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397 books match the query 'Rome' and 11 start with w

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WEB OF FANTASIES

Gaze, Image, & Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Patricia B Salzman-Mitchell

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who “sees” the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation).
The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.

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Water Distribution in Ancient Rome

The Evidence of Frontinus

Harry B. Evans

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Water Distribution in Ancient Rome examines the nature and effects of Rome's system of aqueducts, drawing on the difficult but important work of the Roman engineer Frontinus. Among other questions, the volume considers how water traveled to the many neighborhoods of hilly Rome, which neighborhoods were connected to the water system, and how those connections were made. A consideration of Frontinus' writing reveals comprehensive planning by city officials over long periods of time and the difficulties these engineering feats posed. Water Distribution in Ancient Rome is essential reading for students and scholars of Frontinus, of Roman engineering and imperial policy, and of Roman topography and archaeology.

"Clear style, good maps and photographs, notes, and bibliography make this work accessible and valuable for students at every level. An admirable contribution to knowledge of the Roman Empire." --Choice

Harry B. Evans is Professor of Classics, Fordham University. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize and is past Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philological Association.

This book was published with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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What Did the Romans Know?

An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking

Daryn Lehoux

University of Chicago Press, 2012

What did the Romans know about their world? Quite a lot, as Daryn Lehoux makes clear in this fascinating and much-needed contribution to the history and philosophy of ancient science. Lehoux contends that even though many of the Romans’ views about the natural world have no place in modern science—the umbrella-footed monsters and dog-headed people that roamed the earth and the stars that foretold human destinies—their claims turn out not to be so radically different from our own.

Lehoux draws upon a wide range of sources from what is unquestionably the most prolific period of ancient science, from the first century BC to the second century AD. He begins with Cicero’s theologico-philosophical trilogy On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, and On Fate, illustrating how Cicero’s engagement with nature is closely related to his concerns in politics, religion, and law. Lehoux then guides readers through highly technical works by Galen and Ptolemy, as well as the more philosophically oriented physics and cosmologies of Lucretius, Plutarch, and Seneca, all the while exploring the complex interrelationships between the objects of scientific inquiry and the norms, processes, and structures of that inquiry. This includes not only the tools and methods the Romans used to investigate nature, but also the Romans’ cultural, intellectual, political, and religious perspectives. Lehoux concludes by sketching a methodology that uses the historical material he has carefully explained to directly engage the philosophical questions of incommensurability, realism, and relativism.

By situating Roman arguments about the natural world in their larger philosophical, political, and rhetorical contexts, What Did the Romans Know? demonstrates that the Romans had sophisticated and novel approaches to nature, approaches that were empirically rigorous, philosophically rich, and epistemologically complex.

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When the Lamp is Shattered

Desire and Narrative in Catullus

Michaela Janan

Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

The poetry of the Late Roman Republican poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, a rich document of the human heart, is the earliest-known reasonably complete body of erotic verse in the West.

Though approximately 116 poems survive, uncertainties about the condition of the fragmented manuscript and the narrative order of the poems make the Catullan text unusually problematic for the modern critic. Indeed, the poems can be arranged in a number of ways, making a multitude of different plots possible and frustrating the reader’s desire for narrative closure.

Micaela Janan contends that since unsatisfied desire structures both the experience of reading Catullus and its subject matter, critical interpretation of the text demands a "poetics of desire." Furthermore, postmodern critical theory, narratology, and psychoanalysis suggest a flexible concept of the "subject" as a site through which a multitude of social, cultural, and unconscious forces move. Human consciousness, Janan contends, is inherently incomplete and in a continuous process of transformation. She therefore proposes an original and provocative feminist reading of Catullus, a reading informed by theories of consciousness and desire as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Freud and Lacan.

The Late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, Janan reminds us, was a time of profound social upheaval when political and cultural institutions that had persisted for centuries were rapidly breaking down—a time not unlike our own. Catullus’ poetry provides an unusually honest look at his culture and its contradictory representations of class, gender, and power. By bringing to the study of this major work of classical literature the themes of consciousness and desire dealt with in postmodern scholarship, Janan’s book invites a new conversation among literary disciplines.

