Awards and Service
- SMU University Distinguished Professor, 2005-07
-
President-elect, Texas Classical Association
- 2005
HOPE award
- 2003 and 2004
Mortar Board Outstanding Faculty award
- 2001
Rotunda Outstanding Faculty Teaching award
Books and Essays
- Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, University of Michigan Press, 2006
- “A Time to Regender: The Transformation of Roman Time” in Time and Uncertainty, ed. Paul A. Harris, Brill, 2004; reprinted in Kronoscope, 2003
- “The Vestal Virgins of Rome” Archaeology Odyssey, 2001
- “The Clemency of Sulla: Roman clemency, eternity, and immortality,” Historia, 2000
Professor Melissa Dowling is interested in the ways in which Romans responded to the end of
democratic Republican government and the rise of Roman Imperial society. She finds that this
transition resulted in a new ideal of clemency to balance the cruel abuses of power in the Roman
empire. Her first book, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, explores the spread of clementia
as a popular virtue, ultimately influencing early Christian ideals of mercy.
Dowling’s current research examines the connection between ancient ideas of immortality and changing Roman conceptions of time and temporality. In particular, she is investigating the contributions of the Egyptian cult of Isis to Roman ideas of the afterlife, an important predecessor to Christian beliefs in heaven and hell. She has presented her conclusions on several occasions and they have also been published as articles.
She is writing a book on the subject, The End of Time: Eternity and Immortality in Roman Culture, an interdisciplinary study of these intellectual and cultural developments in the Roman empire between the first century B.C. and the third century A.D.
She examines the politicization of time and the calendar, the increasingly sophisticated political manipulation of time in the ancient world, and the creation of a concept of time as a force or deity. Her study begins with Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar, and the creation of a political ideology of time at the end of the Roman Republic.
This sarcophagus of the third century AD illustrates the novel combination of male and female personifications of the four seasons. Gender confusion accompanies ancient changes in ideas of seasons, time and eternity.
The Farnese Atlas, a marble statue of Atlas holding up the heavens, here represented as a celestial globe decorated with the constellations, is an excellent example of Graeco-Roman fascination with astronomy and astrology and the measurement of time. In the Roman world, precise measurements of the time of a person's birth were required in order to determine an auspicious name, his probable longevity and accomplishments, and the divine stars that guided his destiny.
Dowling concludes her study by analyzing the transformation of Egyptian and Roman ideals of eternal time that resulted in the creation of apocalyptic ideas of time in early Christian thought. |
