Author: Christina S. Kraus
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
This is a collection of studies on ancient (especially Latin) poetry and historiography, concentrating especially on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of considering the literature to illuminate the historical Roman context and the historical context to illuminate the literature. It takes the form of a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, for whom twenty-one scholars have contributed essays reflecting the interests and approaches that have typified Woodman's own work. The authors that he has continuously illuminated - especially Velleius, Horace, Virgil, Sallust, and Tacitus - figure particularly prominently.
Author: Christina Shuttleworth Kraus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191720888
Category : Historiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
This collection of studies on ancient poetry and historiography pays tribute to the distinguished classicist Tony Woodman. It focuses on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of the literature on illuminating the historical Roman context, and the historical context to illuminate the literature.
Author: Cyril Courrier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000450023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
If ancient history is particularly susceptible to a top-down approach, due to the nature of our evidence and its traditional exploitation by modern scholars, another ancient history—‘from below’—is actually possible. This volume examines the possibilities and challenges involved in writing it. Despite undeniable advances in recent decades, ‘our slowness to reconstruct plausible visions of almost any aspect of society beyond the top-most strata of wealth, power or status’ (as Nicholas Purcell has put it) remains a persistent feature of the field. Therefore, this book concerns a historical field and social groups that are still today neglected by modern scholarship. However, writing ancient history ‘from below’ means much more than taking into account the anonymous masses, the subaltern classes and the non-elites. Our task is also, in the felicitous expression coined by Walter Benjamin, ‘to brush history against the grain,’ to rescue the viewpoint of the subordinated, the traditions of the oppressed. In other words, we should understand the bulk of ancient populations in light of their own experience and their own reactions to that experience. But, how do we do such a history? What sources can we use? What methods and approaches can we employ? What concepts are required to this endeavour? The contributions mainly engage with questions of theory and methodology, but they also constitute inspiring case studies in their own right, ranging from classical Greece to the late antique world. This book is aimed not only at readers working on classical Greece, republican and imperial Rome and late antiquity but at anyone interested in ‘bottom-up’ history and social and population history in general. Although the book is primarily intended for scholars, it will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students of history, archaeology and classical studies.
Author: Andreas Mehl
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118785134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Roman Historiography: An Introduction to its Basic Aspects and Development presents a comprehensive introduction to the development of Roman historical writings in both Greek and Latin, from the early annalists to Orosius and Procopius of Byzantium. Provides an accessible survey of every historical writer of significance in the Roman world Traces the growth of Christian historiography under the influence of its pagan adversaries Offers valuable insight into current scholarly trends on Roman historiography Includes a user-friendly bibliography, catalog of authors and editions, and index Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title
Author: Timothy Howe
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785703005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In the ancient Greek-speaking world, writing about the past meant balancing the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of the present. Ancient Historiography on War and Empire shows the ways in which the literary genre of writing history developed to guide empires through their wars. Taking key events from the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’, the 17 essays collected here analyse the way events and the accounts of those events interact. Subjects include: how Greek historians assign nearly divine honours to the Persian King; the role of the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder in historical narratives of conquest and empire from Herodotus to the Alexander historians; warfare and financial innovation in the age of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great; the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos; Alexander the Great’s combat use of eagle symbolism and divination; Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing as a commentary on political legitimacy and military prowess, and Roman Imperial historians using historical examples of good and bad rule to make meaningful challenges to current Roman authority. In some cases, the balance shifts more towards the ‘literary’ and in others more towards the ‘historical’, but what all of the essays have in common is both a critical attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world and its focus on war and empire.
Author: Luke Pitcher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857718037
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
'History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon', said Napoleon. Yet the actual writing of history, especially ancient history, is a practice that often prompts more discord than assent. In his new textbook, Luke Pitcher aims to overcome the hostility which exists between two rival camps in their study of classical historiography. The first camp looks at the classical historians with an eye to what data they can provide about the ancient world. The second camp examines the ancient writers as literary texts in their own right, employing the tools of literary criticism and engaging with such matters as narrative artistry.Attempting to fuse these two - mutually suspicious - approaches, Luke Pitcher's attractive introduction offers undergraduate students of classics the first comprehensive introduction to historiography in antiquity on the market. It unites the nitty-gritty of the historian's trade (the finding and managing of data) to an awareness of the importance of style, form, allusion and composition. The book also seeks to do justice to individual classical historians, and discusses such important figures as Livy, Tacitus, Herodotus, Cicero, Plutarch and Lucian. A comprehensive bibliography and glossary are included. "Writing Ancient History" at last does full justice to the mechanics of history-writing in the ancient world.
Author: Jonas Grethlein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107378214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Historians often refer to past events which took place prior to their narrative's proper past - that is, they refer to a 'plupast'. This past embedded in the past can be evoked by characters as well as by the historian in his own voice. It can bring into play other texts, but can also draw on lieux de mémoire or on material objects. The articles assembled in this volume explore the manifold forms of the plupast in Greek and Roman historians from Herodotus to Appian. The authors demonstrate that the plupast is a powerful tool for the creation of historical meaning. Moreover, the acts of memory embedded in the historical narrative parallel to some degree the historian's activity of recording the past. The plupast thereby allows Greek and Roman historians to reflect on how (not) to write history and gains metahistorical significance. In shedding new light on the temporal complexity and the subtle forms of self-conscious reflection in the works of ancient historians, Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography significantly enhances our understanding of their narrative art.
Author: Alexandra Lianeri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
This book examines the conceptual and temporal frames through which modern Western historiography has linked itself to classical antiquity. In doing so, it articulates a genealogical problematic of what history is and a more strictly focused reappraisal of Greek and Roman historical thought. Ancient ideas of history have played a key role in modern debates about history writing, from Kant through Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and from Friedrich Creuzer through George Grote and Theodor Mommsen to Momigliano and Moses Finley; yet scholarship has paid little attention to the theoretical implications of the reception of these ideas. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of relevant topics and approaches and boast distinguished authors from across Europe in the fields of classics, ancient and modern history and the theory of historiography.
Author: Jennifer Baird
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136894632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Graffiti are ubiquitous within the ancient world, but remain underexploited as a form of archaeological or historical evidence. They include a great variety of texts and images written or drawn inside and outside buildings, in public and private places, on monuments in the city, on objects used in daily life, and on mountains in the countryside. In each case they can be seen as actively engaging with their environment in a variety of ways. Ancient Graffiti in Context interrogates this cultural phenomenon and by doing so, brings it into the mainstream of ancient history and archaeology. Focusing on different approaches to and interpretations of graffiti from a variety of sites and chronological contexts, Baird and Taylor pose a series of questions not previously asked of this evidence, such as: What are graffiti, and how can we interpret them? In what ways, and with whom, do graffiti communicate? To what extent do graffiti represent or subvert the cultural values of the society in which they occur? By comparing themes across time and space, and viewing graffiti in context, this book provides a series of interpretative strategies for scholars and students of the ancient world. As such it will be essential reading for Classical archaeologists and historians alike.
Author: Liba Taub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521113709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
This book explores how science and mathematics were communicated in antiquity in a wide variety of texts, including poetry, letters and biographies.
