›Humanitas‹ in the Imperial Age : From Pliny the Younger to Symmachus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mollea, Simone.

Contributor:

Patrum Lumen Sustine (PLuS), Funder.

Series:

Lumina Series

Lumina Series ; v.1

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (398 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin/Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2024.

Summary:

This book investigates one of the most polysemic Latin words, humanitas. While the first chapter briefly retraces the history of humanitas from its origins, the book as a whole focuses on its uses in the pagan literary texts from the Trajanic (late first century CE) to the Theodosian age (late fourth century CE). The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which the different meanings usually attributed to humanitas by dictionaries (roughly ‘human nature’, ‘education and culture’, ‘philanthropy’) are much more nuanced and in continuous relation with one another, and how the use of humanitas by some authors often performs clear rhetorical and/or ideological strategies. This book is therefore not only a lexicographical study, but pays careful attention to the wider historical and cultural contexts in which humanitas was employed. More specifically, the use of humanitas reveals the ways in which Roman authors considered themes that were at the core of their conception of culture and civilisation, such as the relationship between being learned and behaving morally, the ideas of moral nobility and clemency, the notion that a value concept can distinguish one category of men from another, or even one historical period from another.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Zu dieser Reihe

Zu diesem Band

Acknowledgements

Preface

Contents

I Laying the Foundations

1 Introduction

2 Humanitas from the Republican Age to that of Domitian

II Pagan Humanitas in the Imperial Age

3 A New Apogee of Humanitas in the Trajanic Age: Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and Suetonius

4 Trials and Educational Programmes: The Specialisation(s) of Humanitas in the Antonine Age

5 Humanitas in School: [Quintilian’s] Declamationes Minores and Maiores

6 The Silent Third Century and Its Exception: Eumenius’ Oratio pro instaurandis scholis

7 The Age of Constantine and Another Exception: Firmicus Maternus’ Civilization Without παιδεία in the Mathesis

8 Humanitas in the Thedosian Age: The Reproposition of the Trajanic Pattern?

9 Back (or Forward?) to the Ontological Origins of Humanitas: The Asclepius

10 Pagan Humanitas in the Imperial Age: Concluding Remarks

Appendices

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index Locorum

Index Rerum

Index Nominum

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9783111510507

3111510506

OCLC:

1463057704