Elena Giusti - Böcker

Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.

Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

Founded upon more than a century of civil bloodshed, the first imperial regime of ancient Rome, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, looked at Rome's distant and glorious past in order to justify and promote its existence under the disguise of a restoration of the old Republic. In doing so, it used and revisited the history and myth of Rome's major success against external enemies: the wars against Carthage. This book explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. It analyses the ideological portrait of Carthaginians from the middle Republic and the truth-twisting involved in writing about the Punic Wars under the Principate. It also investigates the mirroring between Carthage and Rome in a poem whose primary concern was rather the traumatic memory of Civil War and the subsequent subversion of Rome's Republican institutions through the establishment of Augustus' Principate.

Latin literature is a hotbed of holes and erasures. Its sensitivity to politics leaves it ripe for repression of all sorts of names, places and historical events, while its dense allusivity appears to hide interpretative clues in a network of texts that only the reader's consciousness can make present. This volume showcases innovative approaches to the field of Latin literature, all of which are refracted through this prism of absence, which functions as a fundamental generative force both for the hermeneutics and the ongoing literary aftermath of these texts. Reviewing and working with various influential approaches to textual absence, the contributors to Unspoken Rome treat these texts as silent types, listening out for what they do not say, and how they do not speak, whilst also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built.