Download or read book Oxford Readings in Tacitus written by Rhiannon Ash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is designed to reflect the main trends in scholarship on the Roman historian of the early empire, Tacitus, particularly as they have developed over the last century. Covering the whole of Tacitus' works, it begins with a comprehensive introduction which sets the selected scholarship and Roman author in context.
Download or read book Religion and Memory in Tacitus Annals written by Kelly E. Shannon-Henderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his narrative of Julio-Claudian Rome in the Annals, Tacitus includes numerous references to the gods, fate, fortune, astrology, omens, temples, priests, the emperor cult, and other religious material. Though scholars have long considered Tacitus' discussion of religion of minor importance, this volume demonstrates the significance of such references to an understanding of the work as a whole by analyzing them using cultural memory theory, which views religious ritual as a key component in any society's efforts to create a lived version of the past that helps define cultural identity in the present. Tacitus, who was not only an historian, but also a member of Rome's quindecimviral priesthood, shows a marked interest in even the most detailed rituals of Roman religious life, yet his portrayal of religious material also suggests that the system is under threat with the advent of the principate. Some traditional rituals are forgotten as the shape of the Roman state changes while, simultaneously, a new form of cultic commemoration develops as deceased emperors are deified and the living emperor and his family members are treated in increasingly worshipful ways by his subjects. This study traces the deployment of religious material throughout Tacitus' narrative in order to show how he views the development of this cultic "amnesia" over time, from the reign of the cryptic, autocratic, and oddly mystical Tiberius, through Claudius' failed attempts at reviving tradition, to the final sacrilegious disasters of the impious Nero. As the first book-length treatment of religion in the Annals, it reveals how these references are a key vehicle for his assessment of the principate as a system of government, the activities of individual emperors, and their impact on Roman society and cultural identity.
Download or read book Telling Tales on Caesar written by Phaedrus and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cameos showcase Tiberius in private and Augustus in court, with Pompey the Great on campaign and Phaedrus himself struggling against prejudice and persecution, and tales feature all sorts - a toadying slave, wicked servant, vain musician, effeminate soldier, sexy poet, and rogue quack. These forgotten tales tell short and clear Roman parables of power and powerlessness. Humorous and acute, they explain, and protest at, the Caesars, and they sit perfectly among Aesop's sadistic lions, murderous wolves, and apes in purple."--Jacket.
Download or read book Tacitus the Epic Successor written by Timothy Joseph and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the Roman historian Tacitus’ (c. 55 – c. 120 C.E.) use of the language and narrative techniques of the epic poets, in particular Virgil and Lucan, for his presentation of the Roman civil wars of 68–70 C.E. in the Histories.
Download or read book The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War is part of a burgeoning new trend that focuses on the great impact of stasis and civil war on Roman society. This volume specifically concentrates on the Late Republic, a transformative period marked by social and political violence, stasis, factional strife, and civil war. Its constitutive chapters closely study developments and discussions concerning the concept of civil war in the late republican and early imperial historiography of the late Republic, from L. Cornelius Sulla Felix to the Severan dynasty.
Download or read book Livy written by Jane D. Chaplin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume have been selected and arranged to provide students with an introduction to the historiographial study of the Roman historian Livy. All classics in their own right, the eighteen articles included here work together to present a picture of this creative and acutely observant historian writing during the Augustan principate. The editors have provided an introductory guide to previous Livian scholarship, which contextualizes each essay; each is also followed by an addendum providing further context and selected suggestions for further reading.
Download or read book Sallust written by William Wendell Batstone and published by Oxford Readings in Classical S. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman historian Sallust emerges from recent scholarship as one of the most innovative and original writers of the ancient world. His works describe the political and moral crises of Rome's civil wars in the first century BCE and raise questions about the possibilities for narrating the past that matter profoundly to historians today. This volume provides a substantial introduction to scholarship on Sallust, bringing together some of the best and most important studies from the last decades and setting them within the context of a rich and continuing scholarly tradition that includes influential works by Eduard Schwartz (1897) and Kurt Latte (1935). Each contribution presents a distinctive vision of the historian and together they reveal different aspects of his complexity and surprising modernity. Substantial attention is given to all three of Sallust's works: the monographs on the Catilinarian conspiracy and the war with Jugurtha, as well as the fragmentary Histories. Translations of important contributions by German and Italian scholars as well as a survey of the early modern reception of Sallust offer unprecedented access to the scope of Sallust studies. This volume will be an important resource for students of ancient history and Latin literature at all levels and also introduce a wider scholarly audience to Sallust's importance and interest.
Download or read book Literary Territories written by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Territories argues that the literature of Late Antiquity shared a defining aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical "inhabited world," the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge.
Download or read book Representing Agrippina written by Judith Ginsburg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agrippina the Younger ranks as one of the most powerful women in the history of the Roman Empire. Judith Ginsburg's book provides a fresh look at both the literary and material representations of Agrippina. Her incisive study exposes both the contrivances of the commissioned artists whose idealized portraits served to buttress the image of the regime and the contrasting designs of the historians whose rhetorical stereotypes and negative depictions aimed to undermine it.
