Archaeology Odyssey

Arthur Darby Nock, “A Diis Electa: A Chapter in the Religious History of the Third Century,” Harvard Theological Review 23 (1930) pp. 251–274 (reprinted in Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972]).

On the development of Octavian’s propaganda of clemency and the role of the Vestals as agents of the emperor’s mercy, see my forthcoming book, Begging Pardon: Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press).

The severity of penalties the Vestals suffered has led one scholar to suggest that they actually lost full citizenship when inducted into the cult, taking on a unique status, not citizen, not alien, but fully sacred. See Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (London: Routledge, 1998).

Tim Cornell, “Some Observations on the ‘Crimen Incesti’,” in Le Délit Religieux dans la Cité Antique (Rome: Ècole Française de Rome, 1981), pp. 27–37.

Mary Beard, “The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins,” Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), pp. 12–27. See her reconsideration of the problem, “Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity,” in Women in Antiquity, New Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 166–177.

Russell T. Scott, “Excavations in the Area Sacra of Vesta, 1987–1989,” in Eius Virtutis Studiosi: Classical and Postclassical Studies in Memory of Frank Edward Brown, ed. Russell T. Scott and Ann Reynolds-Scott (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1993), pp. 161–181.

Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (London: John Murray, 1853), pp. 201–202.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems (London: Everyman’s Library, 1974).

John Philip Newman, The Thrones and Palaces of Babylon and Nineveh (New York: Harper and Bros., 1876), p. 360.

Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Notes on the Early History of Babylonia (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1854).