Author: Rebecca Langlands
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040604
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
"The well-known mythographer Marina Warner has described the process of reading fairy tales and folktales as 'tasting the dragon's blood' - a magical and transformative process by which one's ears are opened to the voices of the past and of other worlds. Roman exempla, which constitute a national story-telling tradition, are very different in many ways from the dream-like fantasies of fairy-tales and other narrative folk traditions that have been the subject of Warner's studies. In (supposedly) true stories from history, battle-hardened warriors, noble maidens and honourable sons of the soil face impossible dangers, take terrible decisions and sacrifice their lives, their limbs and even their own children for the sake of justice, discipline and the Roman community. Yet for the ancient Romans too, hearing the blood-soaked stories of their ancestral heroes was an intimate and potent experience, and this 'taste of the hero's blood' had an intoxicating effect similar to the blood of Warner's dragon: evoking other worlds, shaping understanding of their own world"--
Author: Rebecca Langlands
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108640443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
This ground-breaking study conveys the thrill and moral power of the ancient Roman story-world and its ancestral tales of bloody heroism. Its account of 'exemplary ethics' explores how and what Romans learnt from these moral exempla, arguing that they disseminated widely not only core values such as courage and loyalty, but also key ethical debates and controversies which are still relevant for us today. Exemplary ethics encouraged controversial thinking, creative imitation, and a critical perspective on moral issues, and it plays an important role in Western philosophical thought. The model of exemplary ethics developed here is based on a comprehensive survey of Latin literature, and its innovative approach also synthesizes methodologies from disciplines such as contemporary philosophy, educational theory, and cultural memory studies. It offers a new and robust framework for the study of Roman exempla that will also be valuable for the study of moral exempla in other settings.
Author: Rebecca Langlands
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521859433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
A 2006 study of Roman sexuality and sexual ethics focusing on the crucial and unsettled concept of pudicitia.
Author: Matthew B. Roller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107162599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Presents a coherent model for understanding historical examples in Ancient Rome and their rhetorical, moral and historiographical functions.
Author: Alice König
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316999947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
This book explores new ways of analysing interactions between different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities across the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva to the Severans (96–235 CE). Bringing together leading scholars in classics with experts in the history of Judaism, Christianity and the Near East, it looks beyond the Greco-Roman binary that has dominated many studies of the period, and moves beyond traditional approaches to intertextuality in its study of the circulation of knowledge across languages and cultures. Its sixteen chapters explore shared ideas about aspects of imperial experience - law, patronage, architecture, the army - as well as the movement of ideas about history, exempla, documents and marvels. As the second volume in the Literary Interactions series, it offers a new and expansive vision of cross-cultural interaction in the Roman world, shedding light on connections that have gone previously unnoticed among the subcultures of a vast and evolving Empire.
Author: Tom Geue
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature. From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature. Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s. In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.
Author: Clive Skidmore
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The popularity of the work of Valerius Maximus during the Middle Ages and Renaissance was due to its value as a source of moral exhortation and guidance: the work was as relevant to the readers of those times as it had been to Valerius' contemporaries in the first century AD. Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen demonstrates that the purpose of Valerius' work was to promote a system of morality based upon historical precedent that was both traditional and authoritative to the educated classes for whom he wrote. Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen offers a re-definition of the purpose of Valerius' work and totally new conclusions about its predecessors, form and audience. The book is not confined to an examination of Valerius' work in isolation, but also examines earlier forms of exemplary literature, questions of how Roman literature was communicated to its audience, and presents an entirely new theory on the identity of Valerius Maximus the author.
Author: Teresa Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107321158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.
Author: Benjamin Hartmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316999114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
In a society in which only a fraction of the population was literate and numerate, being one of the few specialists in reading, writing and reckoning meant the possession of an invaluable asset. The fact that the Roman state heavily relied on these professional scribes in financial and legal administration led to their holding a unique position and status. By gathering and analysing the available source material on the Roman scribae, Benjamin Hartmann traces the history of Rome's public scribes from the early Republic to the Later Roman Empire. He tells the story of men of low social origin, who, by means of their specialised knowledge, found themselves at the heart of the Roman polity, in close proximity to the powerful and responsible for the written arcana of the state – a story of knowledge and power, corruption and contested social mobility.
Author: Jerry L. Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429671547
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Thinking about ultimate reality is becoming increasingly transreligious. This transreligious turn follows inevitably from the discovery of divine truths in multiple traditions. Global communications bring the full range of religious ideas and practices to anyone with access to the internet. Moreover, the growth of the nones and those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious creates a pressing need for theological thinking not bound by prescribed doctrines and fixed rituals. This book responds to this vital need. The chapters in this volume each examine the claim that if the aim of theology is to know and articulate all we can about the divine reality, and if revelations, enlightenments, and insights into that reality are not limited to a single tradition, then what is called for is a theology without confessional restrictions. In other words, a Theology Without Walls. To ground the project in examples, the volume provides emerging models of transreligious inquiry. It also includes sympathetic critics who raise valid concerns that such a theology must face. This is a book that will be of urgent interest to theologians, religious studies scholars, and philosophers of religion. It will be especially suitable for those interested in comparative theology, inter-religious and interfaith understanding, new trends in constructive theology, normative religious studies, and global philosophy of religion.
