front cover of Saeculum
Saeculum
Defining Historical Eras in Ancient Roman Thought
Paul Hay
University of Texas Press, 2023

How the notion of unique eras influenced the Roman view of time and the narration of history from various perspectives.

The Victorian Era. The Age of Enlightenment. The post-9/11 years. We are accustomed to demarcating history, fencing off one period from the next. But societies have not always operated in this way. Paul Hay returns to Rome in the first century BCE to glimpse the beginnings of periodization as it is still commonly practiced, exploring how the ancient Romans developed a novel sense of time and used it to construct their views of the past and of the possibilities of the future.

It was the Roman general Sulla who first sought to portray himself as the inaugurator of a new age of prosperity, and through him Romans adopted the Etruscan term saeculum to refer to a unique era of history. Romans went on to deepen their investment in periodization by linking notions of time to moments of catastrophe, allowing them to conceptualize their own epoch and its conclusion, as in the literature of Vergil and Horace. Periodization further introduced the idea of specific agents of change into Roman thought—agents that were foundational to narratives of progress and decline. An eye-opening account, Saeculum describes nothing less than an intellectual and cognitive revolution, that fundamentally reorganized the meanings of history and time.

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The Sasanian Empire at War
Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651
Michael J. Decker
Westholme Publishing, 2021

A comprehensive military history of one of the most important empires of Late Antiquity

The Sasanian Empire at War: Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651 is the first comprehensive study in English examining war and society in one of the most important empires in world history: the Persian Empire of 224-651 AD, ruled by the Sasanian clan. At its height the Sasanians governed lands from the Indus River in the east to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Adversaries of Rome, they also faced grave challenges from nomadic powers from Central Asia, notably the Huns and Turks. The Sasanians were able to maintain their empire for hundreds of years through nearly constant warfare, but when their expansion was checked in the north by the Byzantines at Constantinople in 626, and with the Muslim invasions to their south and west beginning in the 630s, the empire could no longer be sustained, and it finally collapsed.

In this book, Michael J. Decker examines Sasanian warfare, including military capabilities, major confrontations, organization and weapons of the Persian army. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the conflicts that marked this vital period in the history of Eurasia, The Sasanian Empire at War challenges long cherished notions of the inferiority of Sasanian military capabilities and renders a new image of a sophisticated, confident culture astride the heart of Eurasia at the end of the ancient world and birth of the Silk Road. Persian arms were among the many features of their culture that drew widespread admiration and was one of the keys to the survival of Iranian culture beyond the Arab Conquest and into the present day.

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Satire and the Threat of Speech
Horace's Satires, Book 1
Catherine M. Schlegel
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.
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Saturnalia, Volume I
Books 1–2
Macrobius
Harvard University Press, 2011

An antiquarian’s festival.

The Saturnalia, Macrobius’ encyclopedic celebration of Roman culture written in the early fifth century AD, has been prized since the Renaissance as a treasure trove of otherwise unattested lore. Cast in the form of a dialogue, the Saturnalia treats subjects as diverse as the divinity of the Sun and the quirks of human digestion while showcasing Virgil as the master of all human knowledge from diction and rhetoric to philosophy and religion.

The new Latin text is based on a refined understanding of the medieval tradition and improves on Willis’ standard edition in nearly three hundred places. The accompanying translation—only the second in English and the only one now in print—offers a clear and sprightly rendition of Macrobius’ ornate Latin and is supplemented by ample annotation. A full introduction places the work in its cultural context and analyzes its construction, while indexes of names, ancient works cited in both text and notes, and topics make the work more readily accessible than ever before.

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Saturnalia, Volume II
Books 3–5
Macrobius
Harvard University Press, 2011

An antiquarian’s festival.

The Saturnalia, Macrobius’ encyclopedic celebration of Roman culture written in the early fifth century AD, has been prized since the Renaissance as a treasure trove of otherwise unattested lore. Cast in the form of a dialogue, the Saturnalia treats subjects as diverse as the divinity of the Sun and the quirks of human digestion while showcasing Virgil as the master of all human knowledge from diction and rhetoric to philosophy and religion.

The new Latin text is based on a refined understanding of the medieval tradition and improves on Willis’ standard edition in nearly three hundred places. The accompanying translation—only the second in English and the only one now in print—offers a clear and sprightly rendition of Macrobius’ ornate Latin and is supplemented by ample annotation. A full introduction places the work in its cultural context and analyzes its construction, while indexes of names, ancient works cited in both text and notes, and topics make the work more readily accessible than ever before.

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Saturnalia, Volume III
Books 6–7
Macrobius
Harvard University Press, 2011

An antiquarian’s festival.

The Saturnalia, Macrobius’ encyclopedic celebration of Roman culture written in the early fifth century AD, has been prized since the Renaissance as a treasure trove of otherwise unattested lore. Cast in the form of a dialogue, the Saturnalia treats subjects as diverse as the divinity of the Sun and the quirks of human digestion while showcasing Virgil as the master of all human knowledge from diction and rhetoric to philosophy and religion.

The new Latin text is based on a refined understanding of the medieval tradition and improves on Willis’ standard edition in nearly three hundred places. The accompanying translation—only the second in English and the only one now in print—offers a clear and sprightly rendition of Macrobius’ ornate Latin and is supplemented by ample annotation. A full introduction places the work in its cultural context and analyzes its construction, while indexes of names, ancient works cited in both text and notes, and topics make the work more readily accessible than ever before.

