The first holistic study of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96-138). Authors treated include Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus. Key topics and approaches include recitation, allusion, intertextuality, 'extratextuality' and socioliterary interactions.
This volume is the first holistic investigation of Roman literature and literary culture under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian (AD 96–138). With case studies from Frontinus, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Quintilian, Suetonius and Tacitus among others, the eighteen chapters offer not just innovative readings of literary (and some 'less literary') texts, but a collaborative enquiry into the networks and culture in which they are embedded. The book brings together established and novel methodologies to explore the connections, conversations and silences between these texts and their authors, both on and off the page. The scholarly dialogues that result not only shed fresh light on the dynamics of literary production and consumption in the 'High Roman Empire', but offer new provocations to students of intertextuality and interdiscursivity across classical literature. How can and should we read textual interactions in their social, literary and cultural contexts?
In this volume, originally published in 1966, E. Mary Smallwood compiles a thorough list of documents and physical artefacts from the reign of the first three of the Five Good Emperors. It was Nerva, and his two adopted successors, Trajan and Hadrian, who paved the way for Rome's Golden Age - each winning the cooperation and approval of the Roman Senate. Smallwood's text contains an extensive collection of materials from the societies of these first 'good emperors', complete with indices of significant persons, coins and other subjects of general relevance. Smallwood quotes directly from imperial papers and letters, references numerous busts and statues, and uses laws, currency and minutes of meetings to compile a fantastic overview of items from this period in Roman history. This work will remain a highly beneficial research tool for scholars and historians interested in the detailed study of the documents and artefacts of this age.
This book explores new ways of analysing interactions between different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities across the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva to the Severans (96–235 CE). Bringing together leading scholars in classics with experts in the history of Judaism, Christianity and the Near East, it looks beyond the Greco-Roman binary that has dominated many studies of the period, and moves beyond traditional approaches to intertextuality in its study of the circulation of knowledge across languages and cultures. Its sixteen chapters explore shared ideas about aspects of imperial experience - law, patronage, architecture, the army - as well as the movement of ideas about history, exempla, documents and marvels. As the second volume in the Literary Interactions series, it offers a new and expansive vision of cross-cultural interaction in the Roman world, shedding light on connections that have gone previously unnoticed among the subcultures of a vast and evolving Empire.
This is the first in-depth exploration of the extent and significance of Ovidian intertexts in Statius' Thebaid, with particular emphasis on the interplay between poetics, politics, and material culture. Introducing New Historicist, Cultural Materialistic, and Intermedial approaches to Latin literature, it suggests that, despite their Virgilian patina, Statius' depictions of landscapes, heroes, and gods are pervaded by verbal and semantic allusions to Ovid's mythical narratives. This multi-layered allusivity not only prompts alternative readings of the Augustan classics, but also challenges the reader's perceptions of the Augustanising worldview that the urban landscape of Flavian Rome was arguably meant to convey. The poetic and political significance of Statius' Theban saga thereby moves from critically rewriting the Aeneid to reflecting on the new socio-political issues of Flavian Rome. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--
The study of the Roman Empire has changed dramatically in the last century, with significant emphasis now placed on understanding the experiences of subject populations, rather than a sole focus on the Roman imperial elites. Local experiences, and interactions between periphery and centre, are an intrinsic component in our understanding of the empire's function over and against the earlier, top-down model. But where does law fit into this new, decentralized picture of empire? This volume brings together internationally renowned scholars from both legal and historical backgrounds to study the operation of law in each region of the Roman Empire, from Britain to Egypt, from the first century BCE to the end of the third century CE. Regional specificities are explored in detail alongside the emergence of common themes and activities in a series of case studies that together reveal a new and wide-ranging picture of law in the Roman Empire, balancing the practicalities of regional variation with the ideological constructs of law and empire.
