Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T12:48:02.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 15 - Latin Literature and Roman History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2024

By
Myles Lavan
Edited by
Roy Gibson  and
Christopher Whitton
Roy Gibson
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Christopher Whitton
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

This chapter offers a perspective on Latin literature from the neighbouring field of Roman history. It discusses what appears to be a growing intellectual divide between the two fields, a divergence that is surprising given the increased focus on the politics of literature among Latinists. The essay also offers some suggestions for bridging the gap.I suggest that Latinists could take a much broader view of the structures of power in which Latin texts were embedded, rather than focusing on the phenomenon of autocracy and high politics, that they might profitably continue to extend their attention to non-literary texts and especially inscriptions, and that they could work harder to speak to historians.

Keywords

Latin literatureRoman historyinscriptionshistoriographypowerideology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature , pp. 817 - 846
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahl, F. (1984a) ‘The art of safe criticism in Greece and Rome’, AJPh 105: 174–208.Google Scholar
Ahl, F. (1984b) ‘The rider and the horse: politics and power in Roman poetry from Horace to Statius’, ANRW ii.32.1: 40–124.Google Scholar
Ando, C. (2000) Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Ash, R. (2007) Tacitus: Histories Book ii, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bauman, R. A. (1996) Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome, London.Google Scholar
Beard, M. (1998) ‘Vita inscripta’, in Ehlers, W. W., ed., La biographie antique (Geneva), 83–114.Google Scholar
Beard, M. (2002) ‘Ciceronian correspondences: making a book out of letters’, in Wiseman, T. P., ed., Classics in Progress (Oxford), 103–44.Google Scholar
Bertrand, J.-M. (1990) ‘Formes de discours politiques: décrets des cités grecques et correspondance des rois hellénistiques’, in Nicolet, C., ed., Du pouvoir dans l’antiquité: mots et realités (Paris and Geneva), 101–15.Google Scholar
Birley, A. (1979) The People of Roman Britain, London.Google Scholar
Birley, A. (1991) ‘Vindolanda: new writing tablets 1986–1989’, in Maxfield, V. A. and Dobson, M. J., eds., Roman Frontier Studies 1989 (Exeter), 29–51.Google Scholar
Bowman, A. K. and Thomas, J. D. (1994) The Vindolanda Writing-Tablets (Tabulae Vindolandenses ii), London.Google Scholar
Bradley, K. (2001). ‘Imagining slavery: the limits of the plausible’, JRA 14: 473–77.Google Scholar
Bryen, A. Z. (2013) Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation, Philadelphia.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bücheler, F. and Lommatzsch, E. (1930) Carmina Latina epigraphica, 2nd edn, 2 vols., Leipzig.Google Scholar
Buckland, W. W. (1908) The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Ceccarelli, P. (2018) ‘Letters and decrees: diplomatic protocols in the Hellenistic period’, in Ceccarelli, P., Doering, L., Fögen, T. and Gildenhard, I., eds., Letters and Communities: Studies in the Socio-Political Dimensions of Ancient Epistolography (Oxford), 148–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Champlin, E. (1999) ‘The first (1996) edition of the Senatus consultum’, AJPh 120: 117–22.Google Scholar
Chaplin, J. D. (2013) ‘Alluding to reality: towards a typology of historiographical intertextuality’, Histos working papers 2013.01.Google Scholar
Corbeill, A. (2015) Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome, Princeton.Google Scholar
Courtney, E. (1995) Musa Lapidaria: A Selection of Latin Verse Inscriptions, Athens.Google Scholar
Damon, C. (1999) ‘The trial of Cn. Piso in Tacitus’ Annales and the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre’, AJPh 120: 143–62.Google Scholar
Damon, C. (2003) Tacitus. Histories Book 1, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Damon, C. (2010) ‘Déjà vu or déjà lu? History as intertext’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 14: 375–88.Google Scholar
Damon, C. and Takács, S. A. (1999) ‘The senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre: text, translation discussion’, AJPh 120: 13–42.Google Scholar
Davies, J. P. (2004) Rome’s Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their Gods, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Dench, E. (2009) ‘The Roman historians and twentieth-century approaches to Roman history’, in Feldherr 2009b, 394–406.Google Scholar
Dickey, E. (2002) Latin Forms of Address: From Plautus to Apuleius, Oxford.Google Scholar
Dossey, L. (2010) Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Eberle, L. P. and LeQuéré, É (2017) ‘Landed traders, trading agriculturalists? Land in the economy of the Italian diaspora in the Greek East’, JRS 107: 27–59.Google Scholar
Feldherr, A. (2009a) ‘Introduction’, in Feldherr 2009b, 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldherr, A., ed. (2009b) The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, W. (2000) Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flower, H. I. (1999) ‘Piso in Chicago: a commentary on the APA/AIA joint seminar on the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre’, AJPh 120: 99–115.Google Scholar
Geue, T. (2018) ‘Soft hands, hard power: sponging off the empire of leisure (Virgil, Georgics 4)’, JRS 108: 115–40.Google Scholar
Gildenhard, I. (2011) Creative Eloquence: The Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches, Oxford.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, S. (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Chicago.Google Scholar
Gualandi, G. (1963) Legislazione imperiale e giurisprudenza, 2 vols., Milan.Google Scholar
Habinek, T. N. (1998) The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity and Empire in Ancient Rome, Princeton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habinek, T. N. (2002) ‘Ovid and empire’, in Hardie, P., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge), 46–61.Google Scholar
Harries, J. (2018) ‘Saturninus the helmsman, Pliny and friends: legal and literary letter collections’, in König and Whitton 2018, 260–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauken, T. (1998) Petition and Response: An Epigraphic Study of Petitions to Roman Emperors, Bergen.Google Scholar
