The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus

The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus PDF Author: Melanie Racette-Campbell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299343502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The political rupture caused by the ascension of Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome, which ended the centuries-old Republic, had drastic consequences for the performance and understanding of masculinity in a markedly androcentric society. Previously, masculinity was established and maintained through the frame of competition, in both public and private spheres—but the total accumulation of power by one man foreclosed most avenues of, and even appreciation for, competition. Melanie Racette-Campbell examines how Rome’s elite men navigated this liminal moment between Republic and Empire, and shows that the process was neither linear nor uniform. Already in the late Republic, prior to Augustus’s rise to power, cracks in the hegemonic concept of masculinity were starting to show. Careful reading of contemporary texts reveals a decades-long process as tumultuous and unsteady as the political events they echoed, one in which multiple and competing strategies for reconceiving the nature of masculinity were tested, employed, discarded, and adopted in a complex public-private discourse. The eventual reconstitution of a definition of Roman manhood was not easily agreed upon. Masculinity in both the Republic and the Empire are well studied subjects, but by shining a light on the precise moment of transition Racette-Campbell unveils the precise complexity, contours, and nuances of the Augustan crisis of masculinity.

The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus

The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus PDF Author: Melanie Racette-Campbell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299343502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
The political rupture caused by the ascension of Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome, which ended the centuries-old Republic, had drastic consequences for the performance and understanding of masculinity in a markedly androcentric society. Previously, masculinity was established and maintained through the frame of competition, in both public and private spheres—but the total accumulation of power by one man foreclosed most avenues of, and even appreciation for, competition. Melanie Racette-Campbell examines how Rome’s elite men navigated this liminal moment between Republic and Empire, and shows that the process was neither linear nor uniform. Already in the late Republic, prior to Augustus’s rise to power, cracks in the hegemonic concept of masculinity were starting to show. Careful reading of contemporary texts reveals a decades-long process as tumultuous and unsteady as the political events they echoed, one in which multiple and competing strategies for reconceiving the nature of masculinity were tested, employed, discarded, and adopted in a complex public-private discourse. The eventual reconstitution of a definition of Roman manhood was not easily agreed upon. Masculinity in both the Republic and the Empire are well studied subjects, but by shining a light on the precise moment of transition Racette-Campbell unveils the precise complexity, contours, and nuances of the Augustan crisis of masculinity.

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 3, Sites of Knowledge and Practice

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 3, Sites of Knowledge and Practice PDF Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1066

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Book Description
Volume III provides in-depth analyses of specific times and places in the history of world sexualities, to investigate more closely the lived experience of individuals and groups to reveal the diversity of human sexualities. Comprising twenty-five chapters, this volume covers ancient Athens, Rome, and Constantinople; eighth- and ninth-century Chang'an, ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad, and tenth- through twelfth-century Kyoto; fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iceland and Florence; sixteenth-century Tenochtitlan, Istanbul, and Geneva; eighteenth-century Edo, Paris, and Philadelphia; nineteenth-century Cairo, London, and Manila; late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lagos, Bombay, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, and twentieth-century Sydney, Toronto, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. Broad in range, this volume sheds light on continuities and changes in world sexualities across time and space.

Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire

Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire PDF Author: Charles Goldberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000299007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This volume explores the role that republican political participation played in forging elite Roman masculinity. It situates familiarly "manly" traits like militarism, aggressive sexuality, and the pursuit of power within a political system based on power sharing and cooperation. In deliberations in the Senate, at social gatherings, and on military campaign, displays of consensus with other men greased the wheels of social discourse and built elite comradery. Through literary sources and inscriptions that offer censorious or affirmative appraisal of male behavior from the Middle and Late Republic (ca. 300–31 BCE) to the Principate or Early Empire (ca. 100 CE), this book shows how the vir bonus, or "good man," the Roman persona of male aristocratic excellence, modulated imperatives for personal distinction and military and sexual violence with political cooperation and moral exemplarity. While the advent of one-man rule in the Empire transformed political power relations, ideals forged in the Republic adapted to the new climate and provided a coherent model of masculinity for emperor and senator alike. Scholars often paint a picture of Republic and Principate as distinct landscapes, but enduring ideals of male self-fashioning constitute an important continuity. Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire provides a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of masculinity and political power for anyone interested in Roman political and social history, and those working on gender in the ancient world more broadly.

Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus

Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus PDF Author: Kristina Milnor
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191515647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The age of Augustus has long been recognized as a time when the Roman state put a new emphasis on `traditional' feminine domestic ideals, yet at the same time gave real public prominence to certain women in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Kristina Milnor takes up a series of texts and their contexts in order to explore this paradox. Through an examination of authors such as Vitruvius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca the Elder, and Columella, she argues that female domesticity was both a principle and a problem for early imperial writers, as they sought to construct a new definition of who and what constituted Roman public life.

Behold the Man

Behold the Man PDF Author: Colleen Conway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190296003
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In this book, Colleen Conway looks at the construction of masculinity in New Testament depictions of Jesus. She argues that the New Testament writers necessarily engaged the predominant gender ideology of the Roman Empire, whether consciously or unconsciously. Although the notion of what constituted ideal masculinity in Greek and Roman cultures certainly pre-dated the Roman Empire, the emergence of the Principate concentrated this gender ideology on the figure of the emperor. Indeed, critical to the success of the empire was the portrayal of the emperor as the ideal man and the Roman citizen as one who aspired to be the same. Any person who was held up alongside the emperor as another source of authority would be assessed in terms of the cultural values represented in this Roman image of the "manly man." Conway examines a variety of ancient ideas of masculinity, as found in philosophical discourses, medical treaties, imperial documents, and ancient inscriptions. Manliness, in these accounts, was achieved through self-control over passions such as lust, anger, and greed. It was also gained through manly displays of courage, the endurance of pain, and death on behalf of others. With these texts as a starting point, Conway shows how the New Testament writings approach Jesus' gender identity. From Paul's early letters to the Gospels and Acts, to the book of Revelation, Christian writings in the Bible confront the potentially emasculating scandal of the cross and affirm Jesus as ideally masculine. Conway's study touches on such themes as the relationship between divinity and masculinity; the role of the body in relation to gender identity; and belief in Jesus as a means of achieving a more ideal form of masculinity. This impeccably researched and highly readable book reveals the importance of ancient gender ideology for the interpretation of Christian texts.

