Compitum

Rachel Bryant Davies, Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, Cambridge, 2018.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
402 pages
ISBN : 9781107192669
90 £

Playful, popular visions of Troy and Carthage, backdrops to the Iliad and Aeneid's epic narratives, shine the spotlight on antiquity's starring role in nineteenth-century culture. This is the story of how these ruined cities inspired bold reconstructions of the Trojan War and its aftermath, how archaeological discoveries in the Troad and North Africa sparked dramatic debates, and how their ruins were exploited to conceptualise problematic relationships between past, present and future. Rachel Bryant Davies breaks new ground in the afterlife of classical antiquity by revealing more complex and less constrained interaction with classical knowledge across a broader social spectrum than yet understood, drawing upon methodological developments from disciplines such as history of science and theatre history in order to do so. She also develops a thorough critical framework for understanding classical burlesque and engages in in-depth analysis of a toy-theatre production.

Elena Giusti, Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid. Staging the Enemy under Augustus, Cambridge, 2018.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
Collection : Cambridge Classical Studies
346 pages
ISBN : 9781108416801
75 £

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

Jacques Bouineau (éd.), L'Avenir se prépare de loin, Paris, 2018.

Éditeur : Les Belles Lettres
240 pages
ISBN : 9782251448206
17,50 €

Ils sont hommes politiques, savants, professeurs, écrivains.
Ils partagent une conviction simple : leur vie eût été bien différente s'ils n'avaient pas été nourris par le monde antique.
Ils ne pensent pas que c'était mieux avant ; ils sont convaincus que, riches de ce passé, il est possible que ce soit mieux demain.
Et, chacun à sa manière, ils témoignent de la chance culturelle que sont nos Anciens, pour, au fond, apprendre à vivre debout.
Ce volume est né à l'initiative d'Antiquité-Avenir, réseau regroupant 38 associations, dont la mission est de promouvoir et de valoriser la connaissance de l'Antiquité.
Avec les contributions de : Marianne Bastid-Bruguière, Nicolas Baverez, Frédéric Boyer, Françoise Briquel Chatonnet, Pierre Brunel, Jean Canavaggio, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Xavier Darcos, Michel Deguy, Paul Demont, Jean-Paul Demoule, Pierre Ducrey, Michael Edwards, Maha El-Khalil Chalabi, Thierry Grillet, Francis Joannès, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Denis Knoepfler, Pierre Laurens, Bernard Legras, Dario Mantovani, Yves Meyer, Claudia Moatti, Thomas Pavel, Christian Prigent, Maurice Sartre, Pauline Schmitt-pantel, Alain Schnapp, Monique Trédé, Arnaud Zucker.

Source : Les Belles Lettres

Bram Roosen, Per i testi latini. Prime riflessioni sul fondo inedito di Robert Marichal, Turnhout, 2018.

Éditeur : Brepols
Collection : Giornale Italiano di Filologia - Bibliotheca 17
256 pages
ISBN : 978-2-503-57590-2
95 €

Robert Marichal (1904-1999) was one of the most famous Latin paleographers of the Twentieth Century. His broad production is precious and well-known by scholars from all over the world, but his recently discovered Archive at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) offers a further and impressive contribution to the knowledge we have of ancient Latin texts, from Latin papyri from Herculaneum, to Latin ostraka from Northen Africa, and to Latin graffiti the ancient Latium and Campania.
This volume moves from the pioneer work on this Archive by the ERC project PLATINUM. It collects eight papers from leading specialists and highlights how promising is the work on such an unpublished Archive.

Miriam T. Griffin, Politics and Philosophy at Rome: Collected Papers, Oxford, 2018.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
832 pages
ISBN : 9780198793120
120 £

This volume presents the collected papers of Miriam T. Griffin, an eminent scholar of Roman history and ancient thought whose work has played a central role in forging links between scholarship on the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies. Spanning a period of over forty years and a distinguished career as Fellow of Somerville College at Oxford, these papers include both published works, many of them now difficult to find in their original printings, and previously unpublished lectures.
The collection covers a range of topics in Roman Republican and Imperial history, Roman historiography, and the interplay of Latin philosophy and Roman politics, as well as featuring a host of key Latin authors, most notably Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus. The last of these categories, the interplay of philosophy and politics in Rome, is also the most prominent in the volume: though deeply interested in ancient philosophy, and especially Stoicism, Miriam Griffin writes primarily as a historian concerned with how Roman thinking was related to political circumstances and actions. Many of the essays have opened up new areas of discussion and formed the basis of later scholarship dealing with history and philosophy, and although some of them are quite general, serving as useful introductions to the subject area, others are more detailed and technical, inviting discussion and controversy. The style throughout is consistently dynamic and engaging, resulting in a fascinating and formidable collection from a scholar unrivalled as an expert in both the history of the Graeco-Roman world and its philosophies, and a true pioneer in the bridging of these two spheres.

Gesine Manuwald, Cicero, Agrarian Speeches Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary, Oxford, 2018.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
544 pages
ISBN : 9780198715405
110 £

The Agrarian Speeches (Orationes de lege agraria) were delivered in January 63 BCE, just after Cicero had entered office as consul; they are his inaugural orations and therefore the first element of his consular activity. They not only provide valuable testimony for approaches to agrarian legislation in the late Republic, but also show how the new consul presented himself before the Senate and the People at the beginning of his consular year, a significant political event for which very few extensive sources remain.