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This chapter focuses primarily on Roman literary accounts of the world and its peoples. The Romans, like other peoples of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world, from the end of the third century BC wrote themselves into the history of the ‘inhabited world’ in a literature that constantly engaged with the primarily Greek frameworks and images that had long been regarded as something of an international ‘language’ of memory and civilization. However, as they wrote themselves into this history, at the same time they frequently set Rome at an angle to it, one important signal of Roman claims to be both a master of Greek culture and to have a separable, remarkable character of their own. The chapter traces the development of some of the distinctive shapes of Roman conceptualization of their imperial world.

Chapter eight substantiates the claim that Chariton looked to Virgil, adds further evidence to this, and considers conseqences for our general assessment of Narratives about Callirhoe. More parallels in phrases and motifs suggest that Chariton conceived of his novel to some extent as a romantic answer to Virgil's tragic story of Dido and Aeneas. A discussion of the general question of the reception of Roman literature in the Greek world is followed by an account of the significance of Aeneas (and his mother Aphrodite) in the historical relations between Aphrodisias and Rome. Three different scenarios explore how Chariton would have gained access to the Aeneid. For an interpretation of Narratives about Callirhoe, the exclusively psychological and emotional reception of the political Roman model discourages political readings of Chariton.

This chapter investigates some comparable themes in the contemporary sphere of the Roman law. It considers some salient features of the Roman setting and their relevance to Avot. The presence of Roman legal jurisdiction and Greek-speaking lawyers in the Near East indicates that the fundamentals of Roman law were probably well known throughout the Graeco-Roman environment in Palestine. The Roman legal context of the second and third centuries illuminates numerous facets of the broad historical setting of Avot. The similar interests and emerging prominence of rabbis and eastern juries apparently reflected overarching trends of the time. Meanwhile, the educational function of the Institutes, the Enchiridion, and the Regulae Iuris highlights the textbook nature of the Mishnah and Avot's role as a text to be internalized at all levels of study.

This chapter discusses how the ambivalent interpretations of security that coursed through Roman literature accompanied the term's adoption and usage in seventeenth-century Europe. For instance, Claude Favre de Vaugelas, the seventeenth-century grammarian and one of the founding members of the Académie Française, justified the inclusion of term sécurité into the French lexicon based word's ambiguity, on its capacity to express a disjunction between belief and fact: sécurité is the feeling of being safe, well founded or not. To enjoy security while being truly out of harm's way is to benefit from a condition of being carefree; but to proceed securely without acknowledging imminent or already present dangers is to be either heroic or perilously careless.

One of the most fundamental characteristics of ancient slavery was the slave's lack of control over his or her own body. Slaves ‘were sexually available and completely subject to the will of their owners’. Even if they were not forced to work as commercial prostitutes, they would nevertheless serve as the functional equivalent of prostitutes as far as the owner himself, his family members, and his friends were concerned. The sexual exploitation to which they were subjected was similar in both cases. Graeco-Roman literary sources from Homer's Iliad to late antiquity provide ample testimony on this aspect of slave-master relationships. Members of the slave-owning strata of society did not need to frequent brothels: they had their own or their friends' private prostitutes available at all times.

A general introduction to the book’s topic, setting out its parameters in terms of chosen authors and periods and theoretical approaches. The first section sketches the scope of the book and its main critical and methodological questions: what does it mean to read Roman literature ‘for the mother’? How does it change modern feminist perspectives on these ancient, male-authored texts? The second section outlines in more detail the eclectic theoretical framework of the book, ranging from feminist psychoanalytic theorists such as Irigaray and Kristeva to the more recent work on the maternal in literature and philosophy by Elissa Marder and Andrew Parker. The final section of the chapter outlines the shifting significance of motherhood to Roman ideology and identity under Augustus and beyond, in particular the use of motherhood in key Roman foundation myths and texts (Ennius, Virgil, Livy, Horace) to symbolize the natural and apolitical as well as a secure, stable origin.