[more]

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Satyr Square
A Year, a Life in Rome
Leonard Barkan
Northwestern University Press, 2008

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue, this loving reflection is a poignant, funny narrative about an American professor spending a year in Rome. A scarred veteran of academic culture wars retreating to a cradle of culture, Barkan is at first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission. But soon he is appointed unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becomes virtually bilingual, and falls in love. As the year progresses, he finds his voice as a writer, loses his lover, and definitively returns to America with heart, mind, and body. His memoir is the celebration of a life lived in the uncanny spaces where art and real people intersect.

Barkan’s reminiscence is not just about the Renaissance and ancient statuary, or Shakespeare and Mozart, Charles Bukowski and Paul de Man, eggplant antipasto and Brunello di Montalcino, foot fetishism and sulfur baths. At the heart of the narrative—beneath that beguiling surface of irony, humor, and misdirection—is a man of genuine ardor, struggling with what it means to be a homosexual and a Jew, trying to rediscover or reinvent his own intellectual passions. Hilarious, erudite, and lusciously rendered, Satyr Square gives us the whole of a life made up from fragments of Italy, art, food, and longing.

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Satyricon. Apocolocyntosis
Petronius and Seneca
Harvard University Press, 2020

Two rollicking Roman satires.

The Satyrica (Satyricon liber), a comic-picaresque fiction in prose and verse traditionally attributed to the Neronian Petronius (d. AD 66) but possibly of Flavian or Trajanic date, survives only as fragments of a much larger whole. It takes the form of a first-person narrative by the endearing ne’er-do-well Encolpius, a brilliant storyteller, parodist, and mimic who recalls episodes from his past life as a wandering bohemian, living by his wits on the margins of society in Greek southern Italy and encountering a vividly realized array of characters from the early imperial demimonde, including the wealthy freedman Trimalchio, one of the most unforgettable characters in all of Latin literature.

Paired with the Satyrica, and likewise in prose and verse, is the Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification), a short satirical pamphlet lampooning the death, apotheosis, and attempt to enter heaven of the emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). If the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), better known for his austere Stoic moralism, its sarcastic wit and rollicking humor were no doubt inspired by bitterness over his exile at Claudius’ hands in 41–49.

For this Loeb edition the Latin texts have been freshly edited and translated, with ample introductions and explanatory notes.

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The Scent of Ancient Magic
Britta K. Ager
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Magic was a fundamental part of the Greco-Roman world. Curses, erotic spells, healing charms, divination, and other supernatural methods of trying to change the universe were everyday methods of coping with the difficulties of life in antiquity. While ancient magic is most often studied through texts like surviving Greco-Egyptian spellbooks and artifacts like lead curse tablets, for a Greek or Roman magician a ritual was a rich sensual experience full of unusual tastes, smells, textures, and sounds, bright colors, and sensations like fasting and sleeplessness. Greco-Roman magical rituals were particularly dominated by the sense of smell, both fragrant smells and foul odors. Ritual practitioners surrounded themselves with clouds of fragrant incense and perfume to create a sweet and inviting atmosphere for contact with the divine and to alter their own perceptions; they also used odors as an instrumental weapon to attack enemies and command the gods. Elsewhere, odiferous herbs were used equally as medical cures and magical ingredients. In literature, scent and magic became intertwined as metaphors, with fragrant spells representing the dangers of sensual perfumes and conversely, smells acting as a visceral way of envisioning the mysterious action of magic.

The Scent of Ancient Magic explores the complex interconnection of scent and magic in the Greco-Roman world between 800 BCE and CE 600, drawing on ancient literature and the modern study of the senses to examine the sensory depth and richness of ancient magic. Author Britta K. Ager looks at how ancient magicians used scents as part of their spells, to put themselves in the right mindset for an encounter with a god or to attack their enemies through scent. Ager also examines the magicians who appear in ancient fiction, like Medea and Circe, and the more metaphorical ways in which their spells are confused with perfumes and herbs. This book brings together recent scholarship on ancient magic from classical studies and on scent from the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies in order to examine how practicing ancient magicians used scents for ritual purposes, how scent and magic were conceptually related in ancient literature and culture, and how the assumption that strong scents convey powerful effects of various sorts was also found in related areas like ancient medical practices and normative religious ritual.
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Secret History
Procopius
University of Michigan Press, 1961
Written with passion and personal malice, the Secret History of Procopius is a scathing indictment of the emperor Justinian and his sixth-century Byzantine court. Never has there been a more calculated attempt to ruin an entire reign in the eyes of posterity. Procopius writes of:
. . . How the Great General Belisarius was hoodwinked by his wife, whose lover became a monk.
. . . How Theodora, most depraved of all empresses, won Justinian's love.
. . . How she saved five hundred harlots from a life of sin, made off with her own natural son, and other curious incidents of her passion.
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Select Letters
Jerome
Harvard University Press

Correspondence of a Church Father.

Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345–420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He traveled widely in Gaul and in Asia Minor; and turned in the years 373–379 to hermetic life in Syria. Ordained presbyter at Antioch in 379 he went to Constantinople, met Gregory of Nazianzus and advanced greatly in scholarship. He was called to Rome in 382 to help Pope Damasus, at whose suggestion he began his revision of the Old Latin translation of the Bible (which came to form the core of the Vulgate version). Meanwhile he taught scripture and Hebrew and monastic living to Roman women. Wrongly suspected of luxurious habits, he left Rome (now under Pope Siricius) in 385, toured Palestine, visited Egypt, and then settled in Bethlehem, presiding over a monastery and (with help) translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. About 394 he met Augustine. He died on 30 September 420.

