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The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature

Author : Susanna Morton Braund

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 278 pages

File Size : 15,62 MB

Release : 1997-08-07

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 0521473918

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Book Description

Essays by an international team of scholars in Latin literature and ancient philosophy explore the understanding of emotions (or 'passions') in Roman thought and literature. Building on work on Hellenistic theories of emotion and on philosophy as therapy, they look closely at the interface between ancient philosophy (especially Stoic and Epicurean), rhetorical theory, conventional Roman thinking and literary portrayal. There are searching studies of the emotional thought-world of a range of writers including Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Statius, Tacitus and Juvenal. Issues of debate such as the ethical colour of Aeneas's angry killing of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid are placed in a broad and illuminating perspective. Written in clear and non-technical language, with Greek and Latin translated, the volume opens up a fascinating area on the borders of philosophy and literature.





Emotion and Historiography in Polybius’ Histories

Author : Regina M. M. Loehr

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 243 pages

File Size : 29,36 MB

Release : 2023-12-29

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1003835112

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Book Description

This volume explores emotion and its importance in Polybius’ conception of history, his writing of historiography, and the benefits of this understanding to readers of history. How and why did ancient historians include emotions in their texts? This book argues that in the Histories of Polybius – the Greek historian who recorded Rome’s rise to dominion in the ancient Mediterranean – emotions play an effective role in history, used by the historian to explain the causes of actions, connect events, and make sense of human behavior. Through analysis of the emotions in the narrative and theory of Polybius’ Histories using critical terminology and frameworks from modern philosophy, psychology, and political science, this work calls into question assumptions that emotions were purely irrational and detrimental in ancient history, politics, and historiography. Emotions often positively shape Polybius’ historical narrative, provide criteria for the success and morality of agents, actions, and even historians, and aid the historian in guiding readers to become intelligent leaders and citizens of a new world centered on Rome. Emotion and Historiography in Polybius’ Histories is a fascinating read for students and scholars of ancient historiography and history, as well as those working on ancient political thought, emotions in the ancient Greek world, and emotion in history and literature more broadly.



Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome

Author : Robert A. Kaster

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 258 pages

File Size : 48,47 MB

Release : 2005-07-21

Category : History

ISBN : 0195140788

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Book Description

Examines the ways in which emotions, & talk about emotions, interacted with the ethics of the Roman upper classes in the late Republic & early Empire periods. The book considers how various Roman forms of fear, dismay, indignation & revulsion created an economy of displeasure that shaped society in constructive ways.



The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature

Author : Roy Gibson

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 1132 pages

File Size : 18,16 MB

Release : 2024-01-18

Category : History

ISBN : 1108369189

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Book Description

The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future development. The Critical Guide aims to stimulate reflection on how we engage with Latin literature. Texts, tools and territories are the three areas of focus. The Guide situates the study of classical Latin literature within its global context from late antiquity to Neo-Latin, moving away from an exclusive focus on the pre-200 CE corpus. It recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines (history, philosophy, material culture, linguistics, political thought, Greek), and takes a fresh look at key tools (editing, reception, intertextuality, theory).



Icons of Sound

Author : Bissera Pentcheva

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 28,61 MB

Release : 2020-11-23

Category : Art

ISBN : 1000207447

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Book Description

Icons of Sound: Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art brings together art history and sound studies to offer new perspectives on medieval churches and cathedrals as spaces where the perception of the visual is inherently shaped by sound. The chapters encompass a wide geographic and historical range, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and from Armenia and Byzantium to Venice, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. Contributors offer nuanced explorations of the intangible sonic aura produced in these places by the ritual music and harness the use of digital technology to reconstruct historical aural environments. Rooted in a decade-long interdisciplinary research project at Stanford University, Icons of Sound expands our understanding of the inherently intertwined relationship between medieval chant and liturgy, the acoustics of architectural spaces, and their visual aesthetics. Together, the contributors provide insights that are relevant across art history, sound studies, musicology, and medieval studies.



