This volume considers representations of space and movement in sources ranging from Roman comedy to late antique verse, exploring how poetry in the Roman world is fundamentally shaped by its relationship to travel within the geography of Rome’s far-reaching empire. The volume surveys Roman poetics of travel and geography in sources ranging from Plautus to Augustan poetry, from the Flavians to Ausonius. The chapters offer a range of approaches to: the complex relationship between Latin poetry, Roman identity, imperialism, and travel and geospatial narratives; and the diachronic and generic evolutions of poetic descriptions of space and mobility. In addition, two chapters, including the concluding one, contextualize and respond to the volume’s discussion of poetry by looking at ways in which Romans not only write and read poems about travel and geography, but also make writing and reading part of the experience of traveling, as demonstrated in their epigraphic practices. The collection as a whole offers important insights into Roman poetics and into ancient notions of movement and geographical space. Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry will be of interest to specialists in Latin poetry, ancient travel, and Latin epigraphy as well as to those studying travel writing, geography, imperialism, and mobility in other periods. The chapters are written to be accessible to researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.

This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy’s treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for ‘captive Greece’ and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome’s competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome’s colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy’s rhetoric of orientalism.

This study considers the relationship between geography and power in the Roman world, most particularly the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products: geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs.

"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--

This volume provides a collection of chapters by a multidisciplinary collection of experts on the linguistic variegation of the later-Roman and post-imperial period in the Roman west. It offers the first comprehensive modern study of the main developments, key features, and debates of the later-Roman and post-imperial linguistic environment.

Addressing the close connections between ancient divination and knowledge, this volume offers an interlinked and detailed set of case studies which examine the epistemic value and significance of divination in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Focusing on diverse types of divination, including oracles, astrology, and the reading of omens and signs in the entrails of sacrificial animals, chance utterances and other earthly and celestial phenomena, this volume reveals that divination was conceived of as a significant path to the attainment of insight and understanding by the ancient Greeks and Romans. It also explores the connections between divination and other branches of knowledge in Greco-Roman antiquity, such as medicine and ethnographic discourse. Drawing on anthropological studies of contemporary divination and exploring a wide range of ancient philosophical, historical, technical and literary evidence, chapters focus on the interconnections and close relationship between divine and human modes of knowledge, in relation to nuanced and subtle formulations of the blending of divine, cosmic and human agency; philosophical approaches towards and uses of divination (particularly within Platonism), including links between divination and time, ethics, and cosmology; and the relationship between divination and cultural discourses focusing on gender. The volume aims to catalyse new questions and approaches relating to these under-investigated areas of ancient Greek and Roman life. which have significant implications for the ways in which we understand and assess ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of epistemic value and variant ways of knowing, ancient philosophy and intellectual culture, lived, daily experience in the ancient world, and religious and ritual traditions. Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity will be of particular relevance to researchers and students in classics, ancient history, ancient philosophy, religious studies and anthropology who are working on divination, lived religion and intellectual culture, but will also appeal to general readers who are interested in the widespread practice and significance of divination in the ancient world.

This book delineates how Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), a learned playwright and novelist, embeds himself within the classical tradition, integrating Greek and Roman motifs with a wide range of sources to produce heart-breaking masterpieces such as Our Town and comedy sensations such as Dolly Levi. Through this study of archival sources and close reading, readers will understand Wilder’s avant-garde staging and innovative time sequences not as a break with the past, but as a response to the classics. The author traces the genesis of unforgettable characters like Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker, Emily Webb in Our Town, and George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. Vergil’s expression, "Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart" haunts Wilder’s oeuvre. Understanding Vergil’s phrase as "tears for the beauty of the world," Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the beauty of the world and the sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly, alert to the wonder of the everyday. This work will appeal to actors and directors, professors and students in classics and in American literature, those fascinated by modern drama and performance studies, and non-specialists, theatre-goers, and readers in the general public.

In interdisciplinary projects and research collaborations, participants face multiple demands. However, these expectations encounter a reality that is characterized by time pressure, high demands in one's own discipline, and often increasingly administrative tasks. What can meaningful interdisciplinary work look like in an academic environment? What tasks and constraints do researchers face? And, considering the range of disciplines involved, how can interdisciplinary research projects be designed in a successful way? How does one meaningfully bring different disciplines, their methods, and theories into conversation with each other across the spatial and temporal distance of their subjects? And all that in a way in which the yield is effective and visible in all subprojects? This publication sheds light on this issue by way of example. It reflects on and formulates the experiences and outcomes of interdisciplinary work of a humanities and social science research training group with disciplinary breadth as well as historical depth. The disciplines involved are ancient history, archaeology, art history, music didactics, North American history, patristics, philology (Latin/Greek studies), religious studies, sociology, and theology with the subjects Old and New Testament. In pairs of advanced and young scholars, individual experiences and identifiable results of interdisciplinary work in the respective contributions or research projects are recorded; on a next level, discipline-specific outcomes, but also problems are pinpointed; on a third level, collective experiences with interdisciplinary research displayed. The contributions take a variety of forms: reflections, dialogues, experience reports as well as perspective observations. Rafael Barroso Romero, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, Elisabeth Begemann, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Enno Friedrich, University of Rostock, Germany, Elena Malagoli, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Anna-Katharina Rieger, University of Graz, Austria, Jörg Rüpke, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Ramón Soneira Martínez, Austrian Archaeological Institute Vienna, Austria, Markus Vinzent, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany.

If ancient history is particularly susceptible to a top-down approach, due to the nature of our evidence and its traditional exploitation by modern scholars, another ancient history—‘from below’—is actually possible. This volume examines the possibilities and challenges involved in writing it. Despite undeniable advances in recent decades, ‘our slowness to reconstruct plausible visions of almost any aspect of society beyond the top-most strata of wealth, power or status’ (as Nicholas Purcell has put it) remains a persistent feature of the field. Therefore, this book concerns a historical field and social groups that are still today neglected by modern scholarship. However, writing ancient history ‘from below’ means much more than taking into account the anonymous masses, the subaltern classes and the non-elites. Our task is also, in the felicitous expression coined by Walter Benjamin, ‘to brush history against the grain,’ to rescue the viewpoint of the subordinated, the traditions of the oppressed. In other words, we should understand the bulk of ancient populations in light of their own experience and their own reactions to that experience. But, how do we do such a history? What sources can we use? What methods and approaches can we employ? What concepts are required to this endeavour? The contributions mainly engage with questions of theory and methodology, but they also constitute inspiring case studies in their own right, ranging from classical Greece to the late antique world. This book is aimed not only at readers working on classical Greece, republican and imperial Rome and late antiquity but at anyone interested in ‘bottom-up’ history and social and population history in general. Although the book is primarily intended for scholars, it will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students of history, archaeology and classical studies.