Jerome’s letters constitute one of the most notable collections in Latin literature. They are an essential source for our knowledge of Christian life in the fourth–fifth centuries; they also provide insight into one of the most striking and complex personalities of the time. Seven of the eighteen letters in this selection deal with a primary interest of Jerome’s: the morals and proper role of women. The most famous letter here fervently extols virginity.

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Select Papyri, Volume I
Private Documents
A. S. Hunt
Harvard University Press

Personal records from the sands of Egypt.

This is the first of two volumes giving a selection of Greek papyri relating to private and public business. They cover a period from before 300 BC to the eighth century AD. Most were found in rubbish heaps or remains of ancient houses or in tombs in Egypt. From such papyri we get much information about administration and social and economic conditions in Egypt, and about native Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine law, as well as glimpses of ordinary life.

This volume contains: Agreements, 71 examples; these concern marriage, divorce, adoption, apprenticeship, sales, leases, employment of laborers. Receipts, 10. Wills, 6. Deed of disownment. Personal letters from men and women, young and old, 82. Memoranda, 2. Invitations, 5. Orders for payment, 2. Agenda, 2. Accounts and inventories, 12. Questions of oracles, 3. Christian prayers, 2. A Gnostic charm. Horoscopes, 2.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry.

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Select Papyri, Volume II
Public Documents
A. S. Hunt
Harvard University Press

Official records from the sands of Egypt.

This volume presents papyri relating to public business of various kinds in Egypt from the middle of the 3rd century BC to AD 710, thus including affairs in that country first when it was ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic kings, secondly when it was a Roman province. The earliest examples date from the reign of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the latest from the government by the Arabs after their conquest of Egypt in AD 639–641.

The papyri chosen were all sent by persons in office (from king, Roman emperor, or governor downwards) or addressed to them or sent for their information: Codes and Regulations, 6 examples. Edicts and Orders, 26. Public Announcements, 6. Reports of Meetings, 3. Official Acts and Inquiries, 5. Judicial Business, 18. Petitions and Applications, 44. Declarations to Officials, 30. Appointments and Nominations, 7. Tenders and Contracts, 19. Receipts, 26. Orders for Payment, 6. Accounts and Registers or Lists, 12. Letters, 16. Notes on the systems of dating and of money in Egypt as well as a glossary of technical terms are provided.

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes a volume of poetry and one of private documents.

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Select Papyri, Volume III
Poetry
Denys L. Page
Harvard University Press

Scraps of verse from the sands of Egypt.

The papyri found in Egypt have yielded fragments large and small of ancient literary authors. We include in this volume from the 5th–4th centuries BC fragments of two tragedies (one a satyr play) by Aeschylus; of five by Sophocles; of ten by Euripides; of one by Ion; and of some plays not assignable. From Old Comedy, 5th century, we have fragments of one play each of Epicharmus, Cratinus, Pherecrates, Eupolis, and Plato; some fragments of Aristophanes; and unassignable fragments. From Middle Comedy and New Comedy, 4th and 3rd centuries, are twenty-six items including at least three by Menander and one each by Philemon, Timocles, and Straton. From mimes there are a fragment of Sophron and six unassignable, including 112 lines of clownish doings by the Indian Ocean. The lyric poetry, 7th century BC–4th AD, twenty-one mostly anonymous items, includes some of Sappho, Corinna, Pindar, Philicus, fragments of dithyrambic poetry, hymns, songs and so on. There are seventeen examples of elegiac and iambic, 7th century BC–3rd AD, including some Mimnermus, Amyntas, Leonidas, Antipater of Sidon, and Posidippus. The thirty items of hexameter poetry, 5th century BC–6th AD are mostly unassignable but include Panyasis, Erinna (a lovely fragment of her “Distaff”), Euphorion, Pancrates, and Dionysius (the “Bassarica”).

The three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of Select Papyri also includes volumes of public and private documents.

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Selected Epigrams
Martial, Translated with notes by Susan McLean, Introduction by Marc Kleijwegt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. His pithy little poems amuse, but also offer vivid insight into the world of patrons and clients, doctors and lawyers, prostitutes, slaves, and social climbers in ancient Rome. The selections cover nearly a third of Martial's 1,500 or so epigrams, augmented by an introduction by historian Marc Kleijwegt and informative notes on literary allusion and wordplay by translator Susan McLean.

Finalist, Literary Translation Award, PEN Center USA  
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Selected Orations, Volume I
Libanius
Harvard University Press

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

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Selected Orations, Volume II
Libanius
Harvard University Press

Pagans’ advocate.

Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.

As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.

Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.

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Seneca
Fifty Letters of a Roman Stoic
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A selection of Seneca’s most significant letters that illuminate his philosophical and personal life.
 
“There is only one course of action that can make you happy. . . . rejoice in what is yours. What is it that is yours? Yourself; the best part of you.” 
 
In the year 62, citing health issues, the Roman philosopher Seneca withdrew from public service and devoted his time to writing. His letters from this period offer a window onto his experience as a landowner, a traveler, and a man coping with the onset of old age. They share his ideas on everything from the treatment of enslaved people to the perils of seafaring, and they provide lucid explanations for many key points of Stoic philosophy.
 