Haynes, I. (2013) Blood of the Provinces: The Roman Auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans, Oxford.Google Scholar
Henderson, J. (1998) Roman Life: Rutilius Gallicus on Paper and in Stone, Exeter.Google Scholar
Hinds, S. (2001) ‘Cinna, Statius, and “immanent literary history” in the cultural economy’, in Schmidt, E. A., ed., L’histoire littéraire immanente dans la poésie latine (Vandœuvres), 221–65.Google Scholar
Hinds, S. (2010) ‘Between formalism and historicism’, in Barchiesi, A. and Scheidel, W., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies (Oxford), 369–85.Google Scholar
Hopkins, K. (1993) ‘Novel evidence for Roman slavery’, Past & Present 138: 3–27.Google Scholar
Kautsky, J. H. (1997) The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, Chapel Hill, NC.Google Scholar
Keith, A. M. (2000) Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelly, B. (2011) Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, D. F. (1992) ‘Augustan and anti-Augustan: reflections on terms of reference’, in Powell, A., ed., Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Bristol), 26–58.Google Scholar
König, A. and Whitton, C., eds. (2018) Roman Literature under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian: Literary Interactions, ad 96–138, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kosmin, P. J. (2014) The Land of the Elephant Kings, Cambridge, MA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kosmin, P. J. (2018) Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Kreuzsaler, C. and Urbanik, J. (2008) ‘Humanity and inhumanity of law: the case of Dionysia’, JJP 38: 119–55.Google Scholar
Lavan, M. (2013) Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lavan, M. (2018) ‘Pliny Epistles 10 and imperial correspondence: the Empire of letters’, in König and Whitton 2018, 280–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leigh, M. (2016) ‘Vergil’s second Eclogue and the class struggle’, CPh 111: 406–33.Google Scholar
Lendon, J. E. (2009) ‘Historians without history: against Roman historiography’, in Feldherr 2009b, 41–61.Google Scholar
Lendon, J. E. (2013) Review of Lavan 2013, Sehepunkte 13.5.Google Scholar
Levene, D. S. (1993) Religion in Livy, Leiden.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowrie, M. (2009) Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome, Oxford.Google Scholar
Lowrie, M. (2016) ‘Roman law and Latin literature’, in du Plessis, P. J., Ando, C. and Tuori, K., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (Oxford), 70–82.Google Scholar
Ma, J. (2002) Antiochos iii and the Cities of Western Asia Minor, rev. edn, Oxford.Google Scholar
Mantovani, D. (2018) Les juristes écrivains de la Rome antique: les oeuvres des juristes comme littérature, Paris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marincola, J. (2011) ‘Intertextuality and exempla’, Histos working papers 2011.03.Google Scholar
Martelli, F. (2017) ‘The triumph of letters: rewriting Cicero in Ad fam. 15’, JRS 107: 90–115.Google Scholar
Martindale, C. (2003) ‘Green politics’, in Martindale, C., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge), 107–24.Google Scholar
Mattingly, D. J. (2006) An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 bc–ad 409, London.Google Scholar
McCarthy, K. (2000) Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy, Princeton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millar, F. (1977) The Emperor in the Roman World (31 bc–ad 337), London.Google Scholar
Noreña, C. F. (2011) Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power, Cambridge.Google Scholar
O’Gorman, E. (1993) ‘No place like Rome: identity and difference in the Germania of Tacitus’, Ramus 22: 135–54.Google Scholar
O’Gorman, E. (2000) Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, J. H. (1989) Greek Constitutions of Early Roman Emperors from Inscriptions and Papyri, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Peachin, M. (1999) ‘Five Vindolanda tablets, soldiers, and the law’, Tyche 14: 223–35.Google Scholar
Pollock, S. (2010) ‘Future philology? The fate of a soft science in a hard world’, Critical Inquiry 35: 931–61.Google Scholar
Potter, D. S., Damon, C. and Takács, S. A., eds. (1999) The ‘senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre’ (= AJPh 120.1), Baltimore.Google Scholar
Purcell, N. (2006) ‘Romans in the Roman world’, in Galinsky, K., ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (Cambridge), 85–105.Google Scholar
Richlin, A. (2017) Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Roller, M. B. (2001) Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome, Princeton.Google Scholar
Rowe, G. (2002) Princes and Political Cultures: The New Tiberian Senatorial Decrees, Ann Arbor, MI.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryberg, I. S. (1942) ‘Tacitus’ art of innuendo’, TAPhA 73: 383–404.Google Scholar
Sailor, D. (2008) Writing and Empire in Tacitus, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Schmidt, M. G. (2015) ‘Carmina Latina Epigraphica’, in Bruun, C. and Edmondson, J., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy (Oxford), 764–82.Google Scholar
Shannon-Henderson, K. E. (2019) Religion and Memory in Tacitus’ Annals, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, B. D. (1985) ‘The divine economy: Stoicism as ideology’, Latomus 44: 16–54.Google Scholar
Shaw, B. D. (2001) Review of Fitzgerald 2000, Phoenix 55: 185–7.Google Scholar
Shumate, N. (2006) Nation, Empire, Decline: Studies in Rhetorical Continuity from the Romans to the Modern Era, London.Google Scholar
Stewart, R. (2012) Plautus and Roman Slavery, Malden, MA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weisweiler, J. (2016) ‘From empire to world-state: ecumenical language and cosmopolitan consciousness in the later Roman aristocracy’, in Lavan, M., Payne, R. E. and Weisweiler, J., eds., Cosmopolitanism and Empire (Oxford), 187–208.Google Scholar
White, P. (1993) Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City, London.Google Scholar
Wiseman, T. P. (1979) Clio’s Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature, Leicester.Google Scholar
Woodman, A. J. (1988) Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, London.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×