Compitum

Jonathan Wallis, Introspection and Engagement in Propertius. A Study of Book 3, Cambridge, 2018.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
Collection : Cambridge Classical Studies
248 pages
ISBN : 9781108417174
75 £

Propertius re-invents Latin love-elegy in his third collection. Nearly a decade into the Augustan principate, the early counter-cultural impulse of Propertius' first collections was losing its relevance. Challenged by the publication of Horace's Odes, and by the imminent arrival of Virgil's Aeneid, in 23 BCE Propertius produced a radical collection of elegy which critically interrogates elegy's own origins as a genre, and which directly faces off Horatian lyric and Virgilian epic, as part of an ambitious claim to Augustan pre-eminence. But this is no moment of cultural submission. In Book 3, elegy's key themes of love, fidelity, and political independence are rebuilt from the beginning as part of a subtle critique of emerging Augustan mores. This book presents a series of readings of fourteen individual elegies from Propertius Book 3, including nostalgic love poems, an elegiac hymn to Bacchus, and a lament for Marcellus, the recently-dead nephew of Augustus.

Joseph A. Howley, Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae, Cambridge, 2018.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
ISBN : 9781316510124
75 £

Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and intellectual culture. He argues that Gellius is in close conversation with predecessors both Greek and Latin, such as Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, and also offers new ways of making sense of the text's 'miscellaneous' qualities, like its disorder and its table of contents. Dealing with topics ranging from the framing of literary quotations to the treatment of contemporary celebrities who appear in its pages, this book offers a new way to learn from the Noctes about the world of Roman reading and thought.

Manuela Callipo, Verso la frase ben costruita. Il primo libro della Sintassi di Apollonio Discolo, Acireale / Roma, 2017.

Éditeur : Bonanno Editore
Collection : Multa Paucis
501 pages
ISBN : 978-88-6318-118-0
35 €

Primo trattato di sintassi pervenuto fino a noi, il testo di Apollonio Discolo è oggetto, negli ultimi anni, di interesse crescente da parte della critica. Apollonio è il primo autore noto, nelle teorie linguistiche antiche, a occuparsi sistematicamente della costruzione delle parole da un punto di vista grammaticale e non nell'ambito della dialettica o della retorica. Di fronte alla perdita quasi totale delle opere dei predecessori, che sopravvivono solo in frammenti, la produzione apolloniana è testimone dei risultati a cui era pervenuta la grammatica nel II sec. d.C. e fonte indiretta per i grammatici anteriori. Erede di una lunga tradizione, Apollonio è considerato, insieme al figlio Erodiano, il grammatico più autorevole e influente d'età imperiale e rappresenta il più alto livello raggiunto dal pensiero grammaticale greco; attraverso Prisciano (VI sec.), il suo insegnamento passa in Occidente e offre le basi per lo sviluppo della sintassi delle lingue moderne. Il primo libro del trattato, dedicato all'articolo, funge da introduzione all'intera opera: presenta principi di metodo sul significato e sul ruolo della sintassi e digressioni che fanno riflettere sul rapporto di Apollonio sia con la tradizione di scuola alessandrina, sia con la logica stoica, la cui eco è spesso presente tra le righe anche quando non direttamente rivendicata.

Anthony J. Woodman, The Annals of Tacitus: Book 4, Cambridge, 2018.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
Collection : Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries
368 pages
ISBN : 9781108419611
84,99 £

Book 4 of Tacitus' Annals, described by Sir Ronald Syme as 'the best that Tacitus ever wrote', covers the years AD 23–28, the pivotal period in the principate of the emperor Tiberius. Under the malign influence of Sejanus, the henchman who duped him and was loaded with honours, Tiberius withdrew to the island of Capri and was never again seen in Rome, where the treason trials engendered an atmosphere of terror. The volume presents a new text of Book 4, as well as a full commentary on the text, covering textual, literary, linguistic and historical matters. The introduction discusses the relationship between Tacitus and Sallust. The volume completes the sequence which began with commentary on Books 1 and 2 of the Annals by F. R. D. Goodyear (1972, 1981) and was continued by commentary on Book 3 by A. J. Woodman and R. H. Martin (1996) and on Books 5-6 by A. J. Woodman (2016).
Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/classical-studies/classical-literature/annals-tacitus-book-4#0jLcmkUOfdpxDJlD.99

Source : Cambridge University Press

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.