Verrius, Festus, & Paul
Verrius, Festus, & Paul

Author: Fay Glinister

Publisher: University of London Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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Burned, water-damaged, lost for centuries - the text we know today as 'Festus' barely survived to the modern era, but since its re-discovery in the fifteenth century it has exercised some of the greatest minds in the history of scholarship. Today the sole surviving manuscript lies in the airy calm of the Biblioteca Nazionale at Naples, a precious link to the great outpouring of scholarship during the last centuries of the Roman Republic. Festus' Lexicon took shape over several centuries through the efforts of three men in particular: Verrius Flaccus, the antiquarian who rose from humble origins to enjoy a successful career in the service of the emperor Augustus; Festus, an obscure intellectual who abridged Verrius' monumental work, partially saving it condemning the rest to oblivion; and Paul the Deacon, the eighth-century monk whose own epitome of Festus formed part of the resurgence of interest in ancient Roman culture at the court of Charlemagne. In this volume, an international group of scholars brought together by the Festus Lexicon Project of UCL's Department of History explores this rich, if problematic, resource. They furnish new interpretations of the text, re-evaluate the careers and scholarship of the three men responsible for its composition and offer fresh insights into its origins, development and textual transmission. Together these papers demonstrate the many ways in which this important text can be used to shed light on a wide range of historical problems.

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.

Dionysus and Rome
Dionysus and Rome

Author: Fiachra Mac Góráin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-12-16

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 3110672235

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While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god’s Roman and Italian manifestations. Nine contributions address Bacchus’ appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse. The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides’ Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god’s relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid’s Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers. The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.

A Place at the Altar
A Place at the Altar

Author: Meghan J. DiLuzio

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 069120232X

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A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community’s well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. DiLuzio explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. A Place at the Altar offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

The Hills of Rome
The Hills of Rome

Author: Caroline Vout

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-13

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1139577085

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Rome is 'the city of seven hills'. This book examines the need for the 'seven hills' cliché, its origins, development, impact and borrowing. It explores how the cliché relates to Rome's real volcanic terrain and how it is fundamental to how we define this. Its chronological remit is capacious: Varro, Virgil and Claudian at one end, on, through the work of Renaissance antiquarians, to embrace frescoes and nineteenth-century engravings. These artists and authors celebrated the hills and the views from these hills, in an attempt to capture Rome holistically. By studying their efforts, this book confronts the problems of encapsulating Rome and 'cityness' more broadly and indeed the artificiality of any representation, whether a painting, poem or map. In this sense, it is not a history of the city at any one moment in time, but a history of how the city has been, and has to be, perceived.

Legible Religion
Legible Religion

Author: Duncan MacRae

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0674969685

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Scholars have long emphasized the importance of scripture in studying religion, tacitly separating a few privileged “religions of the Book” from faiths lacking sacred texts, including ancient Roman religion. Looking beyond this distinction, Duncan MacRae delves into Roman religious culture to grapple with a central question: what was the significance of books in a religion without scripture? In the last two centuries BCE, Varro and other learned Roman authors wrote treatises on the nature of the Roman gods and the rituals devoted to them. Although these books were not sacred texts, they made Roman religion legible in ways analogous to scripture-based faiths such as Judaism and Christianity. Rather than reflect the astonishingly varied polytheistic practices of the regions under Roman sway, the contents of the books comprise Rome’s “civil theology”—not a description of an official state religion but one limited to the civic role of religion in Roman life. An extended comparison between Roman books and the Mishnah—an early Rabbinic compilation of Jewish practice and law—highlights the important role of nonscriptural texts in the demarcation of religious systems. Tracing the subsequent influence of Roman religious texts from the late first century BCE to early fifth century CE, Legible Religion shows how two major developments—the establishment of the Roman imperial monarchy and the rise of the Christian Church—shaped the reception and interpretation of Roman civil theology.

The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor
The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor

Author: Justin Stover

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 1474492878

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A radical rewriting of the history of fourth-century Latin literature This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the contemporary and lasting influence of his historical work. Though little regarded today, Victor is the best-attested historian of the later Roman Empire, read by Jerome and Ammianus, honoured with a statue by the pagan Emperor Julian and appointed to a prestigious prefecture by the Christian Theodosius. Through careful analysis of the ancient evidence, including newly discovered material, this book re-examines the two short imperial histories attributed to Victor in the manuscripts, known today as the Caesares and the Epitome de Caesaribus, and discusses a wide range of both canonical and neglected authors and texts, from Sallust and Tacitus to Eunapius and the Historia Augusta. By providing a new account of the original scope and scale of Victor’s Historia, this book revolutionises our understanding of the writing of history in late antiquity. Not only does it have profound implications for the transmission of Classical texts in the Middle Ages and the history of Classical scholarship, but it also solves some of the enduring mysteries of later Latin literature.

Writing the Early Medieval West
Writing the Early Medieval West

Author: Elina Screen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 110819592X

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Far from the oral society it was once assumed to have been, early medieval Europe was fundamentally shaped by the written word. This book offers a pioneering collection of fresh and innovative studies on a wide range of topics, each one representing cutting-edge scholarship, and collectively setting the field on a new footing. Concentrating on the role of writing in mediating early medieval knowledge of the past, on the importance of surviving manuscripts as clues to the circulation of ideas and political and cultural creativity, and on the role that texts of different kinds played both in supporting and in subverting established power relations, these essays represent a milestone in studies of the early medieval written word.

Orthographic Traditions and the Sub-elite in the Roman Empire
Orthographic Traditions and the Sub-elite in the Roman Empire

Author: Nicholas Zair

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-08

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1009327682

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This book makes use of digital corpora to give in-depth details of the history and development of the spelling of Latin. It focusses on sub-elite texts in the Roman empire, and reveals that sophisticated education in this area was not restricted to those at the top of society. Nicholas Zair studies the history of particular orthographic features and traces their usage in a range of texts which give insight into everyday writers of Latin: including scribes and soldiers at Vindolanda, slaves at Pompeii, members of the Praetorian Guard, and writers of curse tablets. In doing so, he problematises the use of 'old-fashioned' spelling in dating inscriptions, provides important new information on sound-change in Latin, and shows how much can be gained from a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of ancient texts.

Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age
Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age

Author: Benjamin Albritton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1000081338

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Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital representation of a tangible object. Approaches extend from the codicological, palaeographical, linguistic, and cultural to considerations of reader reception, image production, and the implications of new technologies for future discoveries. Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age advances the debate in manuscript studies about the role of digital and computational sources and tools. As such, the book will appeal to scholars and students working in the disciplines of Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Library and Information Science, and Book History.