This chapter traces images of the witch, such as Circe or Medea, in Greek and Roman literature. By delineating differences between witches in the two cultures and situating the portraits in their historical contexts it illuminates the ideological work that ideas of witches perform. Roman literature, for example, depicts sorceresses with more detail and verisimilitude than Greek literature does, situating them firmly in the real world. Roman witches are not characters from mythology removed from reality by time and divine parentage, but are portrayed as women one might encounter in the market on any day. The witch serves various roles in Greek and Roman imagination: she represents popular fears and fantasies either as a magical helpmate to the male hero in Greek mythology, or as a destructive, emasculating force in Roman literature, where she functions as a negative model for proper female comportment.

An outline account of the writing process in ancient literary culture, with detailed discussion of the relationship between revision and concepts of craft or techne, and of the sociopolitical factors which influenced how revision was understood.

This chapter picks up the Roman historical thread of Ch.2. So far, we will have been led to see Aratus as an icon of order. In this chapter, three elements of disorder in Aratus come to the fore. These are planetary motion, namelessness and celestial change. In early imperial literature, all three elements become part of a system of cosmic symbolism with an inverse relation to the orderliness of the Aratean original. In an Aratean universe irrevocably tinged, after the 50s BC, by Lucretius, Roman literature cultivates the germ of disorder. What is more, cosmic forces become emblematic of disorder in the human sphere, in the form of civil war. The planets, in particular, come to symbolise the disorderly motion attendant on the human familial and civic failure which results in civil conflict.

The introduction aims to treat the main issues around Aratus’ text, whilst at the same time exploding the reader’s assumptions about them as a preparation for re-engagement with the text. Treating lightly the facts around the poem’s date, authorship and composition, the introduction sets Aratus’ poem in a much broader field of reference, namely the culture-specific development of Western cosmology.

This chapter takes three Roman authors – Virgil, Germanicus and Lucretius - and shows how they engage with Aratus. Civil war is uppermost in the Roman tradition of the interpretation of Aratus’ Dike myth, and this repeating historical quirk of Roman identity obtrudes on Aratus’ text in Roman interpretations of it. This is equally the case whether the interpretative strategy is allusion to it, as in the case of Virgil, or translation of it, as in Germanicus. One thing which will emerge from this chapter is a new picture of the interaction of sources in Roman approaches to Aratus.

This chapter examines the extent to which Hellenistic compilations were known at Rome and whether these literary forms were imitated in Latin. It considers the Memorable Words and Deeds of Valerius Maximus and the Stratagems of Frontinus, which combine features of the Hellenistic collections into a thematically arranged handbook of historical material apparently unknown in the Hellenistic era.

This section provides an overview of the series of case studies presented in lectures focusing on the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature. It observes that our thinking about the place occupied in ancient societies by the technology of writing and its products has undergone an analogous change, no less dramatic than these if perhaps less remarked. The section notes that given the fundamental place which words and writing have always occupied in classical philology, the results of challenges to the naturalness of the written word in the last two centuries are in many respects central to contemporary conceptions of the discipline. It presents a clear distinction between “everyday writing” and “public writing,” and seeks to explore methods of inquiry and significant bodies of material. The section reflects on both epigraphical and papyrological fieldwork over the past decade, and on the increased availability of digital images to which this fieldwork has referred.

Chapter eight follows the action that takes place in the eighth section of Mrs. Dalloway. In Hoff’s discussion of the plot she provides useful, factual context as well as her own personal interpretation of the novel which is greatly inspired by conventions of Roman and Greek myth. Also included in Hoff’s analysis is a broad understanding of ancient and modern literature which often provokes comparison to the whole of Woolf’s literary works. This chapter in particular focuses on the concept of rooms as a motif, and discusses the areas of Woolf’s writing that allude to the work of Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare and Dante.