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Some critics of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) have dismissed his work as a compendium of stale narratives and conventional attitudes. Gary B. Miles reveals in Livy's history a creative interplay between traditional stories, contemporary ideological assumptions, and the historian's own perspective at the margins of Roman aristocracy. Drawing on a range of critical approaches, Miles considers Livy's stance as a historian, the ways in which he reworked his sources, and his interpretation of such historical phenomena as recurrence, continuity, and change. Miles focuses on the foundation stories with which Livy begins his account, detecting in Livy's rendition certain original concep...
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it endorse or undermine values of empire and patriarchy? Is its world view comic or tragic? Many studies of the poem have focused primarily on selected books. The approach here is comprehensive. An introduction by editor Christine Perkell discusses the poem's historical background, its reception from antiquity to the present, and its most important themes. The book-by-book readings that follow both explicate the text and offer a variety of interpretations. Concluding topic chapters focus on the Aeneid as foundation story, the influence of Apollonius' Argonautica, the poem's female figures, and English translations of the Aeneid. Written in an accessible style and providing translations of all Latin passages, this volume will be of particular value to teachers and students of humanities courses as well as to specialists.
A definitive, authorized portrait of Paul McCartney draws on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews and access to personal archives to chronicle the private life and successful career of one of the world's most famous musicians, the world of the Beatles, his partnership with John Lennon, and more.
Beyond Origins challenges the common view of foundings as singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. Engaging with cases of founding across political traditions -- from classical Greece to contemporary Latin America -- the book argues that it is only through pragmatist understandings of democratic origins that we can realize the potential for radical democratic change.
Roman and medieval poets and authors not only explored the physicality and sexuality of love, driven by passion and desire, but also saw love as a labour, a project to be worked on and achieved to reach the final goal.
This isn’t a book of statistics and it isn’t a book of science. It has nothing whatsoever to do with actuaries or accountants. Number Freaking is a book of surreal sums and absurd arithmetic: it’s doodling with numbers, doing sums in your head just for fun, playing dice with the universe. It’s the art of putting numbers where none existed before to take an off-the-wall peek behind the curtains at how numbers rule our lives. It’s about taking numbers that were never meant to be in the same room, crashing them together and seeing what comes out the other end. Number Freaking reveals the low drama of life, the unexpected realities and unforeseen truths that emerge only when numbers ar...
A festschrift presented to New Testament E. Earle Ellis on his eightieth birthday. >
Despite their historical importance, empires have received scant attention from social scientists. Now, Alexander J. Motyl examines the structure, dynamics, and continuing relevance of empire—and asks, "Why do empires decline? Why do some empires collapse? And why do some collapsed empires revive?" Rejecting choice-centered theories of imperial decline, Motyl maintains that the very structure of empires promotes decay and that decay in turn facilitates the progressive loss of territory. Although most major empires have in fact declined in this manner, some, such as the Soviet Union, have collapsed suddenly and comprehensively. Motyl explains how and why collapse occurs, why such an outcome...