Ovid's Fasti

Ovid's Fasti

Author: Geraldine Herbert-Brown

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780198154754

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This ground-breaking book celebrates the bimillennial anniversary of the inception of Ovid's Fasti by offering a variety of approaches to Ovid's poem on the Roman religious calendar. The volume does not aim at consensus but brings together experts from around the world without allowing any single prejudice to prevail.


Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond

Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond

Author: Michèle Lowrie

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-10-13

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1009034650

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Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.


The Fragmentary Latin Poets

The Fragmentary Latin Poets

Author: Edward Courtney

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9780199265794

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To understand fully the development of Latin poetry, one has to consider not only the prominent figures whose works survive entire but also the writers known to us only in fragments, usually small, from quotations. The fragments of the non-dramatic poets have been collected by Baehrens, Morel,and Buchner, but only a few have ever received a commentary. This book revises the texts, taking advantage of much earlier work now largely forgotten, and provides the necessary interpretative and illustrative material. By building up, wherever possible, a picture of each writer, Professor Courtneyplaces them in relation to the development of Latin poetry and thus gathers together information at present widely scattered and not easy to locate. While omitting some material which does not contribute to the focus of the book, he adds some writers not usually included in this corpus -particularly Tiberianus, the so-called De Bello Actiaco and the minor works of Ennius.


Playing with Time

Playing with Time

Author: Carole Elizabeth Newlands

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780801430800

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Ovid's Fasti, unlike his Metamorphoses, is anchored in Rome: religion, history and legend, monuments, and character. The poem interprets the Augustan period not as a golden age of peace and prosperity, Carole E. Newlands asserts, but as an age of experimentation, negotiation, compromise, and unresolved tensions. Newlands maintains that, despite the Fasti's basic adherence to the format of the calendar, the text is carefully constructed to reflect the tensions within its subject: the new Roman year. Ovid plays with the calendar. Through the alteration or omission of significant dates, through skilled juxtapositions, through multiple narrators and the development of an increasingly unreliable authorial persona, Ovid opens to a critical and often humorous scrutiny the political ideology of the calendar. By adding astronomical observations and aetiological explanations for certain constellations, Newlands says, Ovid introduced the richly allusive world of Greek mythology to the calendar. Newlands restores the poem to a position of importance, one displaying Ovid's wit and intellect at its best. The incompleteness of the Fasti, she adds, is a comment on the discord that characterized Augustus' later years and led to enforced silences.


The Fragments of the Roman Historians

The Fragments of the Roman Historians

Author: Tim Cornell

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 2719

ISBN-13: 0199277052

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"This title is a definitive and comprehensive edition of the fragmentary texts of all the Roman historians whose works are lost. Historical writing was an important part of the literary culture of ancient Rome, and its best-known exponents, including Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius, provide much of our knowledge of Roman history. However, these authors constitute only a small minority of the Romans who wrote historical works from around 200 BC to AD 250. In this period we know of more than 100 writers of history, biography, and memoirs whose works no longer survive for us to read. They include well-known figures such as Cato the Elder, Sulla, Cicero, and the emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus"--Page 4 of cover.


Georgics

Georgics

Author: Virgil

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-07-29

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521278508

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This volume and its companion volume devoted to the second half of the poem provide a detailed commentary, with text, on the whole of Virgil's Georgics. Professor Thomas describes this work as 'perhaps the most difficult, certainly the most controversial, poem in Roman literature'. He presents the Georgics as the finished poem of Virgil's mature years, approaching it not merely as a part of the tradition of didactic poetry, but rather as a work which confronts, behind its generic appearance, issues not essentially different from those which inform the Eclogues and Aeneid. His introduction and Commentary argue that Virgil's agricultural world, with its successes, failures and ultimate limitations, represents the arena for man's struggle with the realities of existence. Professor Thomas pays particular attention to Virgil's allusion to and reshaping of prior Greek and Latin poetry. The Introduction also covers stylistic, metrical and structural questions. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume. This edition is aimed primarily at students at university and in the upper forms of schools, but the range of its scholarship means that it will be valuable to all classical scholars. The Introduction contains material for non-classicists interested in Latin literature.


Reading After Actium

Reading After Actium

Author: Christopher Nappa

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-02-09

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780472025831

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Reading after Actium is a study of Vergil's Georgics, a didactic poem ostensibly about farming but in fact a brilliant exercise challenging readers to develop a broader perspective on the basic problems and the dangers of human life. Octavian is treated as one of the poet's students and given the opportunity to learn lessons in handling power, in controlling Rome's vast resources, and in preventing the bloody cycle of civil war from beginning again. Most of all the Georgics asks Octavian to consider what is involved in assuming godlike power over his fellow citizens. Reading after Actium provides an introduction to the history of scholarship surrounding the Georgics and the political questions surrounding Octavian and his career. Nappa gives a book by book analysis of the entire poem, and a conclusion that draws together the themes of the whole. Reading after Actium will appeal to students and critics of Vergil and other Augustan Literature as well as those of didactic poetry and its traditions. Students of Roman history and politics should read this as well. Christopher Nappa is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Minnesota.