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This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure o...
Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval Europe In the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome’s first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known to the Greeks as Persephone, by the god of the underworld. The Return of Proserpina takes readers from Roman antiquity to the late Middle Ages to explore how the Mediterranean island offered authors a setting for forces resistant to empire and a location for displaying and reclaiming what has been destroyed. Using the myth of Proserpina as a through line, Sarah Spence charts the relationship Western empire held with its myths and its own p...
Combines material and literary cultural approaches to the study of the reception of Augustus and his age during the reign of the emperor Domitian
The aim of this volume is to study Silius’ poem as an important step in the development of the Roman historical epic tradition. The Punica is analyzed as transitional segment between the beginnings of Roman literature in the Republican age (Naevius and Ennius) and Claudian’s panegyrical epic in late antiquity, shedding light on its ‘inclusiveness’ and its peculiar, internal dialectic between antiquarian taste and problematic actualization. This is an innovative attempt to connect epic poems and authors belonging to different ages, to frame the development of the literary genre, according to its specific aims and interests throughout the centuries.
This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.
Examines Tacitus' understanding of political liberty through his portrayals of Roman emperors and senators
This book offers, in one volume, a modern English translation of all 17 books of Silius Italicus’ Punica. Composed in the first century CE, this epic tells the story of the Second Punic War between Rome and Hannibal’s Carthage (218-202 BCE). It is not only a crucial text for students of Flavian literature, but also an important source for anyone studying early Imperial perspectives on the Roman Republic. The translation is clear and comprehensible, while also offering an accurate representation of the Latin text. Augmented by a scholarly introduction, extensive notes, glossary and a comprehensive bibliography (included in the introduction), this volume makes the text accessible and relevant for students and scholars alike.