The Voices of the Consul: The Rhetorics of Cicero's de lege agraria I and II
Brian A. Krostenko
Abstract
This book probes the ideology of de lege agraria I and II, Cicero’s first two speeches as consul, delivered to the senate and the people respectively. The book propounds and applies a model of applied discourse analysis to draw out the implicit ideology of the speeches. Thus analyzed, the speeches reveal distinctive visions of dignitas and libertas, cardinal values of each audience. Those visions make clear Cicero’s artful self-fashioning, negotiating the complex cross-currents of late Republican politics, and they make clear as well the depth of his rhetorical art, which draws constantly upon unnamed points of reference, the physical environment, and varied social roles to situate his claims within the psychic imaginary of his audiences. The book thus makes it possible to see that apparent screeds against an agrarian law are thoroughgoing political manifestos—appropriate for the first speeches of a consul.
The Linguistic Roots of Ancient Greek
Don Ringe
This book traces the development of Proto-Indo-European into Ancient Greek of about the 5th century BC, attempting to recover the relative chronology of changes whenever possible and to explore in detail how the Ancient Greek dialects diversified. It is roughly parallel to From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (2nd ed.; Oxford University Press, 2017) and is intended for readers who have at least begun to learn Ancient Greek and are interested in its prehistory. Readers should be aware that this book is not a complete historical and comparative grammar of Greek.
The Human Factor: The Demography of the Roman Province of Hispania Citerior/Tarraconensis
Alejandro Sinner and others
Abstract
This book establishes a foundation for the study of ancient demography in the Iberian peninsula, focusing on its largest province, Hispania Citerior (renamed as Tarraconensis in the Early Empire). The authors follow a multidisciplinary approach that includes compiled archaeological, epigraphic, architectonic, osteological, and genetic datasets. Their integration and interpretation provide cutting-edge research and methodology in this area, and fills a gap in the scholarly literature, as no comprehensive work currently exists on the topic in English, Spanish, or any other language. This comprehensive and detailed study of a single province is necessary to generate accurate demographic estimates and to compare it with datasets from other regions and historical periods. By examining the province of Hispania Citerior/Tarraconensis in depth, the authors provide a detailed understanding of demographic patterns, urbanism, and urbanization rates over time, and link them with the social, cultural, and economic factors that affected the Iberian peninsula and the western Mediterranean from the fourth century BCE until the end of the Roman period. For instance, population size was a significant indicator of economic growth and performance, and the distribution of people between urban and rural areas played a vital role in the negotiation and construction of collective identities. Additionally, human mobility promoted cultural change and mediated information and technological flows. The volume provides the first comprehensive, state-of-the-art demographic analysis of the Iberian peninsula from the late Iron Age down to the end of the Roman period, including diachronic comparisons between different cultures and a significant number of case studies. By doing so, the authors provide new methodological approaches and insights into demographic patterns and their impact on ancient societies, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the ancient Mediterranean.
Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel: Between Representation and Resistance
Robert Cioffi
Published: 07 March 2024
Abstract
This book is about Egypt, ancient Ethiopia (a territory located in modern Sudan, known to ancient Egyptians as Kush and modern specialists as Nubia), and the ancient Greek romance novels. Of the five Greek novels that survive in their entirety, Egypt and/or Ethiopia play an important role in four: Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe (first century ce), Xenophon of Ephesus’ An Ephesian Tale (first/second century ce), Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (second century ce), and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story (third or fourth century ce). Employing approaches from literary studies, Classics, and Egyptology, the book’s argument turns on two concepts: representation and resistance. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the novels develop an image of Egypt and Ethiopia that is in close dialogue with Greco-Roman ethnographic tradition. On the other, it argues that this depiction regularly figures Egypt and Ethiopia as sites of resistance, revolt, and rebellion against—and also political, cultural, and religious alternatives to—a series of dominant imperial powers in the region, from the Persians to the Romans. This argument enriches our understanding of the texts’ relationship with the real and imagined frontiers of Roman political, military, and intellectual power. Further, it raises literary and cultural historical questions about the interrelation of humans and their environment and what we might call, after Simon Schama, the topographies of cultural identity in the Roman Empire.
Off-Stage Groups in Athenian Drama
Alexandra Hardwick
Published: 15 February 2024
Abstract
This book discusses off-stage assemblies, populations, armies, and other groups in fifth-century Athenian drama, which often depicts these groups as holding considerable power over events and characters on stage. Off-stage groups can only be depicted through on-stage characters’ viewpoints, and refracted through these characters’ perspectives and allegiances; this allows plays to depict groups from multiple different viewpoints, portraying their activity and decision-making in highly nuanced fashion and confronting the audience with the inherent difficulty of interpreting them. This book sets these off-stage groups in comparison with the groups depicted in fifth- and fourth-century Athenian prose texts: the fictive and mythical worlds imagined in drama explore collective activity in radical, unusual ways. Consequently, plays often undercut and complicate the stereotypes used to portray groups in prose texts.
Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire: Aulus Gellius and the Imperial Prose Collection
Author(s): Scott J. DiGiulio
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Year: 2024
ISBN: 0197688268,9780197688267
Description:
Most classists have viewed Aulus Gellius' second-century text, the Noctes Atticae, as little more than a haphazard collection of short essays and excerpts by an amateur scholar. Often called a "miscellany," the Noctes Atticae collects vast amounts of otherwise lost ancient literature and records Gellius' experience of reading them. While the depictions of his scholarly activity have led some scholars to see in Gellius a kindred spirit--a Classicist avant la lettre--his work is often relegated to the second tier of Latin literature, considered either an unoriginal assembly of more sophisticated sources or too heterogeneous for Classicists to approach as a whole.
Reading Miscellany in the Roman Empire, on the other hand, interprets the Noctes Atticae as a fundamentally literary collection that offers a profound meditation on the experience of reading and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire. Incorporating textual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, Scott J. DiGiulio investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting this text's perceived disorder on its own terms. The Noctes Atticae's self-conscious, miscellaneous aesthetic can enable us to probe the nature of reading during this moment in time, as Gellius' central preoccupation is articulating distinct "ways of reading," which DiGiulio argues we may use to navigate the web of literature in the Roman Empire. Gellius' use of material framing devices, focal characters, recurrent citations in dialogue with one another, and allusive references to other near-contemporary works can all be used as evidence that the evolution of prose as a literary form took place in the second century.
Tragedy, Philosophy, and Political Education in Plato's Laws
Ryan K. Balot
What are the prospects for ambitious political reform in communities of traditional, passionate, and even self-righteous citizens? Can thoughtful legislators create a healthy society for citizens whose judgment is typically unsound? This searching and provocative analysis addresses these timely—though universal—political questions by offering a novel interpretation of Plato’s Laws. Turning to the ancient past is essential to reinvigorating our contemporary understanding of these all-important issues. Previous readers have either celebrated the work’s idealism or denounced its totalitarianism. Balot, by contrast, refuses to interpret the dialogue as a political blueprint, whether admirable or misguided. He shows instead that it constitutes Plato’s greatest philosophical investigation of political life. In this transformative re-appraisal, Balot reveals that Plato’s goal was to cultivate a tragic attitude toward our political passions, commitments, and aspirations. The result is a profound political inquiry with far-reaching consequences.
在由传统、热情甚至自以为是的公民组成的社区中，进行雄心勃勃的政治改革的前景如何？ 深思熟虑的立法者能否为判断力通常不健全的公民创造一个健康的社会？ 通过对柏拉图的《法律篇》进行新颖的解读，这本探究性和启发性的分析著作探讨了这些及时而又普遍的政治问题。 转向古代对于重振我们当代对这些重要问题的理解至关重要。 以往的读者要么赞美这部作品的理想主义，要么谴责其极权主义。 与此相反，巴洛特拒绝将对话解释为政治蓝图，无论是令人钦佩的还是误入歧途的。 相反，他认为对话是柏拉图对政治生活最伟大的哲学探索。 在这一变革性的重新评价中，巴洛特揭示了柏拉图的目标是培养我们对政治激情、承诺和愿望的悲剧态度。 其结果是一种具有深远影响的深刻政治探索。
Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE
Christopher Stedman Parmenter
Abstract
Between circa 700 and 300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world’s peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, “gray-eyed Thracians” of the distant north to the “dark-skinned Ethiopians” of the far south (as the poet Xenophanes would describe around 540 BCE), Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece’s “racial imaginary”—a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy—emerged out of the context of cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors over the Archaic and Classical Periods. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the “exotic” provenance of their goods to consumers; it might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative. But in the early Classical Period such images coalesced into the charged, idea of the barbaros, “barbarian.” Drawing from the historiography of trade in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Racialized Commodities adopts the model of “commodity biography” to investigate the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. Starting in the period circa 700–450 BCE, Part 1 focuses on the earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, in Greek art. Part 2, which concentrates on the period between 550 and 300 BCE, seeks to explain how and why negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians were so widespread in ancient Greece.
大约在公元前 700 年到公元前 300 年之间，古希腊人对世界各民族有了生动的想象。从遥远北方的浅色皮肤、“灰眼睛的色雷斯人 ”到遥远南方的 “深色皮肤的埃塞俄比亚人”（如诗人色诺芬在公元前 540 年左右所描述的那样），希腊人设想了一个由具有不同相貌的人类群体组成的世界。种族化商品》一书追溯了希腊的 “族群想象”--对文化地理、商品生产和人类相貌的思考--是如何在古风时期和古典时期希腊与其地中海邻国的跨文化贸易背景下产生的。对于商人来说，族群想象可以用来向消费者渲染商品的 “异域 ”来源；它还可以传播有关海关、定价、航海和在外国港口做生意的实用信息。古希腊人试图解释异族的做法很少带有贬义。但在古典时期早期，这些形象凝聚成了 “野蛮人”（barbaros）这一带有强烈色彩的概念。本书借鉴了十八世纪大西洋世界的贸易史学，采用 “商品传记 ”的模式来研究古希腊和古典希腊的文化、身体和事物之间的纠葛。第 1 部分从大约公元前 700-450 年开始，重点关注希腊艺术中最早的非洲人形象，希腊人将其描述为埃及人或埃塞俄比亚人。