This selection of fifty letters brings out the essentials of Seneca’s thought, with much that speaks directly to the modern reader. Above all, they explore the inner life of the individual who proceeds through philosophical inquiry from a state of emotional turmoil to true friendship, self-determination, and personal excellence. 
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Settling in a Changing World
Villa Development in the Northern Provinces of the Roman Empire
Diederick Habermehl
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
Offering a broad analysis of the complex developments in rural habitation of the northern provinces of the Roman Empire, Settling in a Changing World reconstructs the colonial villa from social and economic perspectives to create a broad geographical and chronological framework that sheds light on both local and regional patterns. Considering data from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France, Diederick Habermehl analyzes, visualizes, and reconstructs the developments in settlement space and architecture. Applying theoretical concepts from both archaeology and cultural studies, this groundbreaking book ultimately offers a new perspective on the Roman villa as an architectural and cultural phenomenon. 
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Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy
The Twilight of the Ancient World
Paul A. Cantor
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community.

Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds.
More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare’s plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare’s works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.
 
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Shakespeare's Rome
Republic and Empire
Paul A. Cantor
University of Chicago Press, 2017
For more than forty years, Paul Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Rome has been a foundational work in the field of politics and literature. While many critics assumed that the Roman plays do not reflect any special knowledge of Rome, Cantor was one of the first to argue that they are grounded in a profound understanding of the Roman regime and its changes over time. Taking Shakespeare seriously as a political thinker, Cantor suggests that his Roman plays can be profitably studied in the context of the classical republican tradition in political philosophy.
           
In Shakespeare’s Rome, Cantor examines the political settings of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, with references as well to Julius Caesar. Cantor shows that Shakespeare presents a convincing portrait of Rome in different eras of its history, contrasting the austere republic of Coriolanus, with its narrow horizons and martial virtues, and the cosmopolitan empire of Antony and Cleopatra, with its “immortal longings” and sophistication bordering on decadence.
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Shaping Roman Landscape
Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy
Mantha Zarmakoupi
J. Paul Getty Trust, The
A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods.
 
Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends.
 
This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual space, contributed to the creation of novel languages of art and architecture. Drawing on a diverse body of archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence, this study applies an ecocritical lens that moves beyond the limits of traditional iconography. Chapters consider, for example, how garden designs and paintings appropriated the cultures and ecosystems brought under Roman control and the ways miniature landscape paintings chronicled the transformation of the Italian shoreline with colonnaded villas, pointing to the changing relationship of humans with nature. Making a timely and original contribution to current discourses on ecology and art and architectural history, Shaping Roman Landscape reveals how Roman ideas of landscape, and the decorative strategies at imperial domus and villa complexes that gave these ideas shape, were richly embedded with meanings of nature, culture, and labor.
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Shaping the Industrial Century
The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries
Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2009

The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century begun in Inventing the Electronic Century.

Alfred Chandler argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed.

By the end of World War II, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries were transformed by the commercializing of new learning, the petrochemical and the antibiotic revolutions. But by the 1970s, chemical science was no longer providing the new learning necessary to commercialize more products, although new directions flourished in the pharmaceutical industries. In the 1980s, major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Schering Plough, commercialized the first biotechnology products, and as the twenty-first century began, the infrastructure of this biotechnology revolution was comparable to that of the second industrial revolution just before World War I and the information revolution of the 1960s. Shaping the Industrial Century is a major contribution to our understanding of the most dynamic industries of the modern era.

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Shifting Ethnic Identities in Spain and Gaul, 500-700
From Romans to Goths and Franks
Erica Buchberger
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Traditional scholarship on post-Roman western culture has tended to examine the ethnic identities of Goths, Franks, and similar groups while neglecting the Romans themselves, in part because modern scholars have viewed the concept of being Roman as one denoting primarily a cultural or legal affiliation. As this book demonstrates, however, early medieval 'Romanness' also encompassed a sense of belonging to an ethnic group, which allowed Romans in Iberia and Gaul to adopt Gothic or Frankish identities in a more nuanced manner than has been previously acknowledged in the literature.
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Silence in Catullus
Benjamin Eldon Stevens
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Both passionate and artful, learned and bawdy, Catullus is one of the best-known and critically significant poets from classical antiquity. An intriguing aspect of his poetry that has been neglected by scholars is his interest in silence, from the pauses that shape everyday conversation to linguistic taboos and cultural suppressions and the absolute silence of death.
            In Silence in Catullus, Benjamin Eldon Stevens offers fresh readings of this Roman poet's most important works, focusing on his purposeful evocations of silence. This deep and varied "poetics of silence" takes on many forms in Catullus's poetic corpus: underscoring the lyricism of his poetry; highlighting themes of desire, immortality-in-culture, and decay; accenting its structures and rhythms; and, Stevens suggests, even articulating underlying philosophies. Combining classical philological methods, contemporary approaches to silence in modern literature, and the most recent Catullan scholarship, this imaginative examination of Catullus offers a new interpretation of one of the ancient world's most influential and inimitable voices.
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Silenced Voices
The Poetics of Speech in Ovid
Bartolo A. Natoli
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Silenced Voices is a pointed examination of the loss of speech, exile from community, and memory throughout the literary corpus of the Roman poet Ovid. In his book-length poem Metamorphoses, characters are transformed in ways that include losing their power of human speech. In Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, poems written after Ovid's exile from Rome in 8 ce, he represents himself as also having been transformed, losing his voice.

Bartolo A. Natoli provides a unique cross-reading of these works. He examines how the motifs and ideas articulated in the Metamorphoses provide the template for the poet's representation of his own exile. Ovid depicts his transformation with an eye toward memory, reformulating how his exile would be perceived by his audience. His exilic poems are an attempt to recover the voice he lost and to reconnect with the community of Rome.
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Silvae
StatiusEdited and Translated by D. R. Shackleton BaileyWith Corrections by Christopher A. Parrott
Harvard University Press, 2015

Stately verse.