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While Rome Burned

Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination

Virginia M. Closs

University of Michigan Press, 2020

While Rome Burned attends to the intersection of fire, city, and emperor in ancient Rome, tracing the critical role that urban conflagration played as both reality and metaphor in the politics and literature of the early imperial period. Urban fires presented a consistent problem for emperors from Augustus to Hadrian, especially given the expectation that the princeps be both a protector and provider for Rome’s population. The problem manifested itself differently for each leader, and each sought to address it in distinctive ways. This history can be traced most precisely in Roman literature, as authors addressed successive moments of political crisis through dialectical engagement with prior incendiary catastrophes in Rome’s historical past and cultural repertoire.

Working in the increasingly repressive environment of the early principate, Roman authors frequently employed “figured” speech and mythopoetic narratives to address politically risky topics. In response to shifting political and social realities, the literature of the early imperial period reimagines and reanimates not just historical fires, but also archetypal and mythic representations of conflagration. Throughout, the author engages critically with the growing subfield of disaster studies, as well as with theoretical approaches to language, allusion, and cultural memory.

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Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt

The House of Apion at Oxyrhynchus

T. M. Hickey

University of Michigan Press, 2012

The "glorious house" of the senatorial family of the Flavii Apiones is the best documented economic entity of the Roman Empire during the fifth through seventh centuries, that critical period of transition between the classical world and the Middle Ages. For decades, the rich but fragmentary manuscript evidence that this large agricultural estate left behind, preserved for 1,400 years by the desiccating sands of Egypt, has been central to arguments concerning the agrarian and fiscal history of Late Antiquity, including the rise of feudalism.

Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt is the most authoritative synthesis concerning the economy of the Apion estate to appear to date. T. M. Hickey examines the records of the family's wine production in the sixth century in order to shed light on ancient economic practices and economic theory, as well as on the wine industry and on estate management. Based on careful study of the original manuscripts, including unpublished documents from the estate archive, he presents controversial conclusions, much at odds with the "top down" models currently dominating the scholarship.

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Women in Fragments

Alternative Histories of the Roman Republic

Jessica H. Clark

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Our sources of knowledge about women in the ancient Roman Republic are flawed. Roman historians were uniformly male, as were most historians of ancient Rome until quite recently. In the historiography handed down by Enlightenment-era scholars, women generally played marginal and often sexualized roles, relegated to the footnotes by historians who assumed the Roman Republic to be fully androcentric. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. In this detailed and insightful volume, Jessica H. Clark returns to the source material to gain insight into how Roman men understood the lives, roles, and contributions of the women they wrote about.

Reexamining the puzzle pieces of ancient literature, Clark proposes that the earliest Roman historians represented women in complex ways, revealing their appreciation of women’s communities and women’s engagement in the project of the Republic, in contrast to the attitudes assumed by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She attributes those scholars’ assumptions to the social and political circumstances of their own times and demonstrates how these assumptions have continued to inform our own perceptions of Roman women and therefore Roman society more generally. This study ultimately uncovers not only the women of the Roman Republic but also how modern preconceptions have distorted their image and the stories we tell about ancient Rome.

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Women in Roman Republican Drama

Edited by Dorota Dutsch, Sharon L. James, and David Konstan

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relationships between men and women, ideas of masculinity and femininity, the stock characters of dowered wife and of prostitute—all of these are frequently staged in Roman tragedies and comedies. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists from Shakespeare to Sondheim.

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Women's Lives, Women's Voices

Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples

Edited by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland

University of Texas Press, 2021

Literary evidence is often silent about the lives of women in antiquity, particularly those from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even when women are considered, they are often seen through the lens of their male counterparts. In this collection, Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland have gathered an outstanding group of scholars to give voice to both the elite and ordinary women living on the Bay of Naples before the eruption of Vesuvius.

Using visual, architectural, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence, the authors consider how women in the region interacted with their communities through family relationships, businesses, and religious practices, in ways that could complement or complicate their primary social roles as mothers, daughters, and wives. They explore women-run businesses from weaving and innkeeping to prostitution, consider representations of women in portraits and graffiti, and examine how women expressed their identities in the funerary realm. Providing a new model for studying women in the ancient world, Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices brings to light the day-to-day activities of women of all classes in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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