The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome

The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome PDF Author: Amanda Wilcox
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299288331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, Wilcox provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she shows that he both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Though Cicero and Seneca are often viewed as a study in contrasts, Wilcox extensively compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s significant influence on Seneca as a prose stylist, philosopher, and public figure.

The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome

The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome PDF Author: Amanda Wilcox
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299288331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving. By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, Wilcox provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she shows that he both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Though Cicero and Seneca are often viewed as a study in contrasts, Wilcox extensively compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s significant influence on Seneca as a prose stylist, philosopher, and public figure.

Roman Letters

Roman Letters PDF Author: Noelle K. Zeiner-Carmichael
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118617304
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
Roman Letters offers a rich selection of original translations of ancient Roman letters spanning from the 1st century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Chronologically arranged and grouped according to author or collection, the letters cover various topics and themes selected from a broad range of authors. A unique single volume text that makes classical letters accessible and readable to undergraduates and the non-specialist reader Presents a wide range of authors and material, with over 200 selected texts Includes selections that illustrate a complete cycle of correspondence, as well as letters written by the same author and covering the same topic/theme but sent to different recipients Letters are arranged chronologically, with letters grouped according to author or collection An accompanying website offers additional, complementary letters Topical index highlights various topics and themes represented by the letters

Cicero, Greek Learning, and the Making of a Roman Classic

Cicero, Greek Learning, and the Making of a Roman Classic PDF Author: Caroline Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192564803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
The Roman statesman, orator, and author Marcus Tullius Cicero is the embodiment of a classic: his works have been read continuously from antiquity to the present, his style is considered the model for classical Latin, and his influence on Western ideas about the value of humanistic pursuits is both deep and profound. However, despite the significance of subsequent reception in ensuring his canonical status, Cicero, Greek Learning, and the Making of a Roman Classic demonstrates that no one is more responsible for Cicero's transformation into a classic than Cicero himself, and that in his literary works he laid the groundwork for the ways in which he is still remembered today. The volume presents a new way of understanding Cicero's career as an author by situating his textual production within the context of the growth of Greek classicism: the movement had begun to flourish shortly before his lifetime and he clearly grasped its benefits both for himself and for Roman literature more broadly. By strategically adapting classic texts from the Greek world, and incorporating into his adaptations the interpretations of the Hellenistic philosophers, poets, rhetoricians, and scientists who had helped enshrine those works as classics, he could envision and create texts with classical authority for a parallel Roman canon. Ranging across a variety of genres - including philosophy, rhetoric, oratory, poetry, and letters - this close study of Cicero's literary works moves from his early translation of Aratus' poetry (and its later reappearance through self-quotation) to Platonizing philosophy, Aristotelian rhetoric, Demosthenic oratory, and even a planned Greek-style letter collection. Juxtaposing incisive analysis of how Cicero consciously adopted classical Greek writers as models and predecessors with detailed accounts of the reception of those figures by Greek scholars of the Hellenistic period, the volume not only offers ground-breaking new insights into Cicero's ascension to canonical status, but also a salutary new account of Greek intellectual life and its effect on Roman literature.

Ancient Love Letters

Ancient Love Letters PDF Author: Anna Tiziana Drago
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110989476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a ‘genre’ is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label ‘love letter’, are compared with more clear-cut examples. A series of case studies focuses on individual letters and letter-collections. Some case studies situate their subjects within the history and literary evolution of the love letter, using both intertextuality and comparative approaches; others placing them in their cultural and historical contexts, particularly uncovering the contribution of epistolarity to erotic discourse, and to the history of sexuality and gender in diverse eras and locations within Classical to Late Antiquity.

