A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Bay Area director, actor, and producer Sean San José takes on the themes of power and politics in his version of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s exploration of militaristic might and political folly. San José’s take on this little-known classic reimagines the text to be spoken by and for a community of “others.” The translation, which brings Shakespeare’s language into our era, rendering its thematic and dramatic power broadly accessible, is powered by a reexamination of populism in our current political moment.
This translation of Coriolanus was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.
This important new volume examines archaeological evidence of Roman colonization of the Middle Republican period. Themes of land use, ethnic accommodation and displacement, colonial identity, and administrative schemes are also highlighted. In delving deeply into the uniqueness of select colonial contexts, these essays invite a novel discussion on the phenomenon of colonialism in the political landscape of Rome’s early expansion. Roman urbanism of the Middle Republican period brought to the Italian peninsula fundamental changes, an important example of which, highlighted by a wealth of studies, is the ebullience of a dense network of colonies, as well as a mix of senatorial tactics and individual initiatives that underpinned their foundation. Whether Latin, Roman, or Maritimae, colonies created a new mesh of communities and imposed a new topography; more subtly, they signified the mechanisms of the rising hegemony. This book brings to the fore the diversity, agendas, and overall impact of a “settlement device” that changed the Italian landscape and introduced a new idea of Roman town.
"A vibrant account that puts flesh on the bare bones of early Roman history."
---Celia Schultz, University of Michigan
The ancient Romans' story down to 264 B.C. can be made credible by stripping away their later myths and inventions to show how their national character shaped their destiny.
After many generations of scholarly study, consensus is clear: the account in writers like Livy is not to be trusted because their aims were different from ours in history-writing. They wanted their work to be both improving and diverting. It should grow out of the real past, yes, but if that reality couldn't be recovered, or was uncertain, their art did not forbid invention. It more than tolerated dramatic incidents, passions, heroes, heroines, and villains. If, however, all this resulting ancient fiction and adornment are pruned away, a national character can be seen in the remaining bits and pieces of credible information, to explain the familiar story at least in its outlines.
To doubt the written sources has long been acceptable, but this or that detail or narrative section must always be left for salvage by special pleading. To press home the logic of doubt is new. To reach beyond the written sources for a better support in excavated evidence is no novelty; but it is a novelty, to find in archeology the principal substance of the narrative---which is the choice in this book. To use this in turn for the discovery of an ethnic personality, a Roman national character, is key and also novel.
What is repeatedly illustrated and emphasized here is the distance traveled by the art or craft of understanding the past---"history" in that sense---over the course of the last couple of centuries. The art cannot be learned, because it cannot be found, through studying Livy and Company. Readers who care about either of the two disciplines contrasted, Classics and History, may find this argument of interest.
"Like Thucydides of the hyperactive Athenians and de Tocqueville of the nation-building Americans, MacMullen here draws a character sketch of the early Romans---the men who built Rome, conquered Italy, and created an empire. Based on profound familiarity with history, evidence, and their better-known descendants, attention to what they did and failed to do, remarkable insight, empathy, constructive imagination, and not without humor, he reconstructs the homo Romanus and thus helps us imagine what he was like, and understand why he achieved what he did. This little book is informative, full of important ideas, and delightful to read."
---Kurt Raaflaub, Brown University
Jacket image: Marcus Fabius and Quintus Tannius. Fresco. Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy. Courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY..
Rome, from the beginning.
Livy (Titus Livius), the great Roman historian, was born at or near Patavium (Padua) in 64 or 59 BC; he may have lived mostly in Rome but died at Patavium, in AD 12 or 17.
Livy’s only extant work is part of his history of Rome from the foundation of the city to 9 BC. Of its 142 books, we have just thirty-five, and short summaries of all the rest except two. The whole work was, long after his death, divided into Decades or series of ten. Books 1–10 we have entire; books 11–20 are lost; books 21–45 are entire, except parts of 41 and 43–45. Of the rest only fragments and the summaries remain. In splendid style Livy, a man of wide sympathies and proud of Rome’s past, presented an uncritical but clear and living narrative of Rome’s rise to greatness.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Livy is in fourteen volumes. The last volume includes a comprehensive index.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press