Download or read book Apuleius and Antonine Rome written by Keith R. Bradley and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apuleius and Antonine Rome features outstanding scholarship by Keith Bradley on the Latin author Apuleius of Madauros and on the second-century Roman world in which Apuleius lived. Bradley discusses Apuleius' work in the context of social relations (especially the family and household), religiosity in all its diversity and complexity, and cultural interactions between the imperial centre and the provincial periphery. These essays examine the Apology, the speech Apuleius made when he defended himself on the criminal charge of having enticed a wealthy widow to marry him through magical means; the fragments of his speeches known as the Florida; and the remarkable serio-comic novel Metamorphoses (better known as The Golden Ass). Altogether, Apuleius and Antonine Rome effectively illustrates how socio-cultural history can be recovered from works of literature.

Download or read book A Companion to the Ancient Novel written by Edmund P. Cueva and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion addresses a topic of continuing contemporary relevance, both cultural and literary. Offers both a wide-ranging exploration of the classical novel of antiquity and a wealth of close literary analysis Brings together the most up-to-date international scholarship on the ancient novel, including fresh new academic voices Includes focused chapters on individual classical authors, such as Petronius, Xenophon and Apuleius, as well as a wide-ranging thematic analysis Addresses perplexing questions concerning authorial expression and readership of the ancient novel form Provides an accomplished introduction to a genre with a rising profile

Download or read book Embracing the Darkness written by John Callow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As dusk fell on a misty evening in 1521, Martin Luther - hiding from his enemies at Wartburg Castle - found himself seemingly tormented by demons hurling walnuts at his bedroom window. In a fit of rage, the great reformer threw at the Devil the inkwell from which he was preparing his colossal translation of the Bible. A belief - like Luther's - in the supernatural, and in black magic, has been central to European cultural life for 3000 years. From the Salem witch trials to the macabre novels of Dennis Wheatley; from the sadistic persecution of eccentric village women to the seductive sorceresses of TV's Charmed; and from Derek Jarman's punk film Jubilee to Ken Russell's The Devils, John Callow brings the twilight world of the witch, mage and necromancer to vivid and fascinating life. He takes us into a shadowy landscape where, in an age before modern drugs, the onset of sudden illness was readily explained by malevolent spellcasting. And where dark, winding country lanes could terrify by night, as the hoot of an owl or shriek of a fox became the desolate cries of unseen spirits.Witchcraft has profoundly shaped the western imagination, and endures in the forms of modern-day Wicca and paganism. Embracing the Darkness is an enthralling account of this fascinating aspect of the western cultural experience.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic written by Daniel S. Richter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity).

Download or read book Fronto and Antonine Rome written by Edward Champlin and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of a man who was the presiding genius of Latin letters in the second century, the leading orator and lawyer of his day, a prominent senator and consul, the close friend of four emperors and the teacher of two, including the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. It is a history that tells as much about the age as the man. The book begins in Roman North Africa, with an account of Fronto's family and education and the province's influence on his career. After a brief glance at his Italian milieu, Champlin examines Fronto's letters for what they reveal about Fronto and about literary life in the second century. Next come portrayals of Fronto as lawyer, as senator, and as courtier--chapters in Fronto's life that yield a full picture of Antonine society. A final chapter discusses what Marcus Aurelius learned from the orator. The fragmentary nature of Fronto's letters has seriously hampered their use as a historical source. By close analysis of many of the letters and by the deployment of formidable prosopographical skills, Champlin has coaxed information out of this rich material, and he weaves it into a clear social history.

Download or read book Apuleius and Africa written by Benjamin Todd Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius (ca. 170 CE) is a Latin novel written by a native of Madauros in Roman North Africa, roughly equal to modern Tunisia together with parts of Libya and Algeria. Apuleius’ novel is based on the model of a lost Greek novel; it narrates the adventures of a Greek character with a Roman name who spends the bulk of the novel transformed into an animal, traveling from Greece to Rome only to end his adventures in the capital city of the empire as a priest of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Apuleius’ Florida and Apology deal more explicitly with the African provenance and character of their author while also demonstrating his complex interaction with Greek, Roman, and local cultures. Apuleius’ philosophical works raise other questions about Greek vs. African and Roman cultural identity. Apuleius in Africa addresses the problem of this intricate complex of different identities and its connection to Apuleius’ literary production. It especially emphasizes Apuleius’ African heritage, a heritage that has for the most part been either downplayed or even deplored by previous scholarship. The contributors include philologists, historians, and experts in material culture; among them are some of the most respected scholars in their fields. The chapters give due attention to all elements of Apuleius’ oeuvre, and break new ground both on the interpretation of Apuleius’ literary production and on the culture of the Roman Empire in the second century. The volume also includes a modern, sub-Saharan contribution in which "Africa" mainly means Mediterranean Africa.

