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Author: Catharine Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
The decadence and depravity of the ancient Romans are a commonplace of serious history, popular novels and spectacular films. This book is concerned not with the question of how immoral the ancient Romans were but why the literature they produced is so preoccupied with immorality. The modern image of immoral Rome derives from ancient accounts which are largely critical rather than celebratory. Upper-class Romans habitually accused one another of the most lurid sexual and sumptuary improprieties. Historians and moralists lamented the vices of their contemporaries and mourned for the virtues of a vanished age. Far from being empty commonplaces these assertions constituted a powerful discourse through which Romans negotiated conflicts and tensions in their social and political order. This study proceeds by a detailed examination of a wide range of ancient texts (all of which are translated) exploring the dynamics of their rhetoric, as well as the ends to which they were deployed. Roman moralising discourse, the author suggests, may be seen as especially concerned with the articulation of anxieties about gender, social status and political power. Individual chapters focus on adultery, effeminacy, the immorality of the Roman theatre, luxurious buildings and the dangers of pleasure. This book should appeal to students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history. It will also attract anthropologists and social and cultural historians.
Author: Catharine Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book Here
Book Description
The decadence and depravity of the ancient Romans are a commonplace of serious history, popular novels and spectacular films. This book is concerned not with the question of how immoral the ancient Romans were but why the literature they produced is so preoccupied with immorality. The modern image of immoral Rome derives from ancient accounts which are largely critical rather than celebratory. Upper-class Romans habitually accused one another of the most lurid sexual and sumptuary improprieties. Historians and moralists lamented the vices of their contemporaries and mourned for the virtues of a vanished age. Far from being empty commonplaces these assertions constituted a powerful discourse through which Romans negotiated conflicts and tensions in their social and political order. This study proceeds by a detailed examination of a wide range of ancient texts (all of which are translated) exploring the dynamics of their rhetoric, as well as the ends to which they were deployed. Roman moralising discourse, the author suggests, may be seen as especially concerned with the articulation of anxieties about gender, social status and political power. Individual chapters focus on adultery, effeminacy, the immorality of the Roman theatre, luxurious buildings and the dangers of pleasure. This book should appeal to students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history. It will also attract anthropologists and social and cultural historians.
Author: Richard A. Bauman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134821344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
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Book Description
First published in 1994. The study of women in the societies of antiquity has assumed a fresh significance in recent years. This book delineates not only the influential and manipulative role of Roman women in the business of government, law and public affairs in general, but also the emergence of women's political and liberationist movements. Professor Bauman's investigation covers the period from C350 BC to AD 68, and thus embraces the Middle and Late Republic and the Early Principate. It is demonstrated that the story of Roman women over that period is one of cohesion and continuity, of the steady expansion of women's roles in public affairs. That paced expansion, and the means by which it was achieved, such as the acquisition and use of legal knowledge and the influence of women's movements, is the central theme of this book. Bauman's treatment is principally chronological, stressing sequential development, concluding with the great ladies of the Emperor's House.
Author: Catharine Edwards
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300112085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
For the Romans, the manner of a person's death was the most telling indication of their true character. Death revealed the true patriot, the genuine philosopher, even, perhaps, the great artist--and certainly the faithful Christian. Catharine Edwards draws on the many and richly varied accounts of death in the writings of Roman historians, poets, and philosophers, including Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Seneca, Petronius, Tacitus, Tertullian, and Augustine, to investigate the complex significance of dying in the Roman world. Death in the Roman world was largely understood and often literally viewed as a spectacle. Those deaths that figured in recorded history were almost invariably violent--murders, executions, suicides--and yet the most admired figures met their ends with exemplary calm, their last words set down for posterity. From noble deaths in civil war, mortal combat between gladiators, political execution and suicide, to the deathly dinner of Domitian, the harrowing deaths of women such as the mythical Lucretia and Nero's mother Agrippina, as well as instances of Christian martyrdom, Edwards engagingly explores the culture of death in Roman literature and history.
Author: Ingo Gildenhard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108888437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
Roman Frugality offers the first-ever systematic analysis of the variants of individual and collective self-restraint that shaped ancient Rome throughout its history and had significant repercussions in post-classical times. In particular, it tries to do the complexity of a phenomenon justice that is situated at the interface of ethics and economics, self and society, the real and the imaginary, and touches upon thrift and sobriety in the material sphere, but also modes of moderation more generally, not least in the spheres of food and drink, sex and power. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on ancient history, philology, archaeology and the history of thought, the volume traces the role of frugal thought and practice within the evolving political culture and political economy of ancient Rome from the archaic age to the imperial period and concludes with a chapter that explores the reception of ancient ideas of self-restraint in early modern times.
Author: Harriet I. Flower
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
This second edition examines all aspects of Roman history, and contains a new introduction, three new chapters and updated bibliographies.
Author: Catharine Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521559522
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The city of Rome is built not only of bricks and marble but also of the words of its writers. For the ancient inhabitant or visitor, the buildings of Rome, the public spaces of the city, were crowded with meanings and associations. These meanings were generated partly through activities associated with particular places, but Rome also took on meanings from literature written about the city: stories of its foundation, praise of its splendid buildings, laments composed by those obliged to leave it. Ancient writers made use of the city to explore the complexities of Roman history, power and identity. This book aims to chart selected aspects of Rome's resonance in literature and the literary resonance of Rome. A wide range of texts are explored, from later periods as well as from antiquity, since, as the author hopes to show, Gibbon, Goethe and others can be revealing guides to the literary topography of ancient Rome.
Author: Mark Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
A study of the history of filth, disease, purity and cleanliness in one of Europe's oldest and most influential cities.
Author: Stephen Benko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253203854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
"In the early Roman empire, Christians were seen by pagans as overthrowers of ancient gods and destroyers of the prevailing social order. Allegations that Christians recognized each other by secret marks, met at night and made love to one another indiscriminately, worshipped the head of an ass and the genitals of their high priests, and ate children were widely believed. In examining these charges and the Christian response to them, Benko has provided a persuasively argued and refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the confrontation of the pagan and early Christian worlds."[book cover].
Author: Greg Woolf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521789820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Studies the 'Romanization' of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire.
Author: Andrew M. Riggsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052168711X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Andrew Riggsby provides a survey of the main areas of Roman law, and their place in Roman life.
