An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the ae
This book invites us to approach friendship not as something that simply is, but as something performed in and through language. Roman friendship is read across a wide spectrum of Latin texts, from Catullus' poetry to Petronius' Satyricon to the philosophical writings of Cicero and Seneca, from letters exchanged by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his beloved teacher Fronto, to those written by men and women at an outpost in northern Britain. One of the most innovative features of this study is the equal attention it pays to Latin literature and to inscriptions carved in stone across the Roman Empire. What emerges is a richly varied and perhaps surprising picture. Hundreds of epitaphs, commissioned by men and women, citizens and slaves, record the commemoration of friends, which is of equal importance to understanding Roman friendship as Cicero's influential essay De amicitia.
Previous scholarship on classical pseudepigrapha has generally aimed at proving issues of attribution and dating of individual works, with little or no attention paid to the texts as literary artefacts. Instead, this book looks at Latin fakes as sophisticated products of a literary culture in which collaborative practices of supplementation, recasting and role-play were the absolute cornerstones of rhetorical education and literary practice. Texts such as the Catalepton, the Consolatio ad Liviam and the Panegyricus Messallae thus illuminate the strategies whereby Imperial audiences received and interrogated canonical texts and are here explored as key moments in the Imperial reception of Augustan authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Tibullus. The study of the rhetoric of these creative supplements irreverently mingling truth and fiction reveals much not only about the neighbouring concepts of fiction, authenticity and reality, but also about the tacit assumptions by which the latter are em
Star (classics, Middlebury College) provides an expanded portrait of ancient Roman self-care by considering how, in the work of rival philosophers Seneca and Petronius, empire in the ancient world str
The 104 papers are in a number of European languages, not all of them Romance. Among the English-language papers are Renaissance Englishwomen's Latin poetry of praise and lament, medical astrology in
The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook represent the best of current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. The insights offered by the collective of authors not
The Satyrica is a thrilling piece of literature, and rare example of the Roman novel, credited to Gaius Petronius which is as modern today as the time it was written under the Roman emperor Nero. This
Work in Progress offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and representational strategies of Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning
This volume collects medieval Latin texts from the 8th to the 14th centuries that shape a pseudo-historical image of the Prophet Muhammad. The texts, from critical editions, manuscripts and early prin
Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of t
?Reflections of Romanity: Discourses of Subjectivity in Imperial Rome, by Richard Alston and Efrossini Spentzou, challenges and provokes debate about how we understand the Roman world, and ourselves,
This volume presents closely connected articles by Elaine Fantham which deal with Roman responses to Greek literature on three major subjects: the history and criticism of Latin poetry and rhetoric, w
A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night . . . Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares
This collection of articles by leading scholars focuses on Irish writing in Latin in the Renaissance and aims to rewrite Irish cultural history through recovery and analysis of Latin sources. This boo
The literature and art of Augustan Rome are often thought of as the product of an age of high classicism, characterized by maturity, balance, and harmony. This volume examines the presence of what mi
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the ext
This volume examines how urban Latin and Greek literature reacted to politics, often in subtle ways perhaps analogous to the techniques employed by writers in the Soviet Union working under a watchful
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the ext
