Compitum

Nicholas Freer et Bobby Xinyue (éd.), Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics, Londres-Oxford, 2019.

Éditeur : Bloomsbury Academic
304 pages
ISBN : 9781350070516
85 £

Virgil's Georgics, the most neglected of the poet's three major works, is brought to life and infused with fresh meanings in this dynamic collection of new readings. The Georgics is shown to be a rich field of inherited and varied literary forms, actively inviting a wide range of interpretations as well as deep reflection on its place within the tradition of didactic poetry.
The essays contained in this volume – contributed by scholars from Australia, Europe and North America – offer new approaches and interpretive methods that greatly enhance our understanding of Virgil's poem. In the process, they unearth an array of literary and philosophical sources which exerted a rich influence on the Georgics but whose impact has hitherto been underestimated in scholarship. A second goal of the volume is to examine how the Georgics – with its profound meditations on humankind, nature, and the socio-political world of its creation – has been (re)interpreted and appropriated by readers and critics from antiquity to the modern era. The volume opens up a number of exciting new research avenues for the study of the reception of the Georgics by highlighting the myriad ways in which the poem has been understood by ancient readers, early modern poets, explorers of the 'New World', and female translators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Lynn Kozak et Miranda Hickman (éd.), The Classics in Modernist Translation, Londres-Oxford, 2019.

Éditeur : Bloomsbury Academic
Collection : Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
288 pages
ISBN : 9781350040953
85 £

This volume sheds new light on a wealth of early 20th-century engagement with literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity that significantly shaped the work of anglophone literary modernism. The essays spotlight 'translation,' a concept the modernists themselves used to reckon with the Classics and to denote a range of different kinds of reception – from more literal to more liberal translation work, as well as forms of what contemporary reception studies would term 'adaptation', 'refiguration' and 'intervention.'
As the volume's essays reveal, modernist 'translations' of Classical texts crucially informed the innovations of many modernists and often themselves constituted modernist literary projects. Thus the volume responds to gaps in both Classical reception and Modernist studies: essays treat a comparatively understudied area in Classical reception by reviving work in a subfield of Modernist studies relatively inactive in recent decades but enjoying renewed attention through the recent work of contributors to this volume.

Caillan Davenport, A history of the Roman equestrian order, Cambridge-New York, 2019.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
xxv, 717 p pages
ISBN : 9781107032538
180 $

In the Roman social hierarchy, the equestrian order stood second only to the senatorial aristocracy in status and prestige. Throughout more than a thousand years of Roman history, equestrians played prominent roles in the Roman government, army, and society as cavalrymen, officers, businessmen, tax collectors, jurors, administrators, and writers. This book offers the first comprehensive history of the equestrian order, covering the period from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD. It examines how Rome's cavalry became the equestrian order during the Republican period, before analysing how imperial rule transformed the role of equestrians in government. Using literary and documentary evidence, the book demonstrates the vital social function which the equestrian order filled in the Roman world, and how this was shaped by the transformation of the Roman state itself.

Sari Kivistö, Lucubrationes Neolatinae. Readings of Neo-Latin dissertations and satires, Helsinki, 2018.

Éditeur : Societas Scientiarum Fennica
Collection : Commentationes humanarum litterarum, 134
xii-244 pages
ISBN : 978-951-653-427-8
25 €

This volume centers on selected readings of Neo-Latin dissertations, satires and other texts written during the period between 1500 and 1800. Neo-Latin texts offer highly significant, in their own time widely influential and today little studied documentation for European scholarship and literary cultures. The printed dissertation was the predominant form of academic publication in seventeenth- century Germany. Generally master's dissertations of this period were conventional pieces of scholarship that summarised traditional knowledge and scientific discussion of their day. Dissertations were rather short, that is, from twenty to sixty pages, but they were also later bound in larger collective volumes. The dissertations were not intended to demonstrate novelty as much as they sought to display the extensive learnedness of the respondent or the presider who had written the dissertation. The professor who acted as praeses supervised the dissertation and chaired the disputation in which the respondens (the student) defended his arguments. As Neil Kenny notes, the contribution of the professor could be anything from actual authorship to a quick glance over the text.

Source : Tiedekirja

Luis Rivero García, Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses. A Textual Commentary, Oldenbourg, 2019.

Éditeur : De Gruyter
532 pages
ISBN : 978-3-11-061249-3
150 €

The text of Ovid's Metamorphoses is not as indisputably established as one might think. Many passages are still obscure or plainly corrupt. 550 manuscripts, 500 editions and reprints, as well as countless critical notes and works must be taken into account when trying to establish the most reliable text for new generations of readers. This volume provides a detailed line-by-line analysis of Book XIII and offers thereby an indispensable starting point for a new critical edition not only of this but also of other parts of the poem.

Source : De Gruyter

Daniele Miano, Fortuna Deity and Concept in Archaic and Republican Italy, Oxford, 2018.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
256 pages
ISBN : 9780198786566
£60

What is good luck and what did it mean to the Romans? What connections were there between luck and childbirth, victory in war, or success in business? What did Roman statesmen like Cicero and Caesar think about luck? This volume aims to address these questions by focusing on the Latin goddess Fortuna, one of the better known deities in ancient Italy. The earliest forms of her worship can be traced back to archaic Latium, and though the chronological scope of the discussion presented here covers the archaic age to the late Republic, she was still a widely recognized allegorical figure during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The primary reason for Fortuna's longevity is that she was a conceptual deity, symbiotically connected to the concept of chance and good fortune. When communities, individuals, and social groups interacted with the goddess, they were inevitably also interacting with the concept: renegotiating it, enriching it with new meanings, and challenging established associations. All the available literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources on Fortuna are explored here in depth, including analyses of all the attested sanctuaries of the goddess in Italy, an updated study of inscribed gifts offered to her by a variety of individuals, and discussion of how authors such as Cicero and Caesar wrote about Fortuna, chance, and good luck. This study of the goddess based on conceptual analysis serves to construct a radically new picture of the historical development of this deity in the context of the cultural interactions taking place in ancient Italy, and also suggests a new approach to polytheism based on an exploration of the connection between gods and goddesses and concepts.

Source : Oxford University Press