Classical Studies

This book is about Cicero's rhetorical and political strategy as a newcomer in Roman republican politics. It argues that Cicero advertised himself as follower of chosen models of behaviour from the past — his role models or exempla. As an ambitious new man, a homo novus, in a political culture which favoured men descended from famous consuls and generals, Cicero had to devise alternative strategies to reach political office and influence. Through his main means to political power, his oratory, Cicero adopted the traditional claim to political offices through ancestry and adapted it to his own situation. Instead of references to the virtues and achievements of his own ancestors, Cicero presented himself as emulating specific historical figures with the purpose of building up and strengthening his public persona and thereby supporting his claim to political offices and influence. His treatises provided further possibility for promoting himself as a political thinker and brilliant orator. Chapters on the importance of the ancestors in Roman political culture and their role as historical examples for emulation lead up to the central part on Cicero's role models; role models which he utilized to build up and maintain self‐presentations as a leading orator, a prominent consul and statesman, a triumphantly recalled exile and, furthermore, as a role model to his own family, contemporary Romans and posterity.

This volume offers a consideration of the various ways in which Rome's civil wars were perceived, experienced, and represented by Romans and others across a variety of media and historical periods. Why did the Romans subject themselves to civil conflict repeatedly over the long course of their history? Is there something distinctive about the nature and quality of a Roman civil war? How does civil war insinuate itself into the Roman worldview and into what it means to be Roman? What influence does the Roman propensity for civil war have over how other cultures define Rome? The link between discordia and Rome is persistent, and the defining role of, or, to take a longer view, the creative impetus given by civil war's conflict and destruction manifested itself in a variety of areas of Roman experience: politics, ethics, society, literature, to name some of those examined here.

By developing a notion of civic obligation, this book attempts to re‐interpret the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. Its primary concern is to elucidate how the considerable obligations of the citizen to the city‐state (polis) and community (known here as civic obligations) were reconciled with ideas about individual liberty, and how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the oratory of the Athenian law‐courts, assembly, and through the publication of inscriptions. This work assesses the extent to which Rawls' model of liberty, consisting of his advocacy of renewed conventional modes of justice and liberty, might be used to elucidate the kind of liberty that existed in the ancient Greek city. The historical context is late 4th‐century Athens, during which period it is possible to observe a growing concern, expressed in the oratorical and epigraphical sources, for the performance by citizens of obligations, epitomized in the notion of good citizenship which emerges in Lycurgus' speech Against Leocrates. The core of the work analyses the ways in which the civic obligations were negotiated in oratorical and epigraphical modes of expression, examines comprehensively the substance of those obligations, and the ways in which their virtuous performance was recorded and used as a tool of self‐promotion. The final chapter measures the survey of Athens with that gleaned from the theory of Rawls: notwithstanding certain historical peculiarities, it is suggested that the model may be a useful one for thinking about city‐states and other organizations beyond fourth‐century Athens.

This book comprises a collection of chapters on Latin literature by a number of distinguished classicists, produced in memory of Don Fowler, who died in 1999 at the age of forty-six. The authors of the chapters were all inspired by the desire to commemorate a beloved colleague and friend. The chapters, including that by Don Fowler himself, are much concerned with the reception of the classical world, extending into the realms of modern philosophy, art history, and cultural studies. There are fundamental studies of Horace’s style and Ovid’s exile. The book is unusual in the informality of the style of a number of pieces, and the openness with which the contributors have reminisced about Fowler and reflected on his early death.

Since Foucault's History of Sexuality, historians have traced in ever increasing detail the formation of modern sexual identities in the west. Relatively less attention has been addressed to historians, writers and intellectuals working between 1750 and 1910 who formulated their own plots for the history of sexuality. This book examines the significance of ancient Greek pederasty for the formation of scholarly historicism by German and English thinkers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. Rather than “Greek love” being simply a euphemistic signifier for the secret signified “homosexuality,” this book examines how the pederastic—pedagogic relationship as exemplified in Plato's texts became a site for conceptualising the nature of the relationship between antiquity and modernity itself: precisely what did the Socratic teacher teach his pupil? What was the relationship between elder man and male youth? And how did this relationship inform modern discussions about the relationship between one generation and the next—between ancient and modern worlds? With the development of modern scholarly historicism in philhellenic Germany and Britain, Greek love provided the limit case for such scholarly endeavours invested in understanding how we moderns might be descended from a classical past. What sort of man did reading ancient Greek generate? From the work of Johann Matthias Gesner, the very first professor of philology at Göttingen, arguably the first modern European university, to Benjamin Jowett's Oxford, to the Oscar Wilde trials in London, to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic studies in Vienna, the question about the relevance of ancient Greek desires for modern masculinity has been posed and explored.

This book examines the inter-relationship of classical myth and psychoanalysis from the generation before Freud to the present day, engaging with debates about the reception of classical myth by modernity, the importance of psychoanalytic ideas for cultural critique, and its on-going relevance to ways of conceiving the self. The chapters trace the historical roots of terms in everyday usage, such as narcissism and the phallic symbol, and cover a variety of both classical and psychoanalytic texts.

In this volume scholars of modern and ancient culture come together to explore historical, textual, material, and theoretical interactions between classics and imperialism during the heyday of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century through to its collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. The contributors examine the multiple dialogues that developed between classics and colonialism in this period and argue that the two exerted a formative influence on each other at a number of important levels. Most at issue in the contexts where classics and empire converged was the critical question of ownership: to whom did the classical past belong? Did the modern communities of the Mediterranean have pre‐eminent ownership of the visual, literary, and intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Or could the populations and intellectual centres of northern Europe stake a claim to this inheritance? And in what ways could non‐European communities and powers—Africa, India, America—commandeer the classical heritage for themselves? In exploring the relationship between classics and imperialism in this period, the volume examines trends that are of current importance both to the discipline of classics and to modern British cultural and intellectual history. Both classics and empire, it contests, can be better understood by examining them in tandem: the development of classical ideas, classical scholarship, and classical imagery in this period was often directly or indirectly influenced by empire and imperial authority, and the British Empire itself was informed, shaped, legitimized, and evaluated using classical models.

Numerous nations have in one way or another engaged with the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. What impact does the classical past have on ideas of the nation, nationhood, nationality, and what effect does the national space have on classical culture? How has classical culture been imagined in various national traditions, what importance has it had within them, and for whom? This collection of essays by an international team of experts tackles the vexed relationship between Classics and national cultures, presenting essays on many regions, including China, India, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, as well as Germany, Greece, and Italy. It poses new questions for the study of antiquity and for the history of nations and nationalisms.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

This book looks at Roman comedy in the light of history and Roman history in the light of comedy. Plautus and Terence base their dramas on the New Comedy of 4th- and 3rd-century BC Greece. Yet many of the themes with which they engage are peculiarly alive in the Rome of the Hannibalic war, and the conquest of Macedon. This study takes issues as diverse as the legal status of the prisoner of war, the ethics of ambush, fatherhood and command, and the clash of maritime and agrarian economies, and examines responses to them both on the comic stage and in the world at large. This is a substantially new departure in ways of thinking about Roman comedy and one that opens it up to a far wider public than has previously been the case.