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A History Today Best Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history. “Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context...It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney’s work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again.” —Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement “[Feeney’s] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.” —The Economist
Each selection begins with a short biographical and historical essay.
Michael von Albrecht's A History of Roman Literature, originally published in German, can rightly be seen as the long awaited counterpart to Albin Lesky's Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur. In what will probably be the last survey made by a single scholar the whole of Latin literature from Livius Andronicus up to Boethius comes to the fore. 'Literature' is taken here in its broad, antique sense, and therefore also includes e.g. rhetoric, philosophy and history. Special attention has been given to the influence of Latin literature on subsequent centuries down to our own days. Extensive indices give access to this monument of learning. The introductions in Von Albrecht's texts, together with the large bibliographies make further study both more fruitful and easy.
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.
This is the first book to describe the intimate relationship between Latin literature and the politics of ancient Rome. Until now, most scholars have viewed classical Latin literature as a product of aesthetic concerns. Thomas Habinek shows, however, that literature was also a cultural practice that emerged from and intervened in the political and social struggles at the heart of the Roman world. Habinek considers major works by such authors as Cato, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca. He shows that, from its beginnings in the late third century b.c. to its eclipse by Christian literature six hundred years later, classical literature served the evolving interests of Roman and, more particularly, aristocratic power. It fostered a prestige dialect, for example; it appropriated the cultural resources of dominated and colonized communities; and it helped to defuse potentially explosive challenges to prevailing values and authority. Literature also drew upon and enhanced other forms of social authority, such as patriarchy, religious ritual, cultural identity, and the aristocratic procedure of self-scrutiny, or existimatio. Habinek's analysis of the relationship between language and power in classical Rome breaks from the long Romantic tradition of viewing Roman authors as world-weary figures, aloof from mundane political concerns--a view, he shows, that usually reflects how scholars have seen themselves. The Politics of Latin Literature will stimulate new interest in the historical context of Latin literature and help to integrate classical studies into ongoing debates about the sociology of writing.
What was a Roman book? How did it differ from modern books? How were Roman books composed, published and distributed during the high period of Roman literature that encompassed, among others, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Pliny and Tacitus? What was the ‘scribal art’ of the time? What was the role of bookshops and libraries? The publishing of Roman books has often been misrepresented by false analogies with contemporary publishing. This wide-ranging study re-examines, by appeal to what Roman authors themselves tell us, both the raw material and the aesthetic criteria of the Roman book, and shows how slavery was the ‘enabling infrastructure’ of literature. Roman publishing is placed firmly in the context of a society where the spoken still ranked above the written, helping to explain how some books and authors became politically dangerous and how the Roman book could be both an elite cultural icon and a contributor to Rome’s popular culture through the mass medium of the theatre.
The brief word-histories in this book are meant to provide background on some words that everyone learns when they study Latin, as well as some rarer terms that have interesting stories to tell about Roman culture. This book lists a new word or phrase that came into American English every year from 1975 to 1998, with a selection of early additions from 1497 to 1750, and discusses the history behind the adoption of each. Teachers and students of Latin can benefit from the slightly more formal, but still anecdotal, approach taken here to some key words in the Latin lexicon.