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As the changes in the traditional family accelerated toward the end of the twentieth century, a great deal of attention came to focus on fathers, both modern and ancient. While academics and politicians alike singled out the conspicuous and growing absence of the modern father as a crucial factor affecting contemporary family and social dynamics, ancient historians and classicists have rarely explored ancient father-absence, despite the likelihood that nearly a third of all children in the ancient Mediterranean world were fatherless before they turned fifteen. The proportion of children raised by single mothers, relatives, step-parents, or others was thus at least as high in antiquity as it is today. This book assesses the wide-ranging impact high levels of chronic father-absence had on the cultures, politics, and families of the ancient world.
The forced suicide of Seneca, former adviser to Nero, is one of the most tortured death scenes from classical antiquity. Here, James Ker offers a comprehensive cultural history of Seneca's death scene, situating it in the Roman imagination and tracing its many subsequent interpretations.
Essays examine how the genre of historia reflects connections between the study of nature and the study of culture in early modern scholarly pursuits. The early modern genre of historia connected the study of nature and the study of culture from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of historia as a descriptive method across a variety of disciplines--including natural history, medicine, antiquarianism, and philology--indicates how closely intertwined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern period. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that historia can be considered a key epistemic tool of early modern intellectual practices. Focusing on the actual...
In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests—and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as...
Medicine, astronomy, dealing with numbers ‐ even the cultures of the “pre-modern” world offer a rich spectrum of scientific texts. But how are they best translated? Is it sufficient to translate the sources into modern scientific language, and thereby, above all, to identify their deficits? Or would it be better to adopt the perspective of the sources themselves, strange as they are, only for them not to be properly understood by modern readers? Renowned representatives of various disciplines and traditions present a controversial and constructive discussion of these problems.
"The well-known mythographer Marina Warner has described the process of reading fairy tales and folktales as 'tasting the dragon's blood' - a magical and transformative process by which one's ears are opened to the voices of the past and of other worlds. Roman exempla, which constitute a national story-telling tradition, are very different in many ways from the dream-like fantasies of fairy-tales and other narrative folk traditions that have been the subject of Warner's studies. In (supposedly) true stories from history, battle-hardened warriors, noble maidens and honourable sons of the soil face impossible dangers, take terrible decisions and sacrifice their lives, their limbs and even their own children for the sake of justice, discipline and the Roman community. Yet for the ancient Romans too, hearing the blood-soaked stories of their ancestral heroes was an intimate and potent experience, and this 'taste of the hero's blood' had an intoxicating effect similar to the blood of Warner's dragon: evoking other worlds, shaping understanding of their own world"--
The overall objective is to establish the context of Plutarch's work in the society and the historical circumstances for which it was written.
Hierocles, the Stoic philosopher of the early imperial age, is a crucial witness to Middle and Neo-Stoicism, especially with regard to their ethical philosophy. In this volume, all of Hierocles surviving works are translated into English for the first time, with the original Greek and a facing English translation: the Elements of Ethics, preserved on papyrus, along with all fragments and excerpts from the treatise On Duties, collected by Stobaeus in the fifth century C.E. and dealing mainly with social relationships, marriage, household, and family. In addition, Ramelli s introductory essay demonstrates how Hierocles was indebted to the Old Stoa and how he modified its doctrines in accord with Middle Stoicism and further developments in philosophy as well as his personal views. Finally, Ramelli s extensive commentary on Hierocles works clarifies philosophical questions raised by the text and provides rich and updated references to existing scholarship.
Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics can shed new light on Monteverdi’s two Venetian operas (and their respective librettos, by Badoaro and Busenello), not only at the levels of textual criticism, historical exegesis, and dramaturgy, but also with regard to concrete choices of performance, staging, and...