Roman Eyes

Author : Jaś Elsner

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 384 pages

File Size : 12,74 MB

Release : 2007-04-15

Category : Art

ISBN : 9780691096773

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Book Description

In Roman Eyes, Jas Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjectivity in the Roman Empire. Elsner draws upon a wide variety of visual material, from sculpture and wall paintings to coins and terra-cotta statuettes. He examines the different contexts in which images were used, from the religious to the voyeuristic, from the domestic to the subversive. He reads images alongside and against the rich literary tradition of the Greco-Roman world, including travel writing, prose fiction, satire, poetry, mythology, and pilgrimage accounts. The astonishing picture that emerges reveals the mindsets Romans had when they viewed art--their preoccupations and theories, their cultural biases and loosely held beliefs. Roman Eyes is not a history of official public art--the monumental sculptures, arches, and buildings we typically associate with ancient Rome, and that tend to dominate the field. Rather, Elsner looks at smaller objects used or displayed in private settings and closed religious rituals, including tapestries, ivories, altars, jewelry, and even silverware. In many cases, he focuses on works of art that no longer exist, providing a rare window into the aesthetic and religious lives of the ancient Romans.



Roman Eloquence

Author : William J. Dominik

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 280 pages

File Size : 42,27 MB

Release : 2003-09-02

Category : History

ISBN : 1134801475

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Book Description

The present volume is part of a general renaissance in the study of rhetoric and bears testimony to a discipline undergoing rapid and exciting change. It draws together established and newer scholars in the field to produce a probing and innovative analysis of the role played by rhetoric in Roman culture. Utilizing a variety of critical approaches and methodologies, these scholars examine not only the role of rhetoric in Roman society but also the relationship between rhetoric and Rome's major literary genres. In addition to demonstrating rhetoric's critical significance for Roman culture, the studies reveal the important role played by rhetoric in the formation of the various genres of literature.



Virtus Romana

Author : Catalina Balmaceda

Publisher : UNC Press Books

Page : 313 pages

File Size : 46,97 MB

Release : 2017-10-06

Category : History

ISBN : 1469635135

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Book Description

The political transformation that took place at the end of the Roman Republic was a particularly rich area for analysis by the era's historians. Major narrators chronicled the crisis that saw the end of the Roman Republic and the changes that gave birth to a new political system. These writers drew significantly on the Roman idea of virtus as a way of interpreting and understanding their past. Tracing how virtus informed Roman thought over time, Catalina Balmaceda explores the concept and its manifestations in the narratives of four successive Latin historians who span the late Republic and early Principate: Sallust, Livy, Velleius, and Tacitus. Balmaceda demonstrates that virtus in these historical narratives served as a form of self-definition that fostered and propagated a new model of the ideal Roman more fitting to imperial times. As a crucial moral and political concept, virtus worked as a key idea in the complex system of Roman sociocultural values and norms that underpinned Roman attitudes about both present and past. This book offers a reappraisal of the historians as promoters of change and continuity in the political culture of both the Republic and the Empire.



Feeling History

Author : Francesca D'Alessandro Behr

Publisher : Ohio State University Press

Page : 274 pages

File Size : 33,46 MB

Release : 2007

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0814210430

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Book Description

Feeling History is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucan's Bellum Civile. Through the narrator's direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucan's style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The book's chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca D'Alessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucan's retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole. An analysis of selected apostrophes from the Bellum Civile allows us to confront issues that are behind Lucan's disquieting imagery: how can we square the poet's Stoic perspectives with his poetically conveyed emotional urgency? Lucan's approach seems inspired by Aristotle, especially his Poetics, as much as by Stoic philosophy. In Lucan's aesthetic project, participation and alienation work as phases through which the narrator leads the reader to a desired understanding of his work of art. At the same time, the reader is confronted with the ends and limits of the aesthetic enterprise in general. Lucan's long-acknowledged political engagement must therefore be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic stance. In the same way that Lucan is unable to break free from the Virgilian model, neither can he develop a defense of morality outside of the Stoic mold. His philosophy is not a crystal ball to read the future or a numbing drug imposing acceptance. The philosophical vision that Lucan finds intellectually and aesthetically compelling does not insulate his characters (and readers) from suffering, nor does it excuse them from wrongdoing. Rather, it obligates them to confront the responsibilities and limits of acting morally in a chaotic world.