Unwritten Rome

by Wiseman, T.P.

• ISBN13: 9780859898232
• ISBN10: 0859898237
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-08
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

How do you understand a society that didn't write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out-like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen exercises in finding such material and making sense of it. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. x
Unwritten Rome	p. 1
What Can Livy Tell Us?	p. 24
Fauns, Prophets and Ennius' Annales	p. 39
The God of the Lupercal	p. 52
Liber: Myth, Drama and Ideology in Republican Rome	p. 84
The Kalends of April	p. 140
Summoning Jupiter: Magic in the Roman Republic	p. 155
Origines ludorum	p. 167
The Games of Flora	p. 175
The Games of Hercules	p. 187
Praetextae, Togatae and Other Unhelpful Categories	p. 194
Octavia and the Phantom Genre	p. 200
Ovid and the Stage	p. 210
The Prehistory of Roman Historiography	p. 231
History, Poetry and Annales	p. 243
The House of Tarquin	p. 271
The Legend of Lucius Brutus	p. 293
Roman Republic, Year One	p. 306
Bibliography	p. 321
Illustration credits	p. 344
Index of passages	p. 346
General index	p. 350
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