Praise and Blame in Roman Republican Rhetoric

Praise and Blame in Roman Republican Rhetoric
Author: Ralph Covino
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1910589225

Cicero, and others in the Roman Republic, were masters of both invective and panegyric, two hugely important genres in ancient oratory, which influenced the later theory and practice of rhetoric. The papers in this volume address strategies of vituperation and eulogy within the Republic, and examine the mechanisms and effects of praise and blame.

Triumphs in the Age of Civil War

Triumphs in the Age of Civil War
Author: Carsten Hjort Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474267866

Many of the wars of the Late Republic were largely civil conflicts. There was, therefore, a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimize their power. Triumphs in the Age of Civil War rethinks the nature and the character of the phenomenon of civil war during the Late Republic. At the same time it focuses on a key feature of the Roman socio-political order, the triumph, and argues that a commander could in practice expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could also be represented as being over a foreign enemy, even if the principal opponent was clearly Roman. Significantly, the civil aspect of the war did not have to be denied. Carsten Hjort Lange provides the first study to consider the Roman triumph during the age of civil war, and argues that the idea of civil war as "normal" reflects the way civil war permeated the politics and society of the Late Roman Republic.

Making the Middle Republic

Making the Middle Republic
Author: Seth Bernard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2023-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009328018

During the fourth and third centuries BCE, Roman expansion into Italy reshaped the peninsula's Archaic societies and prompted new political relationships, new economic practices, and new sociocultural structures. Rural landscapes and urban spaces throughout Latium saw intensified use amidst novel principles of land management, animal husbandry, and architectural design. This book offers fresh perspectives on these transformations by embracing a wide range of approaches to Middle Republican history. Chapters take up topics and methods ranging from fiscal sociology, bioarchaeology, comparative slaveries, field survey, art and architectural history, numismatics, elite mobility, and beyond. An emphasis is placed on how developments in this period reshaped not only Rome, but also other Latin and Italian societies in complex and often multilinear ways. The volume promotes the Middle Republic as a period whose full dynamism is best appreciated at the intersection of diverse lines of inquiry.

A Noble Ruin

A Noble Ruin
Author: W. Jeffrey Tatum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2023-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 019769490X

A complex and captivating portrait of Mark Antony that offers a fresh perspective on the fall of the Roman Republic In his lifetime, Mark Antony was a famous man. Ally and avenger of Julius Caesar, rhetorical target of Cicero, lover of Cleopatra, and mortal enemy of Octavian (the future emperor Augustus), Antony played a leading role in the transformation of the Roman world. Ever since his and Cleopatra's demise at the hands of Octavian, he has remained famous, or infamous, a figure of recurring fascination. His life--variegated, passionate, sensual, bold, and tragic--inspires vigorous reactions. Nearly everyone has a view on Antony. For Cicero, he was a distasteful though talented man. Octavian fashioned him a dangerous failure, a Roman noble corrupted by his appetites and his lust for Cleopatra. Later historians adopted and adapted these themes, delivering their readers an Antony who was irresistibly depraved, startlingly brave, sometimes cunning, but almost always constitutionally incapable of choosing the right side of history. From these, especially Plutarch's compelling portrait, Shakespeare gave us the chivalrous and unstudied Antony of Antony and Cleopatra. A Noble Ruin, the fullest biography of Antony in English, assimilates the various, often competing, ancient sources to provide a strong and much-needed dose of realism to the caricature we have of this major historical figure. The book gives ample attention to the varied cultural circumstances in which Antony operated, including the social and moral expectations of his republican heritage, as well as the exceptional challenges posed by the convulsion of civil war. In furnishing a complex and captivating portrait of Anthony, A Noble Ruin allows readers to freshly assess his conduct, ambitions, and attainments, as well as the turbulent age in which he lived.

Omnium Annalium Monumenta: Historical Writing and Historical Evidence in Republican Rome

Omnium Annalium Monumenta: Historical Writing and Historical Evidence in Republican Rome
Author: Kaj Sandberg
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004355553

This edited volume brings a variety of approaches to the problem of how the Romans conceived of their history, what were the mechanisms for their preservation of the past, and how did the Romans come to write about their past. Building on important recent work in historiography, and the recent memory turn, the authors consider the practicalities of transmission, literary and generic influences, and the role of the city of Rome in preserving and transmitting memories of the past. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the role history played in Roman life, and the kinds of evidence which could be deployed in constructing Roman history.

Writing on the Edge

Writing on the Edge
Author: Charles E. Cruise
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532647328

In Paul’s angry letter, everything is magnified. His obstructers have insidious motives, their Galatian victims are dense and on the brink of spiritual peril, and the law itself is outmoded and a malevolent taskmaster. How do we read beneath the rhetoric? Writing on the Edge surveys ancient Greco-Roman and modern linguistic sources on hyperbole and demonstrates that it is possible to separate out the effect of Paul’s edgy rhetoric on his ideas. Eleven criteria are applied to identify Paul’s most hyperbolic passages in Galatians, followed by a reinterpretation of those passages and the entire thrust of the letter. Paul’s true attitudes emerge, and a more consistent picture of the apostle materializes, one in line with his Torah-observant behavior in Acts.

Models from the Past in Roman Culture

Models from the Past in Roman Culture
Author: Matthew B. Roller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107162599

Presents a coherent model for understanding historical examples in Ancient Rome and their rhetorical, moral and historiographical functions.

The Roman Elite and the End of the Republic

The Roman Elite and the End of the Republic
Author: Henrik Mouritsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009180657

Presents a new understanding of the social and political world of the late republic and the reasons for its fall.

The Ancient Emotion of Disgust

The Ancient Emotion of Disgust
Author: Donald Lateiner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190604115

The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.