Rome and the Mysterious Orient

Rome and the Mysterious Orient PDF Author: Plautus
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520242750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Rome and the Mysterious Orient

Rome and the Mysterious Orient PDF Author: Plautus
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520938224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays—originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens—tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a hilarious, inspired sampling of American popular culture—from songs to movie stars to slang. Matching the original Latin line for line, this volume captures the full exuberance of Plautus's street language, bursting with puns, learned allusions, ethnic slurs, dirty jokes, and profanities, as it brings three rarely translated works—Weevil (Curculio), Iran Man (Persa), and Towelheads (Poenulus)—to a wide contemporary audience. Richlin's erudite introduction sets these plays within the context of the long history of East-West conflict and illuminates the role played by comedy and performance in imperialism and colonialism. She has also provided detailed and wide-ranging contextual introductions to the individual plays, as well as extensive notes, which, together with these superb and provocative translations, will bring Plautus alive for a new generation of readers and actors.

Rome and the Mysterious Orient

Rome and the Mysterious Orient PDF Author: Plautus
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520938229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays—originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens—tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a hilarious, inspired sampling of American popular culture—from songs to movie stars to slang. Matching the original Latin line for line, this volume captures the full exuberance of Plautus's street language, bursting with puns, learned allusions, ethnic slurs, dirty jokes, and profanities, as it brings three rarely translated works—Weevil (Curculio), Iran Man (Persa), and Towelheads (Poenulus)—to a wide contemporary audience. Richlin's erudite introduction sets these plays within the context of the long history of East-West conflict and illuminates the role played by comedy and performance in imperialism and colonialism. She has also provided detailed and wide-ranging contextual introductions to the individual plays, as well as extensive notes, which, together with these superb and provocative translations, will bring Plautus alive for a new generation of readers and actors.

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic

Slave Theater in the Roman Republic PDF Author: Amy Richlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108216439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together, the actors made comedy to address mixed-class, hybrid, multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus, where slaves are central figures, and the extant fragments of early comedy, this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech, humor, and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation, beatings, sexual abuse, hard labor, hunger, poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt, violence, and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people desired: revenge, honor, free will, legal personhood, family, marriage, sex, food, free speech; a way home, through memory; and manumission, or escape - all complicated by the actors' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.

Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome

Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004548386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The cryptic figure of the cinaedus recurs in both the literature and daily life of the Roman world. His afterlife – the equally cryptic catamite – appears to be well and alive as late as Victorian England. But who was the cinaedus? Should we think of a real group of individuals, or is the term but a scare name to keep at bay any form of threating otherness? This book, the first coherent collection of essays on the topic, addresses the matter and fleshes out the complexity of a debate that concerns not only Roman cinaedi but the foundations of our theoretical approach to the study of ancient sexuality.

Citizens in the Graeco-Roman World

Citizens in the Graeco-Roman World PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004352619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The twelve studies contained in this volume discuss some key-aspects of citizenship from its emergence in Archaic Greece until the Roman period before AD 212, when Roman citizenship was extended to all the free inhabitants of the Empire. The book explores the processes of formation and re-formation of citizen bodies, the integration of foreigners, the question of multiple-citizenship holders and the political and philosophical thought on ancient citizenship. The aim is that of offering a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, ranging from literature to history and philosophy, as well as encouraging the reader to integrate the traditional institutional and legalistic approach to citizenship with a broader perspective, which encompasses aspects such as identity formation, performative aspect and discourse of citizenship.

A Companion to Roman Imperialism

A Companion to Roman Imperialism PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004236465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The Roman empire extended over three continents, and all its lands came to share a common culture, bequeathing a legacy vigorous even today. A Companion to Roman Imperialism, written by a distinguished body of scholars, explores the extraordinary phenomenon of Rome’s rise to empire to reveal the impact which this had on her subject peoples and on the Romans themselves. The Companion analyses how Rome’s internal affairs and international relations reacted on each other, sometimes with violent results, why some lands were annexed but others ignored or given up, and the ways in which Rome’s population and power élite evolved as former subjects, east and west, themselves became Romans and made their powerful contributions to Roman history and culture. Contributors are Eric Adler, Richard Alston, Lea Beness, Paul Burton, Brian Campbell, Arthur Eckstein, Peter Edwell, Tom Hillard, Richard Hingley, Benjamin Isaac, José Luis López Castro, J. Majbom Madsen, Susan Mattern, Sophie Mills, David Potter, Jonathan Prag, Steven Rutledge, Maurice Sartre, John Serrati, Tom Stevenson, Martin Stone, and James Thorne.

The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World

The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World PDF Author: Werner Riess
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472121839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
What soldiers do on the battlefield or boxers do in the ring would be treated as criminal acts if carried out in an everyday setting. Perpetrators of violence in the classical world knew this and chose their venues and targets with care: killing Julius Caesar at a meeting of the Senate was deliberate. That location asserted Senatorial superiority over a perceived tyrant, and so proclaimed the pure republican principles of the assassins. The contributors to The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World take on a task not yet addressed in classical scholarship: they examine how topography shaped the perception and interpretation of violence in Greek and Roman antiquity. After an introduction explaining the “spatial turn” in the theoretical study of violence, “paired” chapters review political assassination, the battlefield, violence against women and slaves, and violence at Greek and Roman dinner parties. No other book either adopts the spatial theoretical framework or pairs the examination of different classes of violence in classical antiquity in this way. Both undergraduate and graduate students of classics, history, and political science will benefit from the collection, as will specialists in those disciplines. The papers are original and stimulating, and they are accessible to the educated general reader with some grounding in classical history.

Plautus and Roman Slavery

Plautus and Roman Slavery PDF Author: Roberta Stewart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405196289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book studies a crucial phase in the history of Roman slavery, beginning with the transition to chattel slavery in the third century bce and ending with antiquity’s first large-scale slave rebellion in the 130s bce. Slavery is a relationship of power, and to study slavery – and not simply masters or slaves – we need to see the interactions of individuals who speak to each other, a rare kind of evidence from the ancient world. Plautus’ comedies could be our most reliable source for reconstructing the lives of slaves in ancient Rome. By reading literature alongside the historical record, we can conjure a thickly contextualized picture of slavery in the late third and early second centuries bce, the earliest period for which we have such evidence. The book discusses how slaves were captured and sold; their treatment by the master and the community; the growth of the conception of the slave as “other than human,” and as chattel; and the problem of freedom for both slaves and society.

Roman Theatre

Roman Theatre PDF Author: Timothy J. Moore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521138183
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
An exciting series that provides students with direct access to the ancient world by offering new translations of extracts from its key texts.