Unwritten Rome / T.P. Wiseman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wiseman, T. P. (Timothy Peter)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rome (Italy)--History--To 476.

Rome (Italy).

Physical Description:

ix, 366 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Exeter : University of Exeter Press, 2008.

Summary:

How do you understand a society that didn't write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out-like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen exercises in finding such material and making sense of it.

Contents:

1 Unwritten Rome 1

2 What Can Livy Tell Us? 24

3 Fauns, Prophets and Ennius' Annales 39

4 The God of the Lupercal 52

5 Liber: Myth, Drama and Ideology in Republican Rome 84

6 The Kalends of April 140

7 Summoning Jupiter: Magic in the Roman Republic 155

8 Origines ludorum 167

9 The Games of Flora 175

10 The Games of Hercules 187

11 Praetextae, Togatae and Other Unhelpful Categories 194

12 Octavia and the Phantom Genre 200

13 Ovid and the Stage 210

14 The Prehistory of Roman Historiography 231

15 History, Poetry and Annales 243

16 The House of Tarquin 271

17 The Legend of Lucius Brutus 293

18 Roman Republic, Year One 306.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [321]-343) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780859898232

0859898237

9780859898225

0859898229

OCLC:

212894329