A posteriori

part in a play.

ROMAN À CLEF (French, "novel with a key"; also called livre à clef, "book with a key," pronounced roh MAHN ah CLAY): A narrative that represents actual historical characters and events in the form of fiction. Usually in this fictional setting, the author presents descriptions of real contemporary figures but uses fictitious names for them. However, the character's common traits and mannerisms would be so well-known that readers "in the know" would recognize them. Typically the "keys" would be published later if readers had trouble figuring out who was who.

Most literary historians think of the genre as a type of novel originating in seventeenth-century France in works like Madame de Scudéry's Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53) and Clélie (1656-60). However, examples actually exist from much earlier medieval poetry. For instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the character Harry Bailly appears to have been an actual innkeeper who lived in Southwark. Many of the other pilgrims also appear to have real-life correspondences; J. M. Manly long ago summarized the evidence in Some New Light on Chaucer (NY, Henry Holt and Company, 1926).

More recent examples of this genre include The New Atlantis (1709), published with a key to its characters; Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818), which contained hidden versions of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley; Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928); Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale; Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister; and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. In English, a roman à clef is often called a key-novel. In German, it is a Schlüsselroman.

ROMAN IMPERIAL PERIOD: After long centuries of representative democracy, within only a few generations, power in Roman government first collapsed into unofficial triumvirates and ultimately into dictatorships. Although Julius Caesar was a monarch in all but name, historians consider his nephew Octavian (alias Caesar Augustus) the first official Emperor, and his rise to power in 27 CE marks the end of the Roman Republican Period and the beginning of the Roman Imperial Period. Writers living during this enormous power shift include Cicero, Julius Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Livy, and Tibullus. Imperial writers who wrote primarily after the Republic collapsed include Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Longinus, Pliny the Elder, Jospehus, Lucan, Martial, Plutarch, Statius, Tacitus, Juvenal, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, and Apuleius. The Roman Empire itself collapsed in the fifth century CE. Vandals sacked the city of Rome in 455 CE, and in 476, another wave of barbarians dethroned the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus.

ROMAN REPUBLICAN PERIOD: The period of Roman history between 514 BCE up until 27 CE, when Rome was primarily and (at least officially) a Republic with elected senators. After Rome's traditional founding in 753 BCE, it fell under the power of Etruscan rulers who were viewed as tyrants. The Romans rebelled, and rose from a primitive monarchy to a complex system of indirect representation under Patrician families, where the richest individuals in select families were eligible for public office; they would represent either particular districts or a number of "clients" (the forerunners of modern special interest groups). By the first century BCE, Julius Caesar, Sulla, the Gracchi brothers, and other men increasingly upset this system--sometimes as part of oligarchic coalitions, sometimes as dictators (Latin imperatores). Although Julius Caesar was a monarch in all but name, historians consider his nephew Octavian (alias Caesar Augustus) the first official Emperor, and his rise to power in 27 CE marks the end of the Republican Period and the beginning of the Imperial Period. Examples of early Roman and Republican literature include Plautus, Ennius, and Terence. Writers that bridge the gap between the two periods include Cicero, Julius Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Livy, and Tibullus.

ROMAN STOICISM: The philosophy espoused by Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, "Roman Stoicism" actually originates with earlier Greek thinkers, a specific school of philosophers that met at the stoa in Athens. Stoicism asserts that the natural world consists of suffering, and that the appropriate response of a human being is to face this suffering with dignity and a lack of tears while doing one's duty, acknowledging that life and pleasure are transitory. The philosophy is often contrasted with Epicurean philosophy, which asserted that wisdom lay in a "carpe diem" existence in which humanity, faced with the transience of life, should strive to enjoy itself as much as possible by using reason and moderation to find pleasure. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism dealt with the same problem: the brevity of life. However, they reached opposite conclusions concerning the appropriate response to that problem. Roman characters like Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid are often analyzed in terms of how they embody (or fail to embody) the virtues of Stoicism.