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In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome—as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn’t write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out – like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.
Who were Roman authors writing for? Only a minority of the population was fully literate and books were very expensive, individually hand-written on imported papyrus. So does it follow that great poets and prose authors like Virgil and Livy, Ovid and Petronius, were writing only for the cultured and the privileged? It is this modern consensus that is challenged in this volume. In an ambitious overview of a thousand years of history, from the formation of the city-state of Rome to the establishment of a fully Christian culture, T. P. Wiseman examines the evidence for the oral delivery of 'literature' to mass public audiences. The treatment is chronological, utilizing wherever possible contemp...
Prophecy, Populism, Propaganda in the 'Octavia'
Seneca was a man of many facets: statesman, dramatist, philosopher, prose stylist. His life was marked by extremes of fortune - extremes that are reflected in much of his writing, and in the vicissitudes of his reputation in later centuries. This volume brings together some outstanding essays written about him over the past four decades, and illustrates the diversity of approaches by which modern critics have attempted to understand this multifaceted figure. Just as Seneca's writings often reflect his times, so current critical approaches often reflect issues in contemporary thought and society. Several of the essays have been revised by their authors for this volume, and two of them are translated for the first time. A new introduction places the articles within the context of recent academic thought and criticism. All Latin has been translated.
The Octavia is the only surviving historical drama from ancient Rome. With a plot rich in sex, dynastic intrigue, riots, and murder, the play's characters include the philosopher Seneca, the emperor Nero, the ghost of his murdered mother, his wife Octavia, and his mistress and empress-to-be Poppaea. For centuries dismissed as a feeble, rhetorically overblown closet-drama written without consideration for the demands of plot or stage, the Octavia's dynamic changes of time and setting, its startling interplay of the verbal and visual, and its integration of issues pervading the politics of the period in which it was written, reflect scenic conventions and a notion of the dramatic that radicall...
Winner of American Philological Association: C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit 2005. Shortlisted for British Academy Book Prize 2005. Widely reviewed and celebrated in hardback on publication in 2004, "The Myths of Rome" is now available in a paperback edition.This major re-evaluation of Roman history and its afterlife in western culture through the mediums of myth and art is fast becoming the standard popular account of the Roman story-world. It triumphantly redresses the popular perception of classical myth as a predominantly Greek invention; and builds a cohesive narrative from the mass of mythical and historical tales that cluster around the nexus of Rome. It is set to become a sourcebook for students of Roman myth and history in this country and around the world at undergraduate and graduate level.
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
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