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This innovative book is the first comprehensive study of ancient Roman gardens to combine literary and archaeological evidence with contemporary space theory. It applies a variety of interdisciplinary methods including access analysis, literary and gender theory to offer a critical framework for interpreting Roman gardens as physical sites and representations. The Roman Garden: Space, Sense, and Society examines how the garden functioned as a conceptual, sensual and physical space in Roman society, and its use as a vehicle of cultural communication. Readers will learn not only about the content and development of the Roman garden, but also how they promoted memories and experiences. It includes a detailed original analysis of garden terminology and concludes with three case studies on the House of Octavius Quartio and the House of the Menander in Pompeii, Pliny’s Tuscan garden, and Caligula’s Horti Lamiani in Rome. Providing both an introduction and an advanced analysis, this is a valuable and original addition to the growing scholarship in ancient gardens and will complement courses on Roman history, landscape archaeology and environmental history.
In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place ...
The story of Maecenas and his role in the evolution and continuing legacy of ancient Roman poetry and culture An unelected statesman with exceptional powers, a patron of the arts and a luxury-loving friend of the emperor Augustus: Maecenas was one of the most prominent and distinctive personalities of ancient Rome. Yet the traces he left behind are unreliable and tantalizingly scarce. Rather than attempting a conventional biography, Emily Gowers shows in Rome’s Patron that it is possible to tell a different story, one about Maecenas’s influence, his changing identities and the many narratives attached to him across two millennia. Rome’s Patron explores Maecenas’s appearances in the c...
This Companion covers a range of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality. It explores ancient representations of these concepts as we define them today, as well as recent perspectives that have been projected back onto antiquity. Beginning in antiquity, the chapters examine how the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded concepts of what we would today call "gender" and "sexuality" based on the evidence available to us, and chart the varied interpretations and receptions of these concepts across time to the present day. In exploring how different cultures have "received" the classical past, the volume investigates these cultures’ different interpretations of Greek and Roman s...
The greatest danger to Roman emperors was the threat of deadly conspiracies arising among the Senate, the imperial court or even their own families All the emperors that reigned from Augustus to the end of the first century AD faced such efforts to overthrow or assassinate them. John McHugh uncovers these conspiracies, narrating them and seeking to explain them. The underlying cause in many cases was the decline in influence, patronage and status granted by emperors to the Senatorial class, leading some to seek power for themselves or a more generous candidate. Attempted assassinations or coups led the emperors to mistrust the Senate and rely more on freedmen, causing more resentment. Parano...
A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.
Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pagán uses conspiracy theory to illuminate the ways that elite Romans invoked conspiracy as they navigated the hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities in their society. By seeming to uncover conspiracy everywhere, Romans could find the need to crush slave revolts, punish rivals with death or exile, dismiss women, denigrate foreigners, or view their emperors with deep suspicion. Expanding on her earlier Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, P...
‘Disciples of Flora’ explores, through a variety of approaches, disciplines, and historical periods, the place and vitality of gardens as cultural objects, repositories of meaning, and sites for the construction of identity and subjectivity; gardens being an eminent locus where culture and nature meet. This collection of essays contributes to a revision of histories of gardens by broadening the scope of scholarly inquiry to include a long history from ancient Rome to the present, in which contesting memories delineate new apprehensions of topography and space. The contributors draw attention to alternative landscapes or gardening practices, while recalling the ways in which spaces have been invested with an affective dimension that has itself been historicized.
This book addresses urban ecology, green technology, problems with climate change prediction, groundwater contamination, invasive species and many other topics, and offers a guardedly optimistic interpretation of humanity's place in nature and our unique caretaker role. Drawing upon scholarly and media sources, the author presents a common-sense analysis of environmental science, debunking eco-apocalyptic thinking along the way. Compromised science masquerading as authoritative is revealed as a fundraising and policy-influencing crusade by the environmental elite, overshadowing unambiguous problems like environmental racism.