Download or read book The Antonines written by Michael Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antonines - Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus and Commodus - played a crucial part in the development of the Roman empire, controlling its huge machine for half a century of its most testing period. Edward Gibbon observed that the epoch of the Antonines, the 2nd century A.D., was the happiest period the world had ever known. In this lucid, authoritative survey, Michael Grant re-examines Gibbon's statement, and gives his own magisterial account of how the lives of the emperors and the art, literature, architecture and overall social condition under the Antonines represented an `age of transition'. The Antonines is essential reading for anyone who is interested in ancient history, as well as for all students and teachers of the subject.

Download or read book Greek and Roman Slaveries written by Eftychia Bathrellou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-04-20 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greek and Roman Slaveries Slavery was foundational to Greek and Roman societies, affecting nearly all of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. Greek and Roman Slaveries offers a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, including many unfamiliar ones. This sourcebook ranges chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity, covering the whole of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe. Readers will find an interactive and user-friendly engagement with past scholarship and new research agendas that focuses particularly on the agency of ancient slaves, the processes in which slavery was inscribed, the changing history of slavery in antiquity, and the comparative study of ancient slaveries. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on ancient slavery, as well as courses on slavery more generally, this sourcebook’s questions, cross-references, and bibliographies encourage an analytical and interactive approach to the various economic, social, and political processes and contexts in which slavery was employed while acknowledging the agency of enslaved persons.

Download or read book Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel written by Michael Paschalis and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume comprises most of the papers delivered at RICAN 4 in 2007. The focus is placed on readers and writers in the ancient novel and broadly in ancient fiction, though without ignoring readers and writers of the ancient novel. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: the reading of novels in antiquity as a process of active engagement with the text (Konstan); the dialogic character, involving writer and reader, of Lucian's Verae Historiae (Futre Pinheiro); book divisions in Chariton's Callirhoe as prompts guiding the reader towards gradual mastery over the text (Whitmarsh); polypragmosyne (curiosity) in ancient fiction and how it affects the practice of reading novels (Hunter); the intriguing relationship between the writing and reading of inscriptions in ancient fiction (Slater); the tension between public and private in constructing and reading of texts inserted in the novelistic prose (Nimis); the intertextual pedigree of the poet Eumolpus (Smith); Seneca's Claudius and Petronius' Encolpius as readers of Homer and Virgil and writers of literary scenarios (Paschalis); the ways in which some Greek novels draw the reader's attention to their status as written texts (Bowie); the interfaces between tellers and receivers of stories in Antonius Diogenes (Morgan); the generic components and the putative author of the Alexander Romance (Stoneman); Diktys as a writer and ways of reading his Ephemeris (Dowden); the presence and character of Iliadic intertexts in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (Harrison); the contrasting roles of the narrator-translator in Apuleius' Metamorphoses and De deo Socratis (Fletcher); seriocomic strategies by Roman authors of narrative fiction and fable (Graverini & Keulen); reading as a function for recognizing 'allegorical moments' in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (Zimmerman); active and passive reading as embedded in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius; and the importance of book reading in Augustine's 'novelistic' Confessions (Hunink).

Download or read book The Practice of Rhetoric written by Debra Hawhee and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rhetoric, broadly conceived as the art of making things matter, is both a practice and theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a "practical art." By practical art, they mean methods tested in practice, by trial and error, with a goal of offering something useful and teachable. This volume presents just such an account of rhetoric. The account here does not turn away from theory, but rather presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The approaches ventured in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric's educational mission and its contributions to civic life. The Practice of Rhetoric is organized into three sections designed to spotlight, in turn, the importance of poetics, performance, and philosophy in rhetorical practice. The volume begins with poetics, stressing the world-making properties of that word, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the mid-twentieth century. Susan C. Jarratt, for instance, probes the art of ekphrasis, or vivid description, and its capacity for rendering alternative futures. Michele Kennerly explores a little-studied linguistic predecessor to prose-logos psilos, or naked speech-exposing the early rumblings of a separation between poetic and rhetorical texts even as it historicizes the idea of clothed or ornamented speech. In an essay on the almost magical properties of writing, Debra Hawhee considers the curious practice of people writing letters to animals in order to banish or punish them, thereby casting the epistolary arts in a new light. Part 2 moves to performance. Vessela Valiavitcharska examines the intertwining of poetic rhythm and performance in Byzantine rhetorical education, and how such practices underlie the very foundations of oratory. Dale Martin Smith draws on the ancient stylistic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus along with the activist work of contemporary poets Amiri Baraka and Harmony Holiday to show how performance and persuasion unify rhetoric and poetics. Most treatments of philosophy and rhetoric begin within a philosophical framework, and remain there, focusing on old tools like stasis and disputation. Essays in part 3 break out of that mold by focusing on the utility and teachability of rhetorical principles in education. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor update stasis, a classical framework that encourages aspiring rhetors to ask after the nature of things, their facts and their qualities, as a way of locating an argument's position. Mark Garrett Longaker probes the medieval practice of disputation in order to marshal a new argument about why, exactly, John Locke detested rhetoric, and the longstanding opposition between science and rhetoric as modes of proof that has lasting implications for the way argument works today. Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the co-operation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. The volume promises to rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission"--

