Cicero and the Rise of Deification at Rome

Cicero and the Rise of Deification at Rome
Author: Spencer Cole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107656354

This book tells a part of the back-story to major religious transformations emerging from the tumult of the late Republic. It considers the dynamic interplay of Cicero's approximations of mortals and immortals with a range of artifacts and activities that were collectively closing the divide between humans and gods. A guiding principle is that a major cultural player like Cicero had a normative function in religious dialogues that could legitimize incipient ideas like deification. Applying contemporary metaphor theory, it analyzes the strategies and priorities configuring Cicero's divinizing encomia of Roman dynasts like Pompey, Caesar and Octavian. It also examines Cicero's explorations of apotheosis and immortality in the De re publica and Tusculan Disputations as well as his attempts to deify his daughter Tullia. In this book, Professor Cole transforms our understanding not only of the backgrounds to ruler worship but also of changing conceptions of death and the afterlife.

Divine Qualities

Divine Qualities
Author: Anna Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2007-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199226822

Anna J. Clark explores 'divine qualities', such as Concord, Faith, Hope, and Clemency, to show how they reveal an aspect of how Romans thought about themselves. Clark draws on a wide range of evidence (literature, drama, coins, architecture, inscriptions and graffiti) to show that these qualities were relevant to a wide range of people.

Romulus' Asylum

Romulus' Asylum
Author: Emma Dench
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2005-06-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191518344

Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: 'race-mixture' has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as 'multicultural'. Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.