Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Wiseman, T. P. (Timothy Peter), author.

Title The Roman audience : classical literature as social history / T.P. Wiseman
Edition First edition
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xiii, 327 pages, 4 pages of plates) : illustrations (some color), 1 map
Contents Times, books, and preconception. The longue durée -- Paper -- Books -- Literature as a public performance -- Rome before literature : indirect evidence. Evidence from Homer -- Evidence from terracotta -- Rome and Athens -- Honouring gods -- Fragments and 'history' -- Marking the days -- Rome before literature : Dionysus and drama. Pots painted, bronze engraved -- Republican Rome -- The Roman Games -- Rome and Alexandria -- The turning point -- An enclosure with benches. Theatrum and scaena -- Plautus and the cauea -- In the forum, in the circus -- Terence and the cauea -- Curtains and steps -- Makers, singers, speakers, writers. Ennius and the Vates -- Ennius as impersonator -- Cato and Polybius -- Lucilus and Varro -- A turbulent people. The political stage -- Pompey and the theatre -- When Cicero wasn't in Rome -- Pompey's Games -- Poets and dancers -- Before the disaster -- Rethinking the Classics : 59-42 BC. Lucretius and Philodemus -- Demetrius, historians, Caesar -- Caesar and Catullus -- Catullus 61-64 -- The Greek stage in Rome -- The ides of March, and after -- Rethinking the Classics : 42-28 BC. Virgil's Eclogues -- Sallust -- Horace's Satires -- Virgil's Georgics -- Virgil's 'Epyllion' -- Livy and Horace -- The Republic restored -- Rethinking the Classics : 28 BC-AD 8. The citizens, the audience -- Horace's Epistles -- Tibullus and Propertius -- Ovid and Virgil -- Augustus and the 'secular games' -- Horace and Ovid -- Ovid's Fasti -- Under the emperors. First century poets -- First century playwrights -- Prose fiction and history -- Lucian in the theatre -- Integrating evidence -- Christians
Summary In an ambitious overview of 1000 years of history, from the formation of the city-state of Rome to the establishment of a fully Christian culture, T.P. Wiseman examines the evidence for the oral delivery of 'literature' to mass public audiences. The treatment is chronological, utilising wherever possible contemporary sources and the close reading of texts. Presenting the history of Roman literature as an integral part of the social and political history of the Roman people, he draws some unexpected inferences from the evidence that survives. In particular, he emphasises the significance of the annual series of 'stage games', and reveals the hitherto unexplored common ground of literature, drama and dance
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-313) and indexes
Notes Print version record
Subject Latin literature -- History and criticism
Popular culture and literature -- Rome
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
Latin literature
Popular culture and literature
Latinsk litteratur -- historia.
Latinsk litteratur -- mottagande -- historia.
Litteraturreception -- historia.
Rome (Empire)
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780191028144
0191028142
9780191787645
0191787647