This book focuses on luxonomics, or the economy of luxury in Roman times, and how its study is an element that is essential to understanding the history of the period. Organised in chronological order, the evolution of the luxury economy is divided into areas of consumption, production, and criticism.
In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests--and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as the opposite of the ideal Roman way of life, to the Christian poet Prudentius, who represents it in an allegorical fight with Sobriety. The book attends both to key authors and to wider literary genres, such as historiography and satire. Particular consideration is given to the rhetorical device of personification, which can be traced from the first appearances of luxuria in Latin literature to those of late antiquity. Berno devotes detailed attention to Seneca the Younger, whose work is often preoccupied with this passion. Seneca both defends himself from the charge of luxuria and violently attacks it in others, describing it as the archenemy of a philosophical life. Along the centuries, the focus on luxuria shifts from the economic sphere (and the waste of money) to the erotic, to the extent that in the Christian world it becomes one of the Seven Capital Sins representing the vice of lust.
Preamble : on the way -- Introduction : en route -- Making use : plaustrum -- Power steering : currus -- The other chariot : essedum -- Conveying women : carpentum -- Portable retreats : lectica -- Envoi : the end of the road.
'Antiquity Recovered' presents 13 diverse essays that trace how perceptions of the past have changed over the course of three centuries of excavations. They range in subject from a reassessment of the contents of the library at Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, to the symbolic appearance of the ancient world in classic films.
Ovid's Ars Amatoria has met with astonishingly varied fortunes down the centuries. Ten years after publication the book became a reason, or more probably a pretext, for the author's banishment from Rome. It was removed from public libraries, and more recently the poem suffered a virtual embargo in schools and universities. This is the first detailed English commentary on any part of the poem. Examined afresh, it emerges as the wittiest of Ovid's love poems, turning upside down the attitudes and conventions of orthodox love elegy. The work is full of psychological insight and is richly embroidered with details of contemporary Roman social and political life. This new paperback edition intends to bring out the spirit of provocative frivolity which was undeniably meant to irritate Roman traditionalists. The text of Kenney's Oxford Classical Text is reproduced and supplemented with a full introduction to the style and historical background the poem, as well as with a full commentary and appendices.
Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the world’s first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshaling of his materials. In Pliny’s Defense of Empire, Laehn offers a radical reinterpretation of the architecture of Pliny’s encyclopedia, exposing fundamental errors in the inherited understanding of the text traceable to its initial reception in ancient Rome. Recognition of the text’s true structure reveals that Pliny’s encyclopedia is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansionism grounded in a sophisticated account of human nature. Correcting the accreted errors and prejudices of nearly 2,000 years of faulty Plinian scholarship, Laehn critically examines one of the most persuasive apologies for the Roman Empire ever written and succeeds in rehabilitating the Elder Pliny as one of the world’s greatest political thinkers. An excellent resource and a must read for scholars in political theory, philosophy, and classical studies.
An examination of the roots of the reunification of Germany, arguing that Erich Honecker's rigid communist regime was undermined by the conflict between Moscow and East Berlin. In the end, Gorbachev's objective - a radical renewal of socialism - turned out to be unattainable.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781351116022, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licence. DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351116022 Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. This volume is an investigation of how Augustine was received in the Carolingian period, and the elements of his thought which had an impact on Carolingian ideas of ‘state’, rulership and ethics. It focuses on Alcuin of York and Hincmar of Rheims, authors and political advisers to Charlemagne and to Charles the Bald, respectively. It examines how they used Augustinian political thought and ethics, as manifested in the De civitate Dei, to give more weight to their advice. A comparative approach sheds light on the differences between Charlemagne’s reign and that of his grandson. It scrutinizes Alcuin’s and Hincmar’s discussions of empire, rulership and the moral conduct of political agents during which both drew on the De civitate Dei, although each came away with a different understanding. By means of a philological–historical approach, the book offers a deeper reading and treats the Latin texts as political discourses defined by content and language.
