The Anxieties of Pliny, the Younger

The Anxieties of Pliny, the Younger PDF Author: Stanley E. Hoffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780788505652
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book provides a new understanding of Pliny's letters by combining historical analysis of the social pressures that shape Pliny's authorial pose with close literary analysis of the letters themselves. It demonstrates how ruling-class ideology is disseminated and how it shapes the literary persona and personal identity of a ruling-class member. The powerful heuristic tool of examining the interplay between confidence and anxieties in the letters will help restore Pliny's relatively neglected masterpiece to a more prominent place in undergraduate Latin and Roman Civilization courses.

The Anxieties of Pliny, the Younger

The Anxieties of Pliny, the Younger PDF Author: Stanley E. Hoffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780788505652
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book provides a new understanding of Pliny's letters by combining historical analysis of the social pressures that shape Pliny's authorial pose with close literary analysis of the letters themselves. It demonstrates how ruling-class ideology is disseminated and how it shapes the literary persona and personal identity of a ruling-class member. The powerful heuristic tool of examining the interplay between confidence and anxieties in the letters will help restore Pliny's relatively neglected masterpiece to a more prominent place in undergraduate Latin and Roman Civilization courses.

The Letters of The Younger Pliny

The Letters of The Younger Pliny PDF Author: the younger Pliny
Publisher: Lebooks Editora
ISBN: 6558942380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Letters of Pliny the Younger, also known as the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, have been studied for centuries, as they offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the daily life of Romans in the 1st century AD. Through his letters, the Roman writer and lawyer Pliny the Younger (whose full name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) discusses philosophical and moral issues; but he also talks about everyday matters and topics related to his administrative duties. One of these letters, Letter 16 from Book VI, addressed to Tacitus, holds unparalleled historical value. In it, Pliny describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the city of Pompeii. Many scholars claim that with his letters, Pliny invented a new literary genre: the letter written not only to establish pleasant communication with peers but also to publish it later. Pliny compiled copies of every letter he wrote throughout his life and published those he considered the best in twelve books. This edition presents selected letters chosen for their various characteristics and covering several books, focusing mainly on Books I, II, and III. The work is part of the famous collection: 501 Books You Must Read.

The Art of Pliny's Letters

The Art of Pliny's Letters PDF Author: Ilaria Marchesi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521882279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In this book on intertextuality in Pliny the Younger, Professor Marchesi invites an alternative reading of Pliny's collection of private epistles: the letters are examined as the product of an authorial strategy controlling both the rhetorical fabric of individual units and their arrangement in the collection. By inserting recognisable fragments of canonical authors into his epistles, Pliny imports into the still fluid practice of letter-writing the principles of composition and organisation that for his contemporaries characterised other writings as literature. Allusions become the occasion for a metapoetic dialogue, especially with the collection's privileged addressee, Tacitus. An active participant in the cultural politics of his time, Pliny entrusts to the letters his views on poetry, oratory and historiography. In defining a model of epistolography alternative to Cicero's and complementing those of Horace, Ovid and Seneca, he also successfully carves a niche for his work in the Roman literary canon.

Making and Unmaking Ancient Memory

Making and Unmaking Ancient Memory PDF Author: Martine De Marre
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000572269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Making and Unmaking Ancient Memory explores the way in which ancient Greeks and Romans represented their past, and in turn how modern literature and scholarship has approached the reception and transmission of some aspects of ancient culture. The contributions, organised into three sections – Political Legacies, Religious Identities, and Literary Traditions – explore case studies in memory and reception of the past. Through studying the techniques and strategies of ancient historiography, biography, hagiography, and art, as well as their effectiveness, this volume demonstrates how humanity has inevitably conveyed memory and history with (sub)conscious biases and preconceived ideas. In the current age of alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth discourses, these chapters highlight that such phenomena are by no means a recent development. This book offers valuable scholarly perspectives to academics and scholars interested in memory, historiography, and representations of the past in the ancient world, as well as those working on literary traditions and reception studies more broadly.

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech

Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech PDF Author: Ellen O'Gorman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350095508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.

Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity

Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Johan Leemans
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110268558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
The election of a new bishop was a defining moment for local Christian communities in Late Antiquity. This volume contributes to a reassessment of the phenomenon of episcopal elections from the broadest possible perspective, examining the varied combination of factors, personalities, rules and habits that played a role in the process. Building on the state of the art regarding late antique bishops and episcopal election, this interdisciplinary volume of collected studies by leading scholars offers fresh perspectives by focussing on specific case-studies and opening up new approaches.

Late Antique Letter Collections

Late Antique Letter Collections PDF Author: Cristiana Sogno
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520308417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

Apuleius and Africa

Apuleius and Africa PDF Author: Benjamin Todd Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136254080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
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.

KAKOS, Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity

KAKOS, Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity PDF Author: Ineke Sluiter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047443144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
The fourth in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical Antiquity, this volume examines the negative foils, the anti-values, against which positive value notions are conceptualized and calibrated in Classical Antiquity. Eighteen chapters address this theme from different perspectives –historical, literary, legal and philosophical. What makes someone into a prototypically ‘bad’ citizen? Or an abomination of a scholar? What is the relationship between ugliness and value? How do icons of sexual perversion, monstruous emperors and detestable habits function in philosophical and rhetorical prose? The book illuminates the many rhetorical manifestations of the concept of ‘badness’ in classical antiquity in a variety of domains.

Letters and Communities

Letters and Communities PDF Author: Paola Ceccarelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192526227
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.