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 Roman 'literature' to mass public audiences.
Provides a general account of the Roman theater and its audience, and records some of the results of the author's experiments in constructing a full-scale replica stage based upon the wall paintings at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and producing Roman plays upon it.
What would you see if you attended a trial in a courtroom in the early Roman empire? What was the behaviour of litigants, advocates, judges and audience? It was customary for Roman individuals out of general interest to attend the various courts held in public places in the city centre and as such the Roman courts held an important position in the Roman community on a sociological level as well as a letigious one. This book considers many aspects of Roman courts in the first two centuries AD, both civil and criminal, and illuminates the interaction of Romans of every social group. Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom is an essential resource for courses on Roman social history and Roman law as a historical phenomenon.
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 contemporary sources and the close reading of texts. Wiseman sees the history of Roman literature as an integral part of the social and political history of the Roman people, and draws some very unexpected inferences from the evidence that survives. In particular, he emphasizes the significance of the annual series of 'stage games' (ludi scaenici), and reveals the hitherto unexplored common ground of literature, drama, and dance. Direct, accessible, and clearly written, The Roman Audience provides a fundamental reinterpretation of Roman literature as part of the historical experience of the Roman people, making it essential reading for all Latinists and Roman historians.
Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch's shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the Panegyricus of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation.
Wheeler proposes instead that Ovid represents himself in the poem as an epic storyteller moved to tell a universal history of metamorphosis in the presence of a fictional audience.
Vitruvius' De architectura is the only extant classical text on architecture, and its impact on Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci is well-known. But what was the text's purpose in its own time (ca. 20s BCE)? In this book, Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols reveals how Vitruvius pitched the Greek discipline of architecture to his Roman readers, most of whom were undoubtedly laymen. The inaccuracy of Vitruvius' architectural rules, when compared with surviving ancient buildings, has knocked Vitruvius off his pedestal. Nichols argues that the author never intended to provide an accurate view of contemporary buildings. Instead, Vitruvius crafted his authorial persona and remarks on architecture to appeal to elites (and would-be elites) eager to secure their positions within an expanding empire. In this major new analysis of De architectura from archaeological and literary perspectives, Vitruvius emerges as a knowing critic of a social landscape in which the house made the man.
The focus of this book--its new perspective--is on the 'receivers' of literature: readers, spectators, and audiences. Twelve contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, explore the various and changing interactions between the makers of literature and their audiences or readers from the earliest Greek poetry to the end of the Roman empires in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. From the heights of Athens to the hellenistic Greek diaspora, from the great Augustans to the irresistible tide of Christianity, the contributors deploy fresh insights to map out lively and provocative, yet accessible, surveys. They cover the kinds of literature which have shaped western culture--epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy, rhetoric, epigram, elegy, pastoral, satire, biography, epistle, declamation, and panegyric. Who were the audiences, and why did they regard their literature as so important? --jacket.
Life in Rome was relentlessly public, and oratory was at its heart. Orations were dramatic spectacles in which the speaker deployed an arsenal of rhetorical tricks and strategies aimed at arousing the emotions of the audience, and spectators responded vigorously and vocally with massed chants of praise or condemnation. Unfortunately, many aspects of these performances have been lost. In the first in-depth study of oratorical gestures and crowd acclamations as methods of communication at public spectacles, Gregory Aldrete sets out to recreate these vital missing components and to recapture the original context of ancient spectacles as interactive, dramatic, and contentious public performances. At the most basic level, this work is a study of communication—how Roman speakers communicated with their audiences, and how audiences in turn were able to reply and convey their reactions to the speakers. Aldrete begins by investigating how orators employed an extraordinarily sophisticated system of hand and body gestures in order to enhance the persuasive power of their speeches. He then turns to the target of these orations—the audience—and examines how they responded through the mechanism of acclamations, that is, rhythmically shouted comments. Aldrete finds much in these ancient spectacles that is relevant to modern questions of political propaganda, manipulation of public image, crowd behavior, and speechmaking. Readers with an interest in rhetoric, urban culture, or communications in any period will find the book informative, as will those working in art history, archaeology, history, and philology.
This exciting new interpretation of Pauls Letter to the Romans approaches Pauls most famous letter from one of the newest scholarly positions within Pauline Studies: The Radical New Perspective on Paul (also known as Paul within Judaism). As a point of departure, the author takes Pauls self-designation in 11:13 as apostle to the gentiles as so determining for Pauls mission that the audience of the letter is perceived to be exclusively gentile. The study finds confirmation of this reading-strategy in the letters construction of the interlocutor from chapter 2 onwards. Even in 2:17, where Paul describes the interlocutor as someone who calls himself a Jew, it requests to perceive this person as a gentile who presents himself as a Jew and not an ethnic Jew. If the interlocutor is perceived in this way throughout the letter, the dialogue between Paul and the interlocutor can be perceived as a continuous, unified and developing dialogue. In this way, this interpretation of Romans sketches out a position against a more disparate and fragmentary interpretation of Romans.