Download or read book Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus written by Jonathan Master and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tacitus’ narrative of 69 CE, the year of the four emperors, is famous for its description of a series of coups that sees one man after another crowned. Many scholars seem to read Tacitus as though he wrote only about the constricted world of imperial Rome and the machinations of emperors, courtiers, and victims of the principate; even recent work on the Histories either passes over or lightly touches upon civil unrest and revolts in the provinces. In Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus, Jonathan Master looks beyond imperial politics and finds threats to the Empire’s stability among unassimilated foreign subjects who were made to fight in the Roman army. Master draws on scholarship in political theory, Latin historiography, Roman history, and ethnic identity to demonstrate how Tacitus presented to his contemporary audience in Trajanic Rome the dangerous consequences of the city’s failure to reward and incorporate its provincial subjects. Master argues that Tacitus’ presentation of the Vitellian and Flavian armies, and especially the Batavian auxiliary soldiers, reflects a central lesson of the Histories: the Empire’s exploitation of provincial manpower (increasingly the majority of all soldiers under Roman banners) while offering little in return, set the stage for civil wars and ultimately the separatist Batavian revolt.
Download or read book Motion in Classical Literature written by G. O. Hutchinson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical literature is full of humans, gods, and animals in impressive motion, though motion has yet to receive significant attention in scholarship and criticism. The case-studies in this volume explore how motion is treated in Greek and Latin visual art and literature, offering a new and stimulating approach to these well-known works.
Download or read book The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature written by Peter E. Knox and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.
Download or read book Greek and Roman Historiography written by John Marincola and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over the past thirty years the study of classical historiography has undergone great changes. While not abandoning traditional questions about sources and reliability, newer scholarship, influenced and informed by the current debates in the academy at large about the nature and purpose of all historiography, has sought to understand the ancient historians on their own terms and has more closely engaged with the ways in which the Greeks and Romans constructed their pasts, with the various roles that history played in these societies, with the relationship of history as a literary composition to other genres, and with the importance of the historian himself in giving form and meaning to his history. The essays in the present volume, six of which are translated into English for the first time, address these and other issues. Topics treated include the relationship of history and myth, the importance of oral tradition in the formation of both Greek andRoman historical traditions, the role of memory (both individual and societal) in shaping notions of the past and determining what is thought worthy of record, the influence of other genres such as poetry and oratory on historiography, and ancient notions of falsehood and historical truth. An introduction places the essays in the larger context of earlier and more recent trends in the study of Greek and Roman historiography"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Figuring Genre in Roman Satire written by Catherine Keane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-12 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Satirists are social critics, but they are also products of society. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the verse satirists of ancient Rome, exploit this double identity to produce their colorful commentaries on social life and behavior. In a fresh comparative study that combines literary and cultural analysis, Catherine Keane reveals how the satirists create such a vivid and incisive portrayal of the Roman social world. Throughout the tradition, the narrating satirist figure does not observe human behavior from a distance, but adopts a range of charged social roles to gain access to his subject matter. In his mission to entertain and moralize, he poses alternately as a theatrical performer and a spectator, a perpetrator and victim of violence, a jurist and criminal, a teacher and student. In these roles the satirist conducts penetrating analyses of Rome's definitive social practices "from the inside." Satire's reputation as the quintessential Roman genre is thus even more justified than previously recognized. As literary artists and social commentators, the satirists rival the grandest authors of the classical canon. They teach their ancient and modern readers two important lessons. First, satire reveals the inherent fragilities and complications, as well as acknowledging the benefits, of Roman society's most treasured institutions. The satiric perspective deepens our understanding of Roman ideologies and their fault lines. As the poets show, no system of judgment, punishment, entertainment, or social organization is without its flaws and failures. At the same time, readers are encouraged to view the satiric genre itself as a composite of these systems, loaded with cultural meaning and highly imperfect. The satirist who functions as both subject and critic trains his readers to develop a critical perspective on every kind of authority, including his own.
Download or read book Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome written by C. B. R. Pelling and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to twelve authors from classical antiquity, whose works still address some of our most fundamental concerns in the world today.
Download or read book Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire written by William A. Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus written by A. J. Woodman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tacitus is universally recognised as ancient Rome's greatest writer of history, and his account of the Roman Empire in the first century AD has been fundamental in shaping the modern perception of Rome and its emperors. This Companion provides a new, up-to-date and authoritative assessment of his work and influence which will be invaluable for students and non-specialists as well as of interest to established scholars in the field. First situating Tacitus within the tradition of Roman historical writing and his own contemporary society, it goes on to analyse each of his individual works and then discuss key topics such as his distinctive authorial voice and his views of history and freedom. It ends by tracing Tacitus' reception, beginning with the transition from manuscript to printed editions, describing his influence on political thought in early modern Europe, and concluding with his significance in the twentieth century.
