Results by title

397 books match the query 'Rome' and 8 start with h

cover of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography

Harriet Hosmer

A Cultural Biography

Kate Culkin

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908) was celebrated as one of the country's most respected artists, credited with opening the field of sculpture to women and cited as a model of female ability and American refinement. In this biographical study, Kate Culkin explores Hosmer's life and work and places her in the context of a notable group of expatriate writers and artists who gathered in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1852 Hosmer moved from Boston to Rome, where she shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others. Culkin argues that Hosmer's success was made possible by her extensive network of supporters, including her famous friends, boosters of American gentility, and women's rights advocates. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Culkin also addresses Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenth-century culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility.
[more]
cover of Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity

Haunted Greece and Rome

Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity

By D. Felton

University of Texas Press, 1998

Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots.

The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.

[more]
cover of History after Liberty: Tacitus on Tyrants, Sycophants, and Republicans

History after Liberty

Tacitus on Tyrants, Sycophants, and Republicans

Thomas E. Strunk

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Roman historian Tacitus wrote a damning critique of the first century CE Roman empire. The emperors in Tacitus’ works are almost universally tyrants surrounded by flatterers and informants, and the image Tacitus creates is of a society that has lost the liberty enjoyed under the Roman Republic. Yet Tacitus also poignantly depicts those who resist this tyranny and seek to restore a sense of liberty to Rome. In his portrayal of autocrats, sycophants, and republicans Tacitus provides an enduring testament to the value of liberty and the evils of despotism.
 
History after Liberty explores Tacitus’ political thought through his understanding of liberty. Influenced by modern republican writers such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, this study defines Tacitean libertas as the freedom from the rule of a dominus and as freedom to participate in the traditional politics of Rome through military service, public service in the senate and magistracies, and public speech. All of these elements are balanced in Tacitus’ writings with examples of those resisting the corruption of politics in an effort to restore a sense of free civic engagement. The work concludes with an exploration of Tacitus’ own writings as an act of restoring liberty. In contrast to most studies on Tacitus, History after Liberty argues that Tacitus is a republican who writes both to demonstrate that Rome had become a tyranny and to show a way out of that tyranny.
 
History after Liberty addresses the political thought of Tacitus’ writings. As such it will be of most interest to those who study the history and historiography of the early Roman empire, namely classicists and ancient historians. The work will also be of use to those interested in the antecedents to modern political thought, particularly the history of republicanism and freedom; readers from this category will include political scientists, philosophers, and modern historians.
 

[more]
cover of History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity

History and Silence

Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity

By Charles W. Hedrick Jr.

University of Texas Press, 2000

The ruling elite in ancient Rome sought to eradicate even the memory of their deceased opponents through a process now known as damnatio memoriae. These formal and traditional practices included removing the person's name and image from public monuments and inscriptions, making it illegal to speak of him, and forbidding funeral observances and mourning. Paradoxically, however, while these practices dishonored the person's memory, they did not destroy it. Indeed, a later turn of events could restore the offender not only to public favor but also to re-inclusion in the public record.

This book examines the process of purge and rehabilitation of memory in the person of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus(?-394). Charles Hedrick describes how Flavian was condemned for participating in the rebellion against the Christian emperor Theodosius the Great—and then restored to the public record a generation later as members of the newly Christianized senatorial class sought to reconcile their pagan past and Christian present. By selectively remembering and forgetting the actions of Flavian, Hedrick asserts, the Roman elite honored their ancestors while participating in profound social, cultural, and religious change.

[more]
cover of Honor Among Thieves: Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt

Honor Among Thieves

Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt

Philip F. Venticinque

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Honor Among Thieves examines associations of craftsmen in the framework of ancient economics and transaction costs. Scholars have long viewed such associations primarily as social or religious groups that provided mutual support, proper burial, and sociability, and spaces where nonelite individuals could seek status supposedly denied them in their contemporary society. However, the analysis presented here concentrates on how craftsmen, merchants, and associations interacted with each other and with elite and nonelite constituencies; managed economic, political, social, and legal activities; represented their concerns to the authorities; and acquired and used social capital—a new and important view of these economic engines.

