This volume presents the collected papers of Miriam T. Griffin, an eminent scholar of Roman history and ancient thought whose work has played a central role in forging links between scholarship on the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies. Spanning a period of over forty years and a distinguished career as Fellow of Somerville College at Oxford, these papers include both published works, many of them now difficult to find in their original printings, and previously unpublished lectures. The collection covers a range of topics in Roman Republican and Imperial history, Roman historiography, and the interplay of Latin philosophy and Roman politics, as well as featuring a host of key Latin authors, most notably Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus. The last of these categories, the interplay of philosophy and politics in Rome, is also the most prominent in the volume: though deeply interested in ancient philosophy, and especially Stoicism, Miriam Griffin writes primarily as a historian concerned with how Roman thinking was related to political circumstances and actions. Many of the essays have opened up new areas of discussion and formed the basis of later scholarship dealing with history and philosophy, and although some of them are quite general, serving as useful introductions to the subject area, others are more detailed and technical, inviting discussion and controversy. The style throughout is consistently dynamic and engaging, resulting in a fascinating and formidable collection from a scholar unrivalled as an expert in both the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies, and a true pioneer in the bridging of these two spheres.

The political transformation that took place at the end of the Roman Republic was a particularly rich area for analysis by the era's historians. Major narrators chronicled the crisis that saw the end of the Roman Republic and the changes that gave birth to a new political system. These writers drew significantly on the Roman idea of virtus as a way of interpreting and understanding their past. Tracing how virtus informed Roman thought over time, Catalina Balmaceda explores the concept and its manifestations in the narratives of four successive Latin historians who span the late Republic and early Principate: Sallust, Livy, Velleius, and Tacitus. Balmaceda demonstrates that virtus in these historical narratives served as a form of self-definition that fostered and propagated a new model of the ideal Roman more fitting to imperial times. As a crucial moral and political concept, virtus worked as a key idea in the complex system of Roman sociocultural values and norms that underpinned Roman attitudes about both present and past. This book offers a reappraisal of the historians as promoters of change and continuity in the political culture of both the Republic and the Empire.

El presente trabajo surge a partir de la preocupacion por una situacion que se hace cada vez mas frecuente en la universidad y que tiene que ver con el alto porcentaje de desercion de ingresantes y numero significativo de alumnos con bajo rendimiento academico. En este escenario, y a partir de diferentes categorias de estudio, analizamos como esta situacion de "fracaso," "abandono," "discontinuidad," "ruptura" de los estudiantes, en terminos de trayectorias educativas, trascienden las practicas individuales y se inscriben y explican involucrando toda la trama social. Consideramos que tales recorridos, visualizados como dificultades en los procesos de aprendizaje, tienen su base en formas de construccion del conocimiento, vivenciados en los niveles de escolaridad previos (primaria y fundamentalmente nivel medio) y que se acentuan en el periodo de ingreso a la universidad."