Myth History And Culture In Republican Rome

In this collection of essays, an international team of outstanding scholars engage with the ideas and methods of Professor Peter Wiseman's past and present work. They provide a sustained response to the work of one of the most widely respected Roman historians of this generation. The contributions range over myth (Corialanus and Remus), the interplay between historiography, literature and myth-making (on Cleopatra, for instance), and art and story-telling at Boscoreale. They explore Roman drama (Pacuvius) and links between drama and Virgil's Aeneid; they discuss Catullus in Bithynia and Cicero on Greek and Roman culture. Professor Wiseman has been at the forefront of innovative research in Roman history, historiography, literature in context, drama and myth, for many years. His work is marked by the combination of a powerful historical imagination with an acute sense of the limitations of our knowledge and of the need to negotiate with the complexity of our sources.

Inspired by the achievements of the ancient Greeks, the Romans made their city the center of an empire unsurpassed in size and influence for more than a thousand years. Its rich legacy shaped the medieval world and continues to amaze us today. Life, Myth, and Art in Ancient Rome celebrates the many achievements of Roman culture and delves into its fascinating dark side. Romans erected structures so well-built and engineered that they still stand millennia later, yet these same buildings also showcased blood sports as public entertainment. The Romans instituted just government, impartial legal and political institutions, and concepts of citizenship, yet its population included slaves as well as patricians and plebeians, and was often riven by intrigue, superstition, and savagery. This volume is a richly illustrated introduction to a fascinating, at times paradoxical, civilization and its art and architecture, ranging from magnificent temples and aqueducts, to exquisite mosaics and jewelry. Placing the art in its cultural context, the author covers themes that have long inspired the Western imagination, including the rise and fall of emperors, the life and death of the gladiator, the belief in omens and prophecy, and, ultimately, the establishment of Christianity.

Winner of American Philological Association: C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit 2005. Shortlisted for British Academy Book Prize 2005. Widely reviewed and celebrated in hardback on publication in 2004, "The Myths of Rome" is now available in a paperback edition.This major re-evaluation of Roman history and its afterlife in western culture through the mediums of myth and art is fast becoming the standard popular account of the Roman story-world. It triumphantly redresses the popular perception of classical myth as a predominantly Greek invention; and builds a cohesive narrative from the mass of mythical and historical tales that cluster around the nexus of Rome. It is set to become a sourcebook for students of Roman myth and history in this country and around the world at undergraduate and graduate level.

The myths of Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, the Six Brave Brothers, Horatius, Coriolanus and Volumnia, Cloelia, and others are explored. Hero myths and the values they represented are explored. This volume has a map of the Roman Empire, a family tree of Rome's founders, a table of major characters with name pronunciations and brief descriptions, a glossary, sidebars, fact boxes, a bibliography of sources for further study, and a subject index.

A new reading of the portrayal of Greek myths in Roman art, revealing important shifts in Roman values and identities.

This work focuses on some of the more unfamiliar aspects of the Roman experience, where the historian needs not just knowledge but also imagination. It expores how the Romans made sense of their past and how people today can understand that history, despite the inadequate evidence for early Rome and the Republic. All Latin and Greek source material is translated. The first essay in this collection was the Ronald Syme Lecture for 1993; "The Origins of Roman Historiography" argues that dramatic performances at the public games were the medium through which the Romans in the "pre-literary" period made sense of their own past.

The scholarship of T. P. Wiseman on the late Roman Republic is remarkable in combining vivid and detailed historical insight into the social, political and topographical realities of that period with a sympathetic understanding of late Republican literature, particularly the poetry of Catullus. Roman Studies contains twenty-eight of his major periodical contributions up to 1983, and published for the first time 'The Masters of Sirmio', which explores the economic, political and literary associations of the great villa on Lake Garda associated with the family of Catullus.

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.