Statius’ Silvae, thirty-two occasional poems, were written probably between 89 and 96 AD. Here the poet congratulates friends, consoles mourners, offers thanks, admires a monument or artistic object, and describes a memorable scene. The verse is light in touch, with a distinct pictorial quality. Statius gives us in these impromptu poems clear images of Domitian’s Rome.

Statius was raised in the Greek cultural milieu of the Bay of Naples, and his Greek literary education lends a sophisticated veneer to his ornamental verse. The role of the emperor and the imperial circle in determining taste is also readily apparent: the figure of the emperor Domitian permeates these poems.

D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s edition of the Silvae, which replaced the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition with translation by J. H. Mozley, is now reissued with corrections by Christopher A. Parrott.

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Silvae
Statius
Harvard University Press, 2003

Statius' Silvae, thirty-two occasional poems, were written probably between 89 and 96 CE Here the poet congratulates friends, consoles mourners, offers thanks, admires a monument or artistic object, describes a memorable scene. The verse is light in touch, with a distinct picture quality. Statius gives us in these impromptu poems clear images of Domitian's Rome.

Statius was raised in the Greek cultural milieu of the Bay of Naples, and his Greek literary education lends a sophisticated veneer to his ornamental verse. The role of the emperor and the imperial circle in determining taste is another readily apparent influence: the figure of the emperor Domitian permeates these poems. D. R. Shackleton Bailey's new edition of the Silvae, a freshly edited Latin text facing a graceful translation, replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition with translation by J. H. Mozley. Kathleen M. Coleman contributed an essay on recent scholarship on the Silvae.

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The Slave in Greece and Rome
Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat, translated by Marion Leopold
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat break new ground in this comparative history of slavery in Greece and Rome. Focusing on slaves’ economic role in society, their crucial contributions to Greek and Roman culture, and their daily and family lives, the authors examine the different ways in which slavery evolved in the two cultures. Accessible to both scholars and students, this book provides a detailed overview of the ancient evidence and the modern debates surrounding the vast and largely invisible populations of enslaved peoples in the classical world.

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Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity
Edited by Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Slavery and sexuality in the ancient world are well researched on their own, yet rarely have they been examined together. This volume is the first to explore the range of roles that sex played in the lives of enslaved people in antiquity beyond prostitution, bringing together scholars of both Greece and Rome to consider important and complex issues. Chapters address a wealth of art, literature, and drama to analyze a wide range of issues, including gendered power dynamics, sexual violence in slave revolts, same-sex relations between free and enslaved people, and the agency of assault victims.
 
Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity reveals the often hidden and contradictory attitudes concerning the sexual identities and expression of enslaved people. These individuals were typically objectified by both social convention and legal description but were also recognized as human subjects, with subjectivity and sexual desires of their own. The contributors provoke valuable and fascinating questions that not only recognize the trauma and struggles of enslaved people but also point to the apparent inconsistencies in the mindsets of the enslavers. The resulting volume expands our understanding of both sexuality and slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, as separate subjects and as they impacted each other.
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The Sleep of Reason
Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome
Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics.

The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love, and from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, the contributors demonstrate the complexity and diversity of classical sexuality. They also show that the ethics of eros, in both Greece and Rome, shared a number of commonalities: a focus not only on self-mastery, but also on reciprocity; a concern among men not just for penetration and display of their power, but also for being gentle and kind, and for being loved for themselves; and that women and even younger men felt not only gratitude and acceptance, but also joy and sexual desire.

Contributors:
* Eva Cantarella
* Kenneth Dover
* Chris Faraone
* Simon Goldhill
* Stephen Halliwell
* David M. Halperin
* J. Samuel Houser
* Maarit Kaimio
* David Konstan
* David Leitao
* Martha C. Nussbaum
* A. W. Price
* Juha Sihvola
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Social Dynamics in the Northwest Frontiers of the Late Roman Empire
Beyond Transformation or Decline
Nico Roymans
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This volume explores the final phase of the West Roman Empire, particularly the changing interactions between the imperial authority and external 'barbarian' groups in the northwest frontiers of the empire during the fourth and fifth centuries. The contributions present valuable overviews of recent archaeological research combined with innovative theoretical discussions. Key topics include the movement of precious metals, trajectories of imperial power, the archaeology of migration, and material culture in relation to debates about ethnicity.
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Soldiers and Silver
Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest
By Michael J. Taylor
University of Texas Press, 2020
By the middle of the second century BCE, after nearly one hundred years of warfare, Rome had exerted its control over the entire Mediterranean world, forcing the other great powers of the region—Carthage, Macedonia, Egypt, and the Seleucid empire—to submit militarily and financially. But how, despite its relative poverty and its frequent numerical disadvantage in decisive battles, did Rome prevail? Michael J. Taylor explains this surprising outcome by examining the role that manpower and finances played, providing a comparative study that quantifies the military mobilizations and tax revenues for all five powers. Though Rome was the poorest state, it enjoyed the largest military mobilization, drawing from a pool of citizens, colonists, and allies, while its wealthiest adversaries failed to translate revenues into large or successful armies. Taylor concludes that state-level extraction strategies were decisive in the warfare of the period, as states with high conscription and low taxation raised larger, more successful armies than those that primarily sought to maximize taxation. Comprehensive and detailed, Soldiers and Silver offers a new and sophisticated perspective on the political dynamics and economies of these ancient Mediterranean empires.
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Soldiers, Cities, and Civilians in Roman Syria
Nigel Pollard
University of Michigan Press, 2000
When one mentions "empire," one place probably comes to mind: Rome. The Romans conquered an empire that covered almost the complete extent of their known world. With a territory that large, there was, of course, a huge cultural diversity between the different corners of the empire. How could the central authority in Rome bring together all the different cultures, religions and customs under one administrative umbrella? Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria explores some of the interactions between the imperial authority and the subjected peoples in the territory of Syria. It looks at how the imperial power controlled its subjects, how the agents of the imperial power (administrators, soldiers, etc.) interacted with those subjects, and what impact the imperial power had on the culture of ruled territories. The Roman empire had few civilian administrators, so soldiers were the representatives of imperial government to be encountered by many provincial civilians. Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria employs the evidence of Roman texts and documents and modern archaeological excavation as well as "alternative" sources, such as the literature of the subject peoples and informal texts such as graffiti, to examine the relationship between soldiers and civilians in the important frontier province of Syria.
Nigel Pollard is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.
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The Sons of Remus
Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain
Andrew C. Johnston
Harvard University Press, 2017

