Translated Texts from Antiquity – serie

This volume offers a fresh translation and the first English-language commentary of Pomponius Mela, an Iberian intellectual who wrote a three-book geographical description of the Roman world under the emperor Claudius. The translation is as faithful to the original Latin as possible to give the Latinless reader a real taste of Mela's style.In the detailed commentary, Irby highlights Mela's sources (Herodotus, Sallust, and Caesar, among others) and stylistic influences, including Vergil, Ovid, Livy, and Horace; she examines Mela’s entertaining digressions into ethnography, paradoxography, and mythology; and she offers at least one interesting or quirky detail about most places (insofar as independent information exists), the sort of information that Mela would want his readers to know or the bizarre details that would have delighted him. Irby shows how Mela reworked his evidence and balanced his identity as an Iberian (for example by promoting his Phoenician heritage) and a Roman citizen (by emulating, especially, Sallust and Caesar). Finally, the commentary is keyed to the Barrington Atlas. Readers are further aided in finding their way through Mela’s world with three maps by the Ancient World Mapping Center and two schematic maps representing the author’s view of the world that he was describing.

The Roman writer Suetonius (second century CE) is best known for his Lives of the Caesars (De vita Caesarum) and Lives of famous men (De viris illustribus). It seems he also wrote about sixteen or seventeen other works, now lost to the manuscript tradition. There remain about sixty fragments attributed to Suetonius by various later writers, from Fronto to Gerald of Wales, which have until now been available only in Greek and Latin. The works seem to cover not just biography, but such diverse fields as the proper use of language, Roman culture and institutions, names for rivers and winds, animals, body parts, types of insults and types of garments.A treasure trove from the time of Hadrian, looking back on institutions that were already passing into history, these fragments are here collected in one volume with the first translation in any language, plus detailed notes by a team of scholars.Alongside the texts and translations, the attribution of each fragment with reference to the possible genre and background of the lost works is discussed, with an afterword by eminent Suetonian David Wardle. Literary scholars and ancient historians as well as students of social history will for the first time be able to easily access and study this unique collection.

This volume offers a fresh translation and the first English-language commentary of Pomponius Mela, an Iberian intellectual who wrote a three-book geographical description of the Roman world under the emperor Claudius. The translation is as faithful to the original Latin as possible to give the Latinless reader a real taste of Mela's style.In the detailed commentary, Irby highlights Mela's sources (Herodotus, Sallust, and Caesar, among others) and stylistic influences, including Vergil, Ovid, Livy, and Horace; she examines Mela’s entertaining digressions into ethnography, paradoxography, and mythology; and she offers at least one interesting or quirky detail about most places (insofar as independent information exists), the sort of information that Mela would want his readers to know or the bizarre details that would have delighted him. Irby shows how Mela reworked his evidence and balanced his identity as an Iberian (for example by promoting his Phoenician heritage) and a Roman citizen (by emulating, especially, Sallust and Caesar). Finally, the commentary is keyed to the Barrington Atlas. Readers are further aided in finding their way through Mela’s world with three maps by the Ancient World Mapping Center and two schematic maps representing the author’s view of the world that he was describing.