Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, ...memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time.
The reign of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, has been seen, both by contemporaries and over the centuries that have followed, as a pivotal moment in the history of Rome. The final stage in ...the move to monarchical government and the structures he put in place, which were to last largely unchanged for over two hundred years, ensured this; but Augustus himself remains an enigmatic figure.
The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as ...a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that Caligula was insane. But was he? This biography tells a different story of the well-known emperor. In a deft account written for a general audience, Aloys Winterling opens a new perspective on the man and his times. Basing Caligula on a thorough new assessment of the ancient sources, he sets the emperor's story into the context of the political system and the changing relations between the senate and the emperor during Caligula's time and finds a new rationality explaining his notorious brutality.
Representing five major areas of Augustan scholarship—historiography, poetry, art, religion, and politics—the nineteen contributors to this volume bring us closer to a balanced, up-to-date account of ...Augustus and his principate.
Augustus, Rome's first emperor, is one of the great figures of world history and one of the most fascinating. In this lively and concise biography Karl Galinsky examines Augustus' life from childhood ...to deification. He chronicles the mosaic of vicissitudes, challenges, setbacks and successes that shaped Augustus' life, both public and private. How did he use his power? How did he manage to keep re-inventing himself? What kind of man was he? A transformative leader, Augustus engineered profound change in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean world. No one would have expected such vast achievements from the frail and little-known eighteen-year-old who became Caesar's heir amid turmoil and crisis. A mere thirteen years later, after defeating Antony and Cleopatra, he had, in his words, 'power over all things'.
The Sons of Caesar is the story of one of the most colourful dynasties in history, from Caesar's rise to power in the first century BC to Nero's death in AD 68. It reviews the long history of the ...Julian and Claudian families in the Republic and the social and political background of Rome, but at the heart of this account are the lives of six men - Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero - men who mastered Rome, and changed it from a democracy to a personal possession. Set against a background of foreign wars and domestic intrigue, the story of Rome's greatest dynasty is also the story of the birth of an imperial system which shaped the Europe of today.
Throughout a long and spectacularly successful political life, the Emperor Augustus (63BC-AD14) was a master of spin. Barbara Levick exposes the techniques which he used to disguise the ruthlessness ...of his rise to power and to enhance his successes once power was achieved.
There was, she argues, less difference than might appear between the ambitious youth who overthrew Anthony and Cleopatra and the admired Emperor of later years. However seemingly benevolent his autocracy and substantial his achievements, Augustus' overriding purpose was always to keep himself and his dynasty in power. Similar techniques were practised against surviving and fresh opponents, but with increasing skill and duplicity, and in the end the exhausted members of the political classes were content to accept their new ruler. This book charts the stages of Augustus' rise, the evolution of his power and his methods of sustaining it, and finally the ways in which he used artists and literary men to glorify his image for his own time and times to come.
This fascinating story of the realities of power in ancient Rome has inescapable contemporary resonance and will appeal equally to students of the Ancient World and to the general reader.
Our Fritz Frank Lorenz Muller, Muller
2011, 2011-10-10, 20110101
eBook
In the first comprehensive life of Frederick III, Müller reconstructs how the beloved persona of "Our Fritz" was created and used for various political purposes before and after the emperor's tragic ...death from throat cancer. Frederick III served as a canvas onto which different political forces projected their hopes and fears for Germany's future.
Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new critical analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious and literary ...contexts.