Histories of ancient Rome have long emphasized the ways in which the empire assimilated the societies it conquered, bringing civilization to the supposed barbarians. Yet interpretations of this “Romanization” of Western Europe tend to erase local identities and traditions from the historical picture, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the diverse cultures that flourished in the provinces far from Rome.

The Sons of Remus recaptures the experiences, memories, and discourses of the societies that made up the variegated patchwork fabric of the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Focusing on Gaul and Spain, Andrew Johnston explores how the inhabitants of these provinces, though they willingly adopted certain Roman customs and recognized imperial authority, never became exclusively Roman. Their self-representations in literature, inscriptions, and visual art reflect identities rooted in a sense of belonging to indigenous communities. Provincials performed shifting roles for different audiences, rehearsing traditions at home while subverting Roman stereotypes of druids and rustics abroad.

Deriving keen insights from ancient sources—travelers’ records, myths and hero cults, timekeeping systems, genealogies, monuments—Johnston shows how the communities of Gaul and Spain balanced their local identities with their status as Roman subjects, as they preserved a cultural memory of their pre-Roman past and wove their own narratives into Roman mythology. The Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Romulus, the legendary founder of the eternal city; from the other brother, the provincials of the west received a complicated inheritance, which shaped the history of the sons of Remus.

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Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire
Claude Nicolet
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Drawing on unexpected texts both ancient and modern, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire offers startling insights into the character of Rome and its princeps-turned-emperor, Augustus. Claude Nicolet documents Roman expansion at the start of the early imperial period and explores how Romans came to map the world they knew and conquered. The roles of both the agrimensores, who worked in the state’s interest observing and recording new territories, and M. Vipsanius Agrippa, the sometime son-in-law of Emperor Augustus, are considered. Nicolet also presents the integral relations between territorial expansion and political expansion, as well as between propaganda cultivated in the national interest and propaganda designed to secure the status of the princeps as primus inter pares, first among equals.
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Spartacus
Aldo Schiavone
Harvard University Press, 2013

Spartacus (109?–71 BCE), the slave who rebelled against Rome, has been a source of endless fascination: the subject of myth-making in his own time, and of movie-making in ours. Hard facts about the man have always yielded to romanticized tales and mystifications. In this riveting, compact account, Aldo Schiavone rescues Spartacus from the murky regions of legend and brings him squarely into the arena of serious history.

Schiavone transports us to Italy in the first century BCE, where the pervasive institution of slavery dominates all aspects of Roman life. In this historic landscape, carefully reconstructed by the author, we encounter Spartacus, who is enslaved after deserting from the Roman army to avoid fighting against his native Thrace. Imprisoned in Capua and trained as a gladiator, he leads an uprising that will shake the empire to its foundations.

While the grandeur of the Spartacus story has always been apparent, its political significance has been less clear. What were his ambitions? Often depicted as the leader of a class rebellion that was fierce in intent but ragtag in makeup and organization, Spartacus emerges here in a very different light: the commander of an army whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system. Surprising, persuasive, and highly original, Spartacus challenges the lore and illuminates the reality of a figure whose achievements, and whose ultimate defeat, are more extraordinary and moving than the fictions we make from them.