Download or read book Law in the Roman Provinces written by Kimberley Czajkowski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the Roman Empire has changed dramatically in the last century, with significant emphasis now placed on understanding the experiences of subject populations, rather than a sole focus on the Roman imperial elites. Local experiences, and interactions between periphery and centre, are an intrinsic component in our understanding of the empire's function over and against the earlier, top-down model. But where does law fit into this new, decentralized picture of empire? This volume brings together internationally renowned scholars from both legal and historical backgrounds to study the operation of law in each region of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Egypt, from the first century BCE to the end of the third century CE. Regional specificities are explored in detail alongside the emergence of common themes and activities in a series of case studies that together reveal a new and wide-ranging picture of law in the Roman Empire, balancing the practicalities of regional variation with the ideological constructs of law and empire.

Download or read book The Language of Roman Letters written by Olivia Elder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores in depth how bilingualism in the correspondence of elite Romans illuminates their lives, relationships and identities.

Download or read book Roman Reflections written by Gareth D. Williams and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collection of 13 essays delivered at a conference held at Columbia University in March 2012.

Download or read book Paul in the Greco Roman World A Handbook written by J. Paul Sampley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark handbook, written by distinguished Pauline scholars, and first published in 2003, remains the first and only work to offer lucid and insightful examinations of Paul and his world in such depth. Together the two volumes that constitute the handbook in its much revised form provide a comprehensive reference resource for new testament scholars looking to understand the classical world in which Paul lived and work. Each chapter provides an overview of a particular social convention, literary of rhetorical topos, social practice, or cultural mores of the world in which Paul and his audiences were at home. In addition, the sections use carefully chosen examples to demonstrate how particularly features of Greco-Roman culture shed light on Paul's letters and on his readers' possible perception of them. For the new edition all the contributions have been fully revised to take into account the last ten years of methodological change and the helpful chapter bibliographies fully updated. Wholly new chapters cover such issues as Paul and Memory, Paul's Economics, honor and shame in Paul's writings and the Greek novel.

Download or read book The Antonines written by Michael Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antonines - Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus and Commodus - played a crucial part in the development of the Roman empire, controlling its huge machine for half a century of its most testing period. Edward Gibbon observed that the epoch of the Antonines, the 2nd century A.D., was the happiest period the world had ever known. In this lucid, authoritative survey, Michael Grant re-examines Gibbon's statement, and gives his own magisterial account of how the lives of the emperors and the art, literature, architecture and overall social condition under the Antonines represented an `age of transition'. The Antonines is essential reading for anyone who is interested in ancient history, as well as for all students and teachers of the subject.

Download or read book From Pliny the Younger to Symmachus written by Simone Mollea and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-10-21 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates one of the most polysemic Latin words, humanitas. While the first chapter briefly retraces the history of humanitas from its origins, the book as a whole focuses on its uses in the pagan literary texts from the Trajanic (late first century CE) to the Theodosian age (late fourth century CE). The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which the different meanings usually attributed to humanitas by dictionaries (roughly 'human nature', 'education and culture', 'philanthropy') are much more nuanced and in continuous relation with one another, and how the use of humanitas by some authors often performs clear rhetorical and/or ideological strategies. This book is therefore not only a lexicographical study, but pays careful attention to the wider historical and cultural contexts in which humanitas was employed. More specifically, the use of humanitas reveals the ways in which Roman authors considered themes that were at the core of their conception of culture and civilisation, such as the relationship between being learned and behaving morally, the ideas of moral nobility and clemency, the notion that a value concept can distinguish one category of men from another, or even one historical period from another.

Download or read book Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel written by Jean Alvares and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe and Heliodorus’s Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as reflecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements. Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary is an understanding of these ideal elements to a full understanding of the novels’ possible readings and their reader’s attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes. Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also find the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas.