Rome – a watering place written over the antique” (2: 165). The Eternal City destroys nothing, preferring to transform objects instead to suit current beliefs and customs: Temples become churches when a cross is placed at their heart, pagan monuments are turned Christian by the addition of holy people's statues, images of gods are allegorized into the likeness of saints, and so on. Neither the words telling of the she-wolf nor the images that picture the Roman beast have escaped this process of reconstruction and reinterpretation through verbal and visual representation. Rome and the she-wolf play at writing and rewriting their own past; Rome and the she-wolf constantly recycle themselves – like sheets of parchment too precious to discard after just one use. The city's layers, like the she-wolf's, are physical as well as literary, artistic, and – more generally – cultural; they embrace objects and texts as well as beliefs and practices.

“It is curious to note in Rome how many a modern superstition has its root in an ancient one,” noticed William Wetmore Story in 1863, “and how tenaciously customs still cling to their old localities.”

THE NEOCLASSICAL SHE-WOLVES OF VALADIER AND PINELLI

The roman she-wolf is a cultural monument. whether made of stone or words, metal or pigment, the picture of a wild beast nursing two human babies is an enduring one and continues to speak of the past – especially of a great Roman past – like few other objects. In the course of the nineteenth century, the she-wolf became an icon of the desire for Italian national unity: Her indigenous form united nature and culture, present and past, and two different babies under one protector. Naturally, then, images of the she-wolf appear in architectural structures of modern Rome. There are she-wolves, for example, on that most visible of its buildings, the Vittoriano of Piazza Venezia, the controversial monument to the first king of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, situated at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. An allegorical she-wolf accompanies the Tyrrhenian Sea in one of the Fountains of the Two Seas and, at the top of the monument, the bronze allegories of Liberty and Unity ride triumphal chariots on the hubs of which wheels are the heads of she-wolves. In a monument such as the Vittoriano, which repeatedly summons images of past incarnations of Rome – a monument that has been described as “a rhetorical device for manipulating public memory” (Atkinson and Cosgrove 31) – the she-wolf carries out her multiple political tasks.

THE SHE-WOLF AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY IN WORDSWORTH AND MACAULAY

Literally speaking, there is no history of the she-wolf. Ancient writers, historians included, did not usually pretend to believe in a flesh-and-blood beast stumbling across a set of whimpering baby boys and offering them suckle. Almost from the beginning, figurative interpretations were devised to account for the story of Romulus's serendipitous rescue from certain death by the intervention of a wild animal. “I have no intention either to affirm or refute,” wrote Livy; “Some say,” echoes Plutarch. Although the she-wolf has no history that today we would promptly recognize as such, this same animal has repeatedly compelled writers to examine the meanings of the discourse we call history. Livy, Dionysius, and Plutarch prefaced the she-wolf's tale with reminders of the unreliability of their sources. Propertius hoped to tell of Rome's origins by imitating the she-wolf's task. Through the memory of the she-wolf, Petrarch could nostalgically relate to the grandeur of Roman antiquity. For du Bellay, the she-wolf's death allegorized the historic fall of Rome itself, the fate of an entire nation epitomized by that of a single beast. The rhetorical figure of allegory, as well as the language of misogyny, entertains a close relationship with the discourse of history. This relationship may be adversarial, with history proving allegory obsolete, or it may be complementary: Allegorical figures, in this sense, continue to help us interpret the meaning of history.