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Spatial Patterns in Landscape Archaeology
A GIS Procedure to Study Settlement Organization in Early Roman Colonial Territories
Anita Casarotto
Leiden University Press, 2018
This 43rd volume of the ASLU series presents a useful GIS procedure to study settlement patterns in landscape archaeology. In several Mediterranean regions, archaeological sites have been mapped by fieldwalking surveys, producing large amounts of data. These legacy site-based survey data represent an important resource to study ancient settlement organization. Methodological procedures are necessary to cope with the limits of these data, and more importantly with the distortions on data patterns caused by biasing factors.
This book develops and applies a GIS procedure to use legacy survey data in settlement pattern analysis. It consists of two parts. One part regards the assessment of biases that can affect the spatial patterns exhibited by survey data. The other part aims to shed light on the location preferences and settlement strategy of ancient communities underlying site patterns. In this book, a case-study shows how the method works in practice. As part of the research by the Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization project (NWO, Leiden University, KNIR) site-based datasets produced by survey projects in central-southern Italy are examined in a comparative framework to investigate settlement patterns in the early Roman colonial period (3rd century B.C.).
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Speculum Iuris
Roman Law as a Reflection of Social and Economic Life in Antiquity
Jean-Jacques Aubert and Boudewijn Sirks, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Roman public and private law regulated many aspects of life in Antiquity. The legal sources, statutes, juristic opinions, textbooks, documents and reports preserve a wealth of information that illuminates Roman society and economy. However, the use of this kind of evidence can be extremely difficult. With this volume, classicists, historians, and legal scholars propose various ways to integrate the legal evidence with other sources for ancient social and economic history.
Speculum Iuris examines the complex relationship between law and social practice from the particular angle of Roman legislation and jurisprudence as conditioned by or reacting to a specific social, economic, and political context. Using various strategies, the editors and contributors mine a huge body of texts to study attitudes and behaviors of the Roman upper class, whose social concerns are reflected in the development of legal rules.
A close reading of juristic opinions and Republican or imperial legislation allows the contributors to find rationales behind rules and decisions in order to explain practices and mentalities of the elite within a larger social context. This book demonstrates clearly that Roman law was not divorced from the realities of daily life, even if some jurists may have been working with purely hypothetical cases.
Speculum Iuris provides a multidisciplinary approach to the question of the interplay of legal and social forces in the Roman world. As such, it will be a helpful study for general classicists and ancient historians, as well as for legal historians, social historians, economic historians, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.
Jean-Jacques Aubert is Professor of Latin Language and Literature, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Boudewijn Sirks is Professor of the History of Ancient Law, the History of European Private Law, and German Civil Law, Institute for the History of Law, Germany.
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Staging Masculinity
The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World
Erik Gunderson
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Performance was one of the five canonical branches of oratory in the classical period, but it presents special problems that distinguish it from concerns such as composition and memory. The ancient performer was supposed to be a "good man" and his performance a manifestation of an authentic and authoritative manliness. But how can the orator be distinguished from a mere actor? And what is the proper role for the body, given that it is a potential object of desire?
Erik Gunderson explores these and other questions in ancient rhetorical theory using a variety of theoretical approaches, drawing in particular on the works of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. His study examines the status of rhetorical theory qua theory, the production of a specific version of body in the course of its theoretical description, oratory as a form of self-mastery, the actor as the orator's despised double, the dangers of homoerotic pleasure, and Cicero's De Oratore, as what good theory and practice ought to look like.
Erik Gunderson is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin, Ohio State University.
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Stock Characters Speaking
Eight Libanian Declamations Introduced and Translated
Robert J. Penella
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Declamations were composed and orally delivered in the Roman Empire by sophists, or teachers of rhetoric, of whom the Greek-speaking Libanius was one of the most distinguished. Stock Characters Speaking may be thought of as emerging from three developments of recent decades: an explosive interest in late antiquity, a newly sympathetic interest in rhetoric (including ancient declamation), and a desire to bring Libanius’s massive corpus into English and other modern languages.

In this book, author Robert J. Penella translates eight of Libanius’s declamations: 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 45, 46, 47, and, in an appendix, the thirteenth-century Gregory of Cyprus’s response to Declamation 34. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction, in which Penella examines the themes, structure, and the stasis, or key issue, of the declamations. Figures who appear in the translated declamations include a parasite who has lost his patron, a man envious of his rich neighbor, a miser’s son, a poor man willing to die for his city, a rich war-hero accused of aiming at tyranny, and a convict asking for exile. Three of these declamations have appeared in German; otherwise, these translations are the first into a modern language.
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Stones, Bones, and the Sacred
Essays on Material Culture and Ancient Religion in Honor of Dennis E.
Alan H. Cadwallader
SBL Press, 2016

A crucial text for any university course on the interaction of archaeology and the Bible

The world of early Christians was not a world lived in texts; it was a world saturated with material reality and concerns: what, where and when to eat or drink; how to present oneself in the space of bodily life and that of death; how to move from one place to another; what impacted status or the adjudication of legal charges. All these and more controlled so much of life in the ancient world. The Christians were not immune from the impact of these realities. Sometimes they absorbed their surrounds; sometimes they quite explicitly rejected the material practices bearing in on them; frequently they modified the practice and the rationale to create a significant Christian alternative. The collection of essays in this volume come from a range of international scholars who, for all their different interests and critical commitments, are yet united in treasuring research into the Greek and Roman worlds in which Christians sought to make their way. They offer these essays in honor of one who has made a lifetime's work in mining ancient material culture to extract nuggets of insight into early Christian dining practices: Dennis E. Smith.

Features

  • Rich examples of method in the utilization of ancient material culture for biblical interpretation.
  • Thirteen essays with a response from Dennis E. Smith
  • Maps, diagrams, and plates
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Stratagems. Aqueducts of Rome
Frontinus
Harvard University Press, 1993

Ancient expertise on water and warfare.

Frontinus, Sextus Iulius, ca. AD 35–103, was a capable Roman civil officer and military commander. Praetor of the city in 70 and consul in 73 or 74, 98 and 100, he was, about the year 76, sent to Britain as governor. He quelled the Silures of Wales, and began to build a road through their territory; his place was taken by Agricola in 78. In 97 he was given the highly esteemed office of Manager of Aqueducts at Rome. He is known to have been an augur, being succeeded by his friend Pliny the Younger.

The two sides of Frontinus’ public career are reflected in his two surviving works. Stratagems, written after 84, gives examples of military stratagems from Greek and Roman history, for the instruction of Roman officers, in three books; the fourth book is concerned largely with military discipline. The Aqueducts of Rome, written in 97–98, gives some historical details and a description of the aqueducts for the water supply of the city, with laws relating to them. Frontinus aimed at being useful and writes in a rather popular style which is both simple and clear.

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Stumbling Blocks
Roman Poems
Karl Kirchwey
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Through six earlier books Karl Kirchwey has rewarded readers with poems of great musicality, visual richness, and historical resonance. Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems represents a culmination of his “formal mastery”—an honor often too loosely bestowed in contemporary American poetry, but one Kirchwey thoroughly earns.

