Death in Rome

Death in Rome

Author: Wolfgang Koeppen

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780393321944

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Mirroring the social and political upheaval following the fall of Nazism, Koeppen offers the story of four members of a German family reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome.


Death in Ancient Rome

Death in Ancient Rome

Author: Valerie Hope

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1134323093

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Presenting a wide range of relevant, translated texts on death, burial and commemoration in the Roman world,this book is organized thematically and supported by discussion of recent scholarship. The breadth of material included ensures that this sourcebook will shed light on the way death was thought about and dealt with in Roman society.


Death in Ancient Rome

Death in Ancient Rome

Author: Catharine Edwards

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780300112085

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For the Romans, the manner of a person's death was the most telling indication of their true character. Death revealed the true patriot, the genuine philosopher, even, perhaps, the great artist--and certainly the faithful Christian. Catharine Edwards draws on the many and richly varied accounts of death in the writings of Roman historians, poets, and philosophers, including Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Seneca, Petronius, Tacitus, Tertullian, and Augustine, to investigate the complex significance of dying in the Roman world. Death in the Roman world was largely understood and often literally viewed as a spectacle. Those deaths that figured in recorded history were almost invariably violent--murders, executions, suicides--and yet the most admired figures met their ends with exemplary calm, their last words set down for posterity. From noble deaths in civil war, mortal combat between gladiators, political execution and suicide, to the deathly dinner of Domitian, the harrowing deaths of women such as the mythical Lucretia and Nero's mother Agrippina, as well as instances of Christian martyrdom, Edwards engagingly explores the culture of death in Roman literature and history.


The Secrets of Rome

The Secrets of Rome

Author: Corrado Augias

Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780847829330

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From Italy's popular author Corrado Augias comes the most intriguing exploration of Rome ever to be published. In the mold of his earlier histories of Paris, New York, and London, Augias moves perceptively through twenty-seven centuries of Roman life, shedding new light on a cast of famous, and infamous, historical figures and uncovering secrets and conspiracies that have shaped the city without our ever knowing it. From Rome's origins as Romulus's stomping ground to the dark atmosphere of the Middle Ages; from Caesar's unscrupulousness to Caravaggio's lurid genius; from the notorious Lucrezia Borgia to the seductive Anna Fallarino, the marchioness at the center of one of Rome's most heinous crimes of the post-war period, Augias creates a sweeping account of the passions that have shaped this complex city: at once both a metropolis and a village, where all human sentiment-bravery and cowardice, industriousness and sloth, enterprise and laxity-find their interpreters and stage. If the history of humankind is all passion and uproar, then, as the author notes, "for centuries Rome has been the mirror of this history, reflecting with excruciating accuracy every detail, even those that might cause you to avert your gaze."


Death and Renewal: Volume 2

Death and Renewal: Volume 2

Author: Keith Hopkins

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521271172

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This is a book for Roman historians which will also be of interest to sociologists.


Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome

Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome

Author: Donald G. Kyle

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1134862725

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The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical development of the games * who the victims were and why they were chosen * how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses * the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence * the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians. This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.


How Rome Fell

How Rome Fell

Author: Adrian Goldsworthy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-05-12

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0300155603

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The author discusses how the Roman Empire--an empire without a serious rival--rotted from within, its rulers and institutions putting short-term ambition and personal survival over the wider good of the state.


The Game of Death in Ancient Rome

The Game of Death in Ancient Rome

Author: Paul Plass

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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Our taste for blood sport stops short at the bruising clash of football players or the gloved blows of boxers, and the suicide of a politician is no more than a personal tragedy. What, then, are we to make of the ancient Romans, for whom the meaning of sport and politics often depended on death? In this provocative, thoughtful book, Paul Plass shows how the deadly violence of arena sport and political suicide served a social purpose in ancient Rome. His work offers a reminder of the complex uses to which institutionalized violence can be put. Violence, Plass observes, is a universal part of human life, and so must be integrated into social order. Grounding his study in evidence from Roman history and drawing on ideas from contemporary sociology and anthropology, he first discusses gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Massive bloodshed in the arena, Plass argues, embodied the element of danger for a society frequently engaged in war, with outsiders--whether slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war--sacrificed for a sense of public security


Rome at War

Rome at War

Author: Nathan Rosenstein

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-12-15

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0807864102

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Historians have long asserted that during and after the Hannibalic War, the Roman Republic's need to conscript men for long-term military service helped bring about the demise of Italy's small farms and that the misery of impoverished citizens then became fuel for the social and political conflagrations of the late republic. Nathan Rosenstein challenges this claim, showing how Rome reconciled the needs of war and agriculture throughout the middle republic. The key, Rosenstein argues, lies in recognizing the critical role of family formation. By analyzing models of families' needs for agricultural labor over their life cycles, he shows that families often had a surplus of manpower to meet the demands of military conscription. Did, then, Roman imperialism play any role in the social crisis of the later second century B.C.? Rosenstein argues that Roman warfare had critical demographic consequences that have gone unrecognized by previous historians: heavy military mortality paradoxically helped sustain a dramatic increase in the birthrate, ultimately leading to overpopulation and landlessness.