The most important primary texts on homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome are translated into modern, explicit English and collected together for the first time in this comprehensive sourcebook. ...Covering an extensive period—from the earliest Greek texts in the late seventh century b.c.e. to Greco-Roman texts of the third and fourth centuries c.e.—the volume includes well-known writings by Plato, Sappho, Aeschines, Catullus, and Juvenal, as well as less well known but highly relevant and intriguing texts such as graffiti, comic fragments, magical papyri, medical treatises, and selected artistic evidence. These fluently translated texts, together with Thomas K. Hubbard's valuable introductions, clearly show that there was in fact no more consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today. The material is organized by period and by genre, allowing readers to consider chronological developments in both Greece and Rome. Individual texts each are presented with a short introduction contextualizing them by date and, where necessary, discussing their place within a larger work. Chapter introductions discuss questions of genre and the ideological significance of the texts, while Hubbard's general introduction to the volume addresses issues such as sexual orientation in antiquity, moral judgments, class and ideology, and lesbianism. With its broad, unexpurgated, and thoroughly informed presentation, this unique anthology gives an essential perspective on homosexuality in classical antiquity.
Covering material from the time of Julius Caesar to the sack of Rome, this topically arranged reference volume provides substantive entries on people, cities, government, institutions, military ...developments, material culture, and other topics related to the Roman Empire.
Presented are the perceptions of different foreigners who came to Slovene lands in the past or in the present time, as shown in Slovene folk narratives. Despite often stereotyped picture of the ...Others, the research demonstrates an immense complexity of these narratives and the fact that they tell more about Us than about Them. The book ('The Mysteriou Stranger and the Demonic Enemy. “The Other” and Otherness in Slovene Folk Narratives') brings a theoretical overview of the current research on otherness in folklore studies and contextualizes the examples into a wider international folkloristic, anthropological and historical frames. Stories about the Turks, the Napoleon’s French and the Huns reflect an interweaving of historical facts, archetypical imageries of the dangerous Foreigner and ideological influences. These narratives are strongly embedded into the landscape and reinforce the sense of a common identity of its members. The imagery of historic aggressors is understandably quite different from the imagery of Jews and the Roma, with whom the people of the Slovene lands have had a completely different kind of contact.The same goes for contemporary foreigners from other countries. Nevertheless, they all display a high level of stereotypization, generalization and projection of fears upon “the Other”.
This book describes the philosophy of ancient Rome in an original, convincing and, at the same time, captivating manner. Roman philosophy is both a continuation of Greek philosophy and a ...substantially different way of thinking. The predominant examples dealt with in this book are language and time. Emphasis is laid upon the interweaving of philosophy and religion.The principal figures here are Cicero and the Greek philosopher Plotinus; the rise of Christianity is shown against the background of the philosophy of those days.
This edited volume brings a variety of approaches to the problem of how the Romans conceived of their history, what were the mechanisms for their preservation of the past, and how did the Romans come ...to write about their past.Building on important recent work in historiography, and the recent memory turn, the authors consider the practicalities of transmission, literary and generic influences, and the role of the city of Rome in preserving and transmitting memories of the past.The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the role history played in Roman life, and the kinds of evidence which could be deployed in constructing Roman history.
This book has come about as a result of the project 'Roman Funerary Monuments of South-Western Pannonia in their Material, Social, and Religious Context', unfolding between 2015 and 2018 in the ...Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts under the auspices of the Croatian Science Foundation, with B. Migotti as the project leader and M. Šašel Kos and I. Radman-Livaja as collaborators. 'Roman Funerary Monuments of South-Western Pannonia in their Material, Social, and Religious Context' examines around two hundred funerary monuments and fragments (stelai, sarcophagi, ash-chests, tituli, altars, medallions and buildings) from three Roman cities in the south-west part of the Roman province of Pannonia in the territory of north-west Croatia: colonia Siscia (Sisak) and municipia Andautonia (Ščitarjevo) and Aquae Balissae (Daruvar). A juxtaposition of the evidence from three administrative units of different dimensions and municipal profiles, and of unequal importance in the wider area, offered a good opportunity for a meaningful comparison of the main components for a reconstruction of material, social and cultural components of the three Romano-provincial communities. The components studied were: 1 – territorial scope of the individual cities; 2 – quantification of the monuments in terms of kinds and chronology; 3 – structural typology and iconography; 4 – social aspects of the monument use; 5 – ritual and religious aspects (incineration vs. inhumation, classical religion vs. Christianity); 6 – geo-archaeological aspect. The most valuable contributions have been achieved in the geo-archaeological field, as such research had never been carried out in the studied area before.
To honor the 20th year of his reign, Emperor Constantine was given what may be the most precious gift of his lifetime: a codex of artistic panegyrics and odes dedicated to him by the poet Optatianus. ...Optatianus’ poems showcase the poetic talent of their creator and go beyond the classical confines of a panegyric: they form a literary invitation to an intellectual bond between laudator and laudandus.
The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War represents a close and coherent study of developments and discussions concerning the concept of civil war in the late republican and early imperial ...historiography of the late Republic.
This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the 'small politics' of rural communities in the Late Roman world. It places the diverse fates of those communities within a generalized model for ...exploring rural social systems. Fundamentally, social interactions in rural contexts in the period revolved around the desire of individual households to insure themselves against catastrophic subsistence failure and the need of the communities in which they lived to manage the attendant social tensions, inequalities and conflicts. A focus upon the politics of reputation in those communities provides a striking contrast to the picture painted by the legislation and the writings of Rome's literate elite: when viewed from the point of view of the peasantry, issues such as the Christianization of the countryside, the emergence of new types of patronage relations, and the effects of the new system of taxation upon rural social structures take on a different aspect.
Traditional approaches have reduced Caesar's Bellum Civile to a tool for teaching Latin or to one-dimensional propaganda, thereby underestimating its artistic properties and ideological complexity. ...Reading strategies typical of scholarship on Latin poetry, like intertextuality, narratology, semantic, rhetorical and structural analysis, cast a new light on the Bellum Civile: Ciceronian language advances Caesar's claim to represent Rome; technical vocabulary reinforces the ethical division between 'us' and the 'barbarian' enemy; switches of focalization guide our perception of the narrative; invective and characterization exclude the Pompeians from the Roman community, according to the mechanisms of rhetoric; and the very structure of the work promotes Caesar's cause. As a piece of literature interacting with its cultural and socio-political world, the Bellum Civile participates in Caesar's multimedia campaign of self-fashioning. A comprehensive approach, such as has been productively applied to Augustus' program, locates the Bellum Civile at the interplay between literature, images and politics.
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