Philip F. Venticinque offers a study of associations from a social, economic, and legal point of view, and in the process examines how they helped their members overcome high transaction costs—the “costs of doing business”—through the development of social capital. He explores associations from the “bottom up,” in order to see how their members create status and reputation outside of an elite framework. He thus explores how occupations regarded as thieves in elite ideology create their own systems of honor.

Honor Among Thieves will be of interest to scholars of the ancient economy, of social groups, and Roman Egypt in all periods. 


[more]
cover of Horace between Freedom and Slavery: The First Book of <i>Epistles</i>

Horace between Freedom and Slavery

The First Book of <i>Epistles</i>

Stephanie McCarter

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

During the Roman transition from Republic to Empire in the first century B.C.E., the poet Horace found his own public success in the era of Emperor Augustus at odds with his desire for greater independence. In Horace between Freedom and Slavery, Stephanie McCarter offers new insights into Horace's complex presentation of freedom in the first book of his Epistles and connects it to his most enduring and celebrated moral exhortation, the golden mean.

She argues that, although Horace commences the Epistles with an uncompromising insistence on freedom, he ultimately adopts a middle course. She shows how Horace explores in the poems the application of moderate freedom first to philosophy, then to friendship, poetry, and place. Rather than rejecting philosophical masters, Horace draws freely on them without swearing permanent allegiance to any—a model for compromise that allows him to enjoy poetic

renown and friendships with the city's elite while maintaining a private sphere of freedom. This moderation and adaptability, McCarter contends, become the chief ethical lessons that Horace learns for himself and teaches to others. She reads Horace's reconfiguration of freedom as a political response to the transformations of the new imperial age.
[more]
cover of Horace's Odes and Epodes: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary

Horace's Odes and Epodes

Translated with an Introduction and Commentary

David Mulroy

University of Michigan Press, 1994

In his new book David Mulroy presents a translation of the Odes and Epodes of Horace, who was one of the Augustan regime’s best known and most talented poets. Intended for those with little knowledge of these works as well as for those with a more experienced ear, David Mulroy’s translations are accompanied by explanatory notes on the individual poems. Appendices are also provided that offer information on Suetonius’ biography of Horace, on ambiguity in Horace’s personal allusions, and on the theme of sadism in Horace’s writings.Teachers of Latin writers in translation will want to use this book to make Horace accessible to their students; scholars of Latin literature will find much of value in the notes and appendices as well as in the linguistically satisfying translations.
[more]
cover of Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus

Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus

Emma Warhover

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Emma Warhover’s Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus explores how the ancient Roman historian Tacitus incorporated humor into his historical works, and unveils the significance of these humorous motifs. Since the historian is one of the most important ancient sources on Rome’s emperors Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, readers of Tacitus have long been challenged by his purposely opaque style, full of unbalanced grammatical constructions and end-of-the-sentence surprises. Tacitus’ strange prose style reflects the remarkable times about which he writes, when emperors made bizarre and contradictory demands on their subjects and told obvious lies to cover up the cruelty of their regimes.
In serious texts like Tacitus’ historical works, humor can expose hypocrisy in the powerful, demonstrate the absurdity of imperial pronouncements, and simultaneously communicate why such offenses were allowed to stand. Warhover argues that major elements of Tacitus’ distinctive style, such as variatio, appendix sentences, and sententiae, create humor, and that Tacitus used humor deliberately to emphasize the incongruities that emerged from the principate. By employing humor, Tacitus followed Roman rhetorical traditions evident in Cicero and Quintilian, who agree that humor is an important tool for criticism. For Tacitus, humor is therefore not an amusement or decoration, but an integral part of his historiographic construction.
[more]