"An exciting and sophisticated approach to a major author in the Latin canon who has been much ignored. Feldherr's writing is clear and intelligent and admirably reflects his engagement in the material. The close analysis is extraordinarily perceptive and innovative—a real pleasure to read."—Ann Vasaly, author of Representations "[Feldherr] persuasively establishes civic spectacle as a broad category under which to examine the rhetorical strategies of both the makers and the writers of history."—Ralph Hexter, University of California, Berkeley
Public spectacle—from the morning rituals of the Roman noble to triumphs and the shows of the Arena—formed a crucial component of the language of power in ancient Rome. The historian Livy (c. 60 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), who provides our fullest description of Rome's early history, presents his account of the growth of the Roman state itself as something to be seen—a visual monument and public spectacle. Through analysis of several episodes in Livy's History, Andrew Feldherr demonstrates the ways in which Livy uses specific visual imagery to make the reader not only an observer of certain key events in Roman history but also a participant in those events. This innovative study incorporates recent literary and cultural theory with detailed historical analysis to put an ancient text into dialogue with contemporary discussions of visual culture. In Spectacle and Society in Livy's History, Feldherr shows how Livy uses the literary representation of spectacles from the Roman past to construct a new sense of civic identity among his readers. He offers a new way of understanding how Livy's technique addressed the political and cultural needs of Roman citizens in Livy's day. In addition to renewing our understanding of Livy through modern scholarship, Feldherr provides a new assessment of the historian's aims and methods by asking what it means for the historian to make readers spectators of history.
The Roman historian Livy saw the past as a storehouse of lessons. This text examines how his historical figures manipulate the shifting meaning of the past and reveals Livy's acute sensitivity to contemporary problems.
In this collected volume fourteen experts in the fields of Classics and Ancient History study the textual strategies used by Herodotus and Livy when recounting the disastrous battles at Thermopylae and Cannae. Literary, linguistic and historical approaches are used (often in combination) in order to enhance and enrich the interpretation of the accounts, which for obvious reasons confronted the authors with a special challenge. Chapters drawing a comparison with other battle narratives and with other genres help to establish genre-specific elements in ancient historiography, and draw attention to the particular techniques employed by Herodotus and Livy in their war narratives.
Originally published in 1913, this book contains the Latin text of the 27th book of the monumental history of Rome by Titus Livius, which deals with Roman advances against Punic forces in Italy and Spain. The history is prefaced with an introduction to Livy's sources and a guide to his dense style.
This book offers a novel interpretation of politics and identity in Ovid's epic poem of transformations, the Metamorphoses. Reexamining the emphatically fictional character of the poem, Playing Gods argues that Ovid uses the problem of fiction in the text to redefine the power of poetry in Augustan Rome. The book also provides the fullest account yet of how the poem relates to the range of cultural phenomena that defined and projected Augustan authority, including spectacle, theater, and the visual arts. Andrew Feldherr argues that a key to the political as well as literary power of the Metamorphoses is the way it manipulates its readers' awareness that its stories cannot possibly be true. By continually juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, Ovid shows how a poem made up of fictions can and cannot acquire the authority and presence of other discursive forms. One important way that the poem does this is through narratives that create a "double vision" by casting characters as both mythical figures and enduring presences in the physical landscapes of its readers. This narrative device creates the kind of tensions between identification and distance that Augustan Romans would have felt when experiencing imperial spectacle and other contemporary cultural forms. Full of original interpretations, Playing Gods constructs a model for political readings of fiction that will be useful not only to classicists but to literary theorists and cultural historians in other fields.
A Companion to Livy features a collection of essays representing the most up-to-date international scholarship on the life and works of the Roman historian Livy. Features contributions from top Livian scholars from around the world Presents for the first time a new interpretation of Livy's historical philosophy, which represents a key to an overall interpretation of Livy's body of work Includes studies of Livy's work from an Indo-European comparative aspect Provides the most modern studies on literary archetypes for Livy's narrative of the history of early Rome
