Bøger i Wisconsin Studies in Classics serien

By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the "Historia Augusta" is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. By analyzing it as literature rather than as history, David Rohrbacher offers a new and compelling explanation for this strange text that has long vexed scholars.

Catullus' life was akin to pulp fiction. In Julius Caesar's Rome, he engages in a stormy affair with a consul's wife. He writes her passionate poems of love, hate, and jealousy. The consul, a vehement opponent of Caesar, dies under suspicious circumstances. The merry widow romances numerous young men. Catullus is drawn into politics and becomes a cocky critic of Caesar, writing poems that dub Julius a low-life pig and a pervert. Not surprisingly, soon after, no more is heard of Catullus. David Mulroy brings to life the witty, poignant, and brutally direct voice of a flesh-and-blood man, a young provincial in the Eternal City, reacting to real people and events in a Rome full of violent conflict among individuals marked by genius and megalomaniacal passions. Mulroy's lively, rhythmic translations of the poems are enhanced by an introduction and commentary that provide biographical and bibliographical information about Catullus, a history of his times, a discussion of the translations, and definitions and notes that ease the way for anyone who is not a Latin scholar.

The Persica is an extensive history of Assyria and Persia written by the Greek historian Ctesias around 400 BCE. Written for a Greek readership, the Persica influenced the development of both historiographic and literary traditions in Greece. It also, contends Matt Waters, is an essential but often misunderstood source for the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Engages postmodern and materialist feminist thought in readings of three significant poets writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class.

A fresh examination of a marginalized women's festival that influenced Athenian art, drama, philosophy, and public institutions.

The uses and effects of repetition, imitation, and appropriation in Latin epic poetry.

Three plays about women and the Trojan War, in fresh translations for the stage, the classroom, or the general reader. The publication of Trojan Women, Helen, and Hecuba in one volume also invites provocative engagement with issues of gender, history, warfare, and politics.

The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Dream, Fantasy, and Visual Art in Roman Elegy examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to allow readers to share in the intensely personal experience of dreaming.

Offering a reminder of the complex uses to which institutionalized violence can be put, this study shows how the deadly violence of arena sport and political suicide served a social purpose in ancient Rome.

Shedding light on the evidence of well-known and recently excavated sites and the objects they have yielded - their iconography, manufacturing techniques, and afterlives - this collection follows the first archaeological traces of the rise of ancient Italy to its rediscovery in the Renaissance and its reinvention in contemporary fiction.

Scrutinizes most of the best-known pieces of Greek sculpture to determine what can be securely considered to have been produced during 200-100 BC. This book reveals a tentative but plausible picture of the artistic trends of this fascinating period.

Reveals major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"", highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". This title explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry.

The foremost religious festival of ancient Athens was the Panathenaia. This work addresses the problems of its interpretation, discussing the seasonal controversy over the Parthenon frieze. The festival is also compared with others held throughout the ancient Greek world.

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists.

This text questions the Hellenistic dating of many famous monuements, based on careful examination of the evidence.

In this examination of Etruscan religion, Jean-Rene Jannot uses three major constructs - death, ritual, and the nature of the gods to present an overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, including the afterlife, funerary customs, and mythology.

This insightful study of the Roman poet Horace's first book of Epistles explores his representations of slavery and freedom as a response to the new imperial era in Rome.

Argues that the story of Hylas - a famous episode of the Argonauts' voyage - was used by poets throughout classical antiquity to reflect symbolically on the position of their poetry in the literary tradition. Certain elements of the story, including the characters of Hylas and Hercules themselves, functioned as metaphors of the art of poetry.

Scholarly investigations of the rich field of verbal and extraverbal Athenian insults have typically been undertaken piecemeal. Deborah Kamen provides an overview of this vast terrain and synthesizes the rules, content, functions, and consequences of insulting fellow Athenians.

Flinders Petrie has been called the ""Father of Modern Egyptology"" and was one of the pioneers of modern archaeology. Here Drower, a student of his in the 1930s, traces his life from his boyhood, when he was already a budding scholar, to his stunning career in the deserts of Egypt.

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes. The awful deeds function as a form of patriarchal terrorism, disappearing women at a rate of some four thousand annually in the United States alone. Caputi asks us not only to name the phenomenon of sexually political murder, but to recognize sex crime in all of its various interconnecting manifestations."

This sparkling new translation of Ovid's love poems, notorious for the sexual content that led to his exile by the emperor Augustus, also includes Tristia 2, Ovid's witty self-defense. With helpful footnotes and a comprehensive introduction, this edition gives readers a poetic tour of the literature, mythology, topography, religion, politics, and sexuality of ancient Rome.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 20 BC, Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.

In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great. The critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This book scrutinizes Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception.

Reveals the play as a key to Roman social relations centered on many kinds of slavery: to sex, money, and family structure; to masculinity and social standing; to senility and partying; and to jokes, lies, and idiocy. This work includes comprehensive commentary, useful indexes, and a pronunciation guide.

This is a comprehensive collection of material on sculptured statue bases which should be of interest to archaeologists, historians of art and of religion, and scholars of ancient culture (including athletics and gender studies).

This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. His pithy little poems amuse, but also offer vivid insight into the world of patrons and clients, doctors and lawyers, prostitutes, slaves, and social climbers in ancient Rome.