Search results for ""Cambridge Philological Society""

Augustus and the Destruction of History explores the intense controversies over the meaning and profile of the past that accompanied the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Augustan principate. The ten case studies collected here analyse how different authors and agents (individual and collective) developed specific conceptions of history and articulated them in a wide variety of textual and visual media to position themselves within the emergent (and evolving) new Augustan normal. The chapters consider both hegemonic and subaltern endeavours to reconfigure Roman memoria and pay special attention to power and polemics, chaos, crisis and contingency – not least to challenge some long-standing habits of thought about Augustus and his principate and its representation in historiographical discourse, ancient and modern. Some of the most iconic texts and monuments from ancient Rome receive fresh discussion here, including the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Fasti Capitolini.

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This monograph uses the life and work of ground-breaking female classicist, Wilmer Cave Wright, to examine several questions about the rise of women in that discipline. First, what went into the creation of a classics scholar under circumstances that would seem to preclude that? Second, why was it arguably Wright’s time in Chicago that was her formative experience and period? Third, why did Wright want so desperately to leave Bryn Mawr, and then stay and pour herself into her students? Fourth, through what lens did she approach the evidence of classical literature, and did it make a difference? Fifth, how did Wright survive the Thomas years at Bryn Mawr? Sixth, why did she abruptly abandon her long-term project on Libanius of Antioch? Seventh, what led her to suddenly switch from classical Greek literature to translating medieval Latin medical texts? Wright's journey from Mason College to Girton College, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Bryn Mawr College is placed into historical context. Throughout, the significance of Wright’s work, particularly on the life of the Emperor Julian, is assessed. The author is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, and the author of Julian and Christianity (Cornell) as well as numerous articles in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, and Classical Philology.

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The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the centre, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossible to access anonymous poems in their pristine shape and context. The essays collected in this volume attempt, each in its own way, to disentangle the bundles of historically accreted uncertainties and misconceptions that affect individual anonymous texts, including pseudepigrapha ascribed to Homer, Manetho, Virgil and Tibullus, literary and inscribed epigrams, and unattributed fragments. Poems without Poets will be of interest to students and scholars working on any anonymous ancient texts, but also to readers seeking an introduction to classical poetry beyond the limits of the established canon.

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