As in his 1998 New York Times Notable Book The Engrafted Word, the city of Rome becomes a lens through which to understand the contemporary human experience and the upheavals of human loss. Stumbling Blocks takes as its starting point the shattered ancient Roman ruins described in Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay's celebrated sonnet—a landscape of death feeding upon itself and restored to life in the imagination of each successive generation to salvage its own narratives.

Kirchwey builds new arches and mythological intersections in exquisite poems that take long walks in the Eternal City, through landscapes far away and deep within. This gorgeous collection takes us back in time and brings us forward through our Old and New Worlds, revealing through the religion of art both beauty and atrocity.
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Style and Tradition in Catullus
David O. Ross Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1969

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The Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa
Vidyākara
Harvard University Press
This edition of the Sanskrit text of the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa—in the editors’ opinion the oldest known general anthology of Sanskrit verse—is the result of years of work deciphering and comparing the five different versions to arrive at a complete and reliable text. The editors’ aim has been to restore, as far as the sources permit, the text compiled by Vidyākara somewhere between A.D. 1100 and 1130. In the absence of written records from the period, studies such as this one are invaluable as sources of information about the literary and cultural history of eleventh century India, especially about Sanskrit poets, and also about the changes of ideas since the eleventh century as they have affected the versions compiled since Vidyākara’s. Included with the complete Sanskrit text and footnotes to the stanzas is an introductory section in which D. D. Kosambi discusses in detail the various versions in existence, the cultural background, and the authors and sources of individual verses.
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A Sudden Terror
The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome
Anthony F. D'Elia
Harvard University Press, 2009

In 1468, on the final night of Carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat enthroned above the boisterous crowd, when a scuffle caught his eye. His guards had intercepted a mysterious stranger trying urgently to convey a warning—conspirators were lying in wait to slay the pontiff. Twenty humanist intellectuals were quickly arrested, tortured on the rack, and imprisoned in separate cells in the damp dungeon of Castel Sant’Angelo.

Anthony D’Elia offers a compelling, surprising story that reveals a Renaissance world that witnessed the rebirth of interest in the classics, a thriving homoerotic culture, the clash of Christian and pagan values, the contest between republicanism and a papal monarchy, and tensions separating Christian Europeans and Muslim Turks. Using newly discovered sources, he shows why the pope targeted the humanists, who were seen as dangerously pagan in their Epicurean morals and their Platonic beliefs about the soul and insurrectionist in their support of a more democratic Church. Their fascination with Sultan Mehmed II connected them to the Ottoman Turks, enemies of Christendom, and the love of the classical world tied them to recent rebellious attempts to replace papal rule with a republic harking back to the glorious days of Roman antiquity.

From the cosmetic-wearing, parrot-loving pontiff to the Turkish sultan, savage in war but obsessed with Italian culture, D’Elia brings to life a Renaissance world full of pageantry, mayhem, and conspiracy and offers a fresh interpretation of humanism as a dynamic communal movement.

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Symbols of Wealth and Power
Architectural Terracotta Decoration in Etruria and Central Italy, 640-510 B.C.
Nancy A. Winter
University of Michigan Press, 2009

Although initially intended for the innovative, if prosaic, purpose of providing waterproof and fireproof cover for earlier thatch-roofed homes, fired clay tiles, in seventh- and sixth-century Etruria and Central Italy, combined with Etruscan love of adornment to create exceptional domestic and religious building decoration. Featuring statues and figured friezes of humans, animals, and mythological figures intended to convey the status of the owner or dedicator, the surviving terracotta roofs provide important insights into the architectural history of Etruria. With Symbols of Wealth and Power, Nancy A. Winter has provided a definitive overview of the evidence for these roofing elements that will enhance our knowledge of Etruscan---and more broadly, ancient---architecture.

Nancy A. Winter is an archaeologist and former librarian of the American School of Classical Studies, Athens. She is the author of Greek Architectural Terracottas: From the Prehistoric to the End of the Archaic Period (1993).

Also of Interest
Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation, edited by Sinclair Bell and Inge Lyse Hansen
The Maritime World of Ancient Rome, edited by Robert L. Hohlfelder
Cosa: The Black-Glaze Pottery 2, by Ann Reynolds Scott
Jacket illustration: Tuscania, Ara del Tufo, 560–550 B.C.
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A Symposion of Praise
Horace Returns to Lyric in Odes IV
Timothy Johnson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
    Ten years after publishing his first collection of lyric poetry, Odes I-III, Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) returned to lyric and published another book of fifteen odes, Odes IV. These later lyrics, which praise Augustus, the imperial family, and other political insiders, have often been treated more as propaganda than art. But in A Symposion of Praise, Timothy Johnson examines the richly textured ambiguities of Odes IV that engage the audience in the communal or "sympotic" formulation of Horace's praise. Surpassing propaganda, Odes IV reflects the finely nuanced and imaginative poetry of Callimachus rather than the traditions of Aristotelian and Ciceronian rhetoric, which advise that praise should present commonly admitted virtues and vices.  In this way, Johnson demonstrates that Horace's application of competing perspectives establishes him as Pindar's rival.
    Johnson shows the Horatian panegyrist is more than a dependent poet representing only the desires of his patrons. The poet forges the panegyric agenda, setting out the character of the praise (its mode, lyric, and content both positive and negative), and calls together a community to join in the creation and adaptation of Roman identities and civic ideologies. With this insightful reading, A Symposion of Praise will be of interest to historians of the Augustan period and its literature, and to scholars interested in the dynamics between personal expression and political power.
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