Public Libraries and Literary Culture in Ancient Rome
Author : Clarence Eugene Boyd
Publisher :
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 30,35 MB
Release : 1915
Category : Libraries
ISBN :
Roman Literary Culture
Author : Elaine Fantham
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 28,55 MB
Release : 2013-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1421409275
Book Description
This new edition broadens the scope of Fantham’s study of literary production and its reception in Rome. Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. Fantham’s first edition discussed the habits of Roman readers and developments in their means of access to literature, from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. She examines the issues of patronage and the utility of literature and shows how the constraints of the physical object itself—the ancient "book"—influenced the practice of both reading and writing. She also explores the ways in which ancient criticism and critical attitudes reflected cultural assumptions of the time. In this second edition, Fantham expands the scope of her study. In the new first chapter, she examines the beginning of Roman literature—more than a century before the critical studies of Cicero and Varro. She discusses broader entertainment culture, which consisted of live performances of comedy and tragedy as well as oral presentations of the epic. A new final chapter looks at Pagan and Christian literature from the third to fifth centuries, showing how this period in Roman literature reflected its foundations in the literary culture of the late republic and Augustan age. This edition also includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.
Ancient Libraries
Author : Jason König
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 501 pages
File Size : 41,72 MB
Release : 2013-04-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1107244587
Book Description
The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.
The Philobiblon
Author : Richard De Bury
Publisher : Courier Dover Publications
Page : 84 pages
File Size : 38,81 MB
Release : 2019-06-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0486832465
Book Description
"Will always hold an honorable place for bibliophiles." — The University of Chicago Press One of the earliest treatises on the value of preserving neglected manuscripts, building a library, and book collecting, Richard De Bury's The Philobiblon was written in 1345 and circulated widely in manuscript form for over a century. The first printed edition appeared in Cologne in 1473, and several others soon followed as the invention of the printing press spread throughout the late Medieval world. The chapter titles of this legendary work reflect its nature, combining the author's love for and commitment to the importance of books and the knowledge they contain with thoughts on collecting them, lending them, teaching with them, and simply enjoying them: "That the Treasure of Wisdom is chiefly contained in books," "What we are to think of the price in the buying of books," "Who ought to be special lovers of books," and "Of the manner of lending all our books to students." The Prologue ends with the following thought: "And this treatise (divided into twenty chapters) will clear the love we have had for books from the charge of excess, will expound the purpose of our intense devotion, and will narrate more clearly than light all the circumstances of our undertaking. And because it principally treats of the love of books, we have chose after the fashion of the ancient Romans fondly to name it by a Greek word, Philobiblon." This volume offers modern bibliophiles a splendid edition of one of the first books ever to study, define, and, above all, praise their passion: the all-encompassing love of books.
Inside Roman Libraries
Author : George W. Houston
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 28,46 MB
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 1469617803
Book Description
Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity
The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature
Author : Peter E. Knox
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 648 pages
File Size : 40,23 MB
Release : 2013-11
Category : History
ISBN : 0195395166
Book Description
Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.
Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire
Author : William A. Johnson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 19,11 MB
Release : 2010-06-03
Category : History
ISBN : 019972105X
Book Description
In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.
Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind
Author : Edith Hall
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 37,40 MB
Release : 2014-06-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0393244121
Book Description
"Wonderful…a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours." —Natalie Haynes, Independent The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history to show how the ancient Greeks were the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. Hall portrays a uniquely rebellious, inquisitive, individualistic people whose ideas and creations continue to enthrall thinkers centuries after the Greek world was conquered by Rome. These are the Greeks as you’ve never seen them before.
Libraries in the Ancient World
Author : Lionel Casson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 17,94 MB
Release : 2001-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0300088094
Book Description
The unexpected murder in the little Cotswolds town of Colombury has everyone guessing. Before the answers are found more lives are threatened.
Walking in Roman Culture
Author : Timothy M. O'Sullivan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 40,15 MB
Release : 2011-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 1139497154
Book Description
Walking served as an occasion for the display of power and status in ancient Rome, where great men paraded with their entourages through city streets and elite villa owners strolled with friends in private colonnades and gardens. In this book-length treatment of the culture of walking in ancient Rome, Timothy O'Sullivan explores the careful attention which Romans paid to the way they moved through their society. He employs a wide range of literary, artistic and architectural evidence to reveal the crucial role that walking played in the performance of social status, the discourse of the body and the representation of space. By examining how Roman authors depict walking, this book sheds new light on the Romans themselves - not only how they perceived themselves and their experience of the world, but also how they drew distinctions between work and play, mind and body, and Republic and Empire.
