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397 books match the query 'Rome' and 5 start with f

cover of FEELING HISTORY: LUCAN, STOICISM, AND THE POETICS OF PASSION

FEELING HISTORY

LUCAN, STOICISM, AND THE POETICS OF PASSION

Francesca D’Alessandro Behr

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Feeling History is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Through the narrator’s direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucan’s style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The book’s chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca D’Alessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucan’s retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole.
 
An analysis of selected apostrophes from the Bellum Civile allows us to confront issues that are behind Lucan’s disquieting imagery: how can we square the poet’s Stoic perspectives with his poetically conveyed emotional urgency? Lucan’s approach seems inspired by Aristotle, especially his Poetics, as much as by Stoic philosophy. In Lucan’s aesthetic project, participation and alienation work as phases through which the narrator leads the reader to a desired understanding of his work of art. At the same time, the reader is confronted with the ends and limits of the aesthetic enterprise in general. 
 
Lucan’s long-acknowledged political engagement must therefore be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic stance. In the same way that Lucan is unable to break free from the Virgilian model, neither can he develop a defense of morality outside of the Stoic mold. His philosophy is not a crystal ball to read the future or a numbing drug imposing acceptance. The philosophical vision that Lucan finds intellectually and aesthetically compelling does not insulate his characters (and readers) from suffering, nor does it excuse them from wrongdoing. Rather, it obligates them to confront the responsibilities and limits of acting morally in a chaotic world.
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cover of Farewell, Mama Odessa: A Novel

Farewell, Mama Odessa

A Novel

Emil Draitser

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama
Odessa describes the émigrés’ attempts at adjustment to the free world. 

 
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cover of Foodways in Roman Republican Italy

Foodways in Roman Republican Italy

Laura M. Banducci

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Foodways in Roman Republican Italy explores the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in Republican Italy to illuminate the nature of cultural change during this period. Traditionally, studies of the cultural effects of Roman contact and conquest have focused on observing changes in the public realm: that is, changing urban organization and landscape, and monumental construction. Foodways studies reach into the domestic realm: How do the daily behaviors of individuals express their personal identity, and How does this relate to changes and expressions of identity in broader society? Laura M. Banducci tracks through time the foodways of three sites in Etruria from about the third century BCE to the first century CE: Populonia, Musarna, and Cetamura del Chianti. All were established Etruscan sites that came under Roman political control over the course of the third and second centuries BCE. The book examines the morphology and use wear of ceramics used for cooking, preparing, and serving food in order to deduce cooking methods and the types of foods being prepared and consumed. Change in domestic behaviors was gradual and regionally varied, depending on local social and environmental conditions, shaping rather than responding to an explicitly “Roman” presence.

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cover of From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico: Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico

Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire

David Charles Wright-Carr

University Press of Colorado, 2023

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico compares the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the evangelization of Mesoamerica, offering novel perspectives on the historical processes involved in the spread of Christianity. Combining concepts of empire and globalization with the notion of religion from a postcolonial perspective, the book proposes the method of analytical comparison as a point of departure to conceptualize historical affinities and differences between the ancient Roman Empire and colonial Mesoamerica.

An international team of specialists in classical scholarship and Mesoamerican studies engage in an interdisciplinary discussion involving ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, iconography, and philology. Key themes include the role of religion in processes of imperial domination; religion’s use as an instrument of resistance or the imposition, appropriation, incorporation, and adaptation of various elements of religious systems by hegemonic groups and subaltern peoples; the creative misunderstandings that can arise on the “middle ground”; and Christianity’s rejection of ritual violence and its use of this rejection as a pretext for inflicting other kinds of violence against peoples classified as “barbarian,” “pagan,” or “diabolical.”

From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico presents a sympathetic vantage point for discussing and attempting to decipher past processes of social communication in multicultural contexts of present-day realities. It will be significant for scholars and specialists in the history of religions, ethnohistory, classical antiquity, and Mesoamerican studies.

Publication supported, in part, by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Contributors: Sergio Botta,Maria Celia Fontana Calvo, Martin Devecka, György Németh, Guilhem Olivier, Francisco Marco Simón, Paolo Taviani, Greg Woolf, David Charles Wright-Carr, Lorenzo Pérez Yarza
Translators: Emma Chesterman, Benjamin Adam Jerue, Layla Wright-Contreras
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cover of Frontinus' Legacy: Essays on Frontinus' de aquis urbis Romae

Frontinus' Legacy

Essays on Frontinus' de aquis urbis Romae

Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2001

The city of Rome depended on a complex system of aqueducts for survival, and Frontinus purports to tell his readers how best to manage this system. Although his text is largely technical, his treatment of technicalities is not always clear, raising the question of how well he, and the Romans, really understood hydraulics.This interdisciplinary study of Frontinus' work addresses the questions that lie between the lines of his text. How large a work force was required to build an aqueduct, and how did they go about doing it? What did such an undertaking cost, and who was responsible for paying? Who decided which route should be followed? Why did Frontinus feel a need to write this book? Who was his audience? To date, Frontinus has been subjected to very little critical scrutiny. Deane R. Blackman and A. Trevor Hodge have gathered here a wide range of recognized authorities -- in classics, hydraulics engineering, surveying, financing, and the formation of calcium carbonate deposits in the water conduits -- to examine the puzzle Frontinus has left us.
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