Didactic Literature in the Roman World

Didactic Literature in the Roman World PDF Author: T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book collects new work on Latin didactic poetry and prose in the late Republic and early Empire, and it evaluates the varied, shifting roles that literature of teaching and learning played during this period. Instruction was of special interest in the culture and literature of the late Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus, as attitudes towards education found complex, fluid, and multivalent expressions. The era saw a didactic boom, a cottage industry whose surviving authors include Vergil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Varro, Germanicus, and Grattius, who are all reexamined here. The contributors to this volume bring fresh approaches to the study of educational literature from the end of the Roman Republic and early Empire, and their essays discover unexpected connections between familiar authors. Chapters explore, interrogate, and revise some aspect of our understanding of these generic and modal boundaries, while considering understudied points of contact between art and education, poetry and prose, and literature and philosophy, among others. Altogether, the volume shows how lively, experimental, and intertextual the didactic ethos of this period is, and how deeply it engages with social, political, and philosophical questions that are of critical importance to contemporary Rome and of enduring interest into the modern world. Didactic Literature in the Roman World is of interest to students and scholars of Latin literature, particularly the late Republic and early Empire, and of Classics more broadly. In addition, the volume’s focus on didactic poetry and prose appeals to those working on literature outside of Classics and on intellectual history.

Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14–2014

Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14–2014 PDF Author: Penelope J. Goodman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108540058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
The bimillennium of Augustus' death on 19 August 2014 commemorated not only the end of his life but also the beginning of a two-thousand-year reception history. This volume addresses the range and breadth of that history. Beginning with the Emperor's death and continuing through Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and early modernity to the present day, chapters address political positioning, religious mythologisation, philosophy, rhetoric, narratives, memory, and material embodiment. As they collectively reveal, Augustus has meant radically different things from one time and place to another, and even to some individual commentators as the circumstances around them changed. The weight of established narratives has often also shaped those of subsequent generations, with or without their conscious awareness. The book outlines and analyses the major themes in Augustus' reception history, clarifying the cultural and historiographical issues at stake and providing a platform for further scholarship.

Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature

Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature PDF Author: Dr Mehl Allan Penrose
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472422287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
In Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature, Mehl Allan Penrose examines three distinct male figures, each of which was represented as the Other in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The most common configuration of non-normative men was the petimetre, an effeminate, Francophile male who figured a failed masculinity, a dubious sexuality, and an invasive French cultural presence. Also inscribed within cultural discourse were the bujarrón or ‘sodomite,’ who participates in sexual relations with men, and the Arcadian shepherd, who expresses his desire for other males and who takes on agency as the voice of homoerotica. Analyzing journalistic essays, poetry, and drama, Penrose shows that Spanish authors employed queer images of men to engage debates about how males should appear, speak, and behave and whom they should love in order to be considered ‘real’ Spaniards. Penrose interrogates works by a wide range of writers, including Luis Cañuelo, Ramón de la Cruz, and Félix María de Samaniego, arguing that the tropes created by these authors solidified the gender and sexual binary and defined and described what a ‘queer’ man was in the Spanish collective imaginary. Masculinity and Queer Desire engages with current cultural, historical, and theoretical scholarship to propose the notion that the idea of queerness in gender and sexuality based on identifiable criteria started in Spain long before the medical concept of the ‘homosexual’ was created around 1870.

The Public Lives of Ancient Women (500 BCE-650 CE)

The Public Lives of Ancient Women (500 BCE-650 CE) PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004534512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Covering a broad chronological and geographic range and a great variety of source types, this volume examines the presence and activities of ancient women in the public domain, for example as rulers, patrons, priestesses, wives, athletes and pilgrims.

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides"

Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's Author: Simona Martorana
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501777084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" explores Ovid's reconceptualization of the heroines' maternal experience. Rather than aligning them with the stereotypical roles of Roman women, motherhood enables the Ovidian heroines to challenge traditional norms with irreverent perspectives on gender categories and familial relationships. To confront these perspectives and overcome the dialectic between the (male) voice of the poet and the (female) voice of the heroines, Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" argues for a form of polyphonic "cooperation" between the two voices, thus providing new angles on ironical discourse and gender fluidity within the Heroides. By reading the Heroides both through feminist theory and against Ovid's poetic production, Simona Martorana provides a novel approach to describe how motherhood enhances the heroines' agency, drawing on works of Kristeva, Irigaray, Butler, Mulvey, Cavarero, Braidotti, and Ettinger. The application of theory is flexible throughout Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" and tailored to the nuances of specific passages rather than being uniformly imposed on the ancient text. Seeking the Mothers in Ovid's "Heroides" reveals how the irony, ambiguity, and polyphony intrinsic to Ovid's poetry are amplified by the heroines' poetic voices. Martorana breaks new ground by incorporating contemporary feminist theories within the analysis of the Heroides and provides an original comprehensive analysis of motherhood that encompasses other Ovidian works, Latin poetry, and classical literature more broadly.