The Roman Republic of Letters

The Roman Republic of Letters PDF Author: Katharina Volk
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691253951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
An intellectual history of the late Roman Republic—and the senators who fought both scholarly debates and a civil war In The Roman Republic of Letters, Katharina Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion. It was a period of intense cultural flourishing and extreme political unrest—and the agents of each were very often the same people. Members of the senatorial class, including Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Cato, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus, contributed greatly to the development of Roman scholarship and engaged in a lively and often polemical exchange with one another. These men were also crucially involved in the tumultuous events that brought about the collapse of the Republic, and they ended up on opposite sides in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey in the early 40s. Volk treats the intellectual and political activities of these “senator scholars” as two sides of the same coin, exploring how scholarship and statesmanship mutually informed one another—and how the acquisition, organization, and diffusion of knowledge was bound up with the question of what it meant to be a Roman in a time of crisis. By revealing how first-century Rome’s remarkable “republic of letters” was connected to the fight over the actual res publica, Volk’s riveting account captures the complexity of this pivotal period.

Letters and Communities

Letters and Communities PDF Author: Paola Ceccarelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192526235
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.

Roman Letters

Roman Letters PDF Author: Finley Hooper
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814320235
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book

Book Description
What did the Romans say in their letters? How are their letters useful in understanding the ancient world? Addressing these and other questions, Finley Hooper and Matthew Schwartz have compiled a selection of letters from Cicero in the first century B.C. to Cassidorus in the sixth century A.D. The letters, sometimes surprising, occasionally amusing, but always impressive, provide new insights to Roman life. With sixteen chapters, notable Romans write about themselves and their times, and about personal and public matters. Seneca provides indignant remarks about the behavior of women in Nero's Rome. From his monastic cell in Bethlehem, St. Jerome berates St. Augustine for unkind gossip he may have spread. Some letters give a different perspective to history, while others talk of harvests, marriages, and day-to-day events. The authors have included running commentary for historical continuity as well as brief sketches on the men behind the letters.

Fronto: Selected Letters

Fronto: Selected Letters PDF Author: Marcus Cornelius Fronto
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780934424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
Selected letters written by the Roman senator and orator M. Cornelius Fronto in translation and accompanied by in-depth commentary notes, offering a unique insight into the late second century A.D Roman world.

Reading History in the Roman Empire

Reading History in the Roman Empire PDF Author: Mario Baumann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110764121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book

Book Description
Although the relationship of Greco-Roman historians with their readerships has attracted much scholarly attention, classicists principally focus on individual historians, while there has been no collective work on the matter. The editors of this volume aspire to fill this gap and gather papers which offer an overall view of the Greco-Roman readership and of its interaction with ancient historians. The authors of this book endeavor to define the physiognomy of the audience of history in the Roman Era both by exploring the narrative arrangement of ancient historical prose and by using sources in which Greco-Roman intellectuals address the issue of the readership of history. Ancient historians shaped their accounts taking into consideration their readers’ tastes, and this is evident on many different levels, such as the way a historian fashions his authorial image, addresses his readers, or uses certain compositional strategies to elicit the readers’ affective and cognitive responses to his messages. The papers of this volume analyze these narrative aspects and contextualize them within their socio-political environment in order to reveal the ways ancient readerships interacted with and affected Greco-Roman historical prose.

Love, Friendship, and Expediency in Cicero's Letters

Love, Friendship, and Expediency in Cicero's Letters PDF Author: Gabriel Evangelou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book

Book Description
By attacking Epicurean philosophy repeatedly in his public writings, Cicero established himself as one of Epicurus’ most fervent critics. The remarks that he makes about Epicureanism in his letters further suggest a genuine conviction that such a philosophy had no place in Roman society. This consistency in Cicero’s statements has led most scholars to assume that Cicero could not have embraced any of the principles of the Epicurean school. This book challenges the conventional view of Cicero as someone who completely rejected Epicurean philosophy-even in his private life-because of its utilitarian character. It argues that his relationship with Pompey, Caesar, Atticus, Quintus, Terentia, and Tullia encompassed several aspects of Aristotle’s account of φιλία (love and friendship) but was, nonetheless, ultimately based on expediency, in accord with Epicurus’ conception of φιλία. While Cicero’s statements in his public speeches and his letters to men with an active public life have been scrutinised for his lack of candour or for his tendency to exaggerate his achievements, the claims found in his letters to Atticus and to his family have not been treated with equal caution, as they tend be taken at face value. The book highlights the large number of discrepancies in his remarks and argues that, despite his anti-Epicurean statements, personal benefit played a vital role in all of his relationships.