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"This introduction to, commentary on, and translation into English of the first book of letters by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus shows the leading orator and statesman of the fourth-century Roman Senate deeply engaged in conversation with the leading men of the empire. The book highlights the influence of the late Roman aristocracy that flourished in the century after Constantine and demonstrates that it did not become powerless in the face of the bishops and the new Christian elite. Shared goals united the late Roman elites far more than religion divided them, helping explain the relatively nonviolent and gradual conversion of the western Roman aristocracy. One hundred and seven letters-crafted to match the recipient's personality, status, and interest-discuss literature, religion, politics, and social life. They provide a unique window into the private lives of Rome's leaders, pagan and Christian, in late antiquity."--Publisher's website.
Examines the religious life of one of the last pagan senators of Rome, dates c. 340-402, who lived in a tumultuous time during the Late Antique period of the Roman Empire, dying just a few years before the Western Empire began to break up.
Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, this volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300–600 c.e.). Each chapter addresses a major collection of Greek or Latin literary letters, introducing the social and textual histories of each collection and examining its assembly, publication, and transmission. Contributions also reveal how collections operated as discrete literary genres, with their own conventions and self-presentational agendas. This book will fundamentally change how people both read these texts and use letters to reconstruct the social history of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.
This volume, offering an insight into the literary world of Rome in the fourth century AD, reflects an increased interest in the writers of the 150 years before the collapse of the Western Empire, who have long been over-shadowed by the pre-eminence accorded since the eighteenth century to the Golden and Silver ages. Among the writers examined are Ausonius, the poet, Imperial official and tutor to Gratian; Claudian, the last major ‘classical’ poet; Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola, two of the founders of Christian Latin poetry; Symmachus, the letter writer and supporter of die-hard paganism; and St. Augustine, whose influence on Christian thought and the Middle Ages is incalculable. These essays consider how such writers responded to a world where vitality was ebbing from the old forms of political life, religion and literature, giving way to new institutions, modes of life and horizons of reflection.