Bøger i Wisconsin Studies in Classics serien

Demonstrates the varying conceptions of an institution that was central to ancient social and political life-and remains prominent in the modern world. This book contributes to understanding of the era and will fascinate anyone interested in depictions of marriage and the role and status of women in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The first comprehensive volume to present visual representations of everything from pets and children's games to drunken revelry and funerary rituals. John Oakley's clear, accessible writing provides sound information with just the right amount of detail. Specialists of Greek art will welcome this book for its text and illustrations.

The contributors to this volume are members of the Hellenistic Sardis Project, a research collaboration between long-standing expedition members and scholars keenly interested in the site. These new discussions on the pre-Roman history of Sardis restore the city in the scholarship of the Hellenistic East.

First presented in the spring of 458 BCE at the festival of Dionysus in Athens, Aeschylus' trilogy Oresteia won the first prize. It is the only surviving example of the ancient trilogy form for Greek tragedies. David Mulroy's fluid, accessible English translation with its rhyming choral songs does full justice to the meaning and theatricality of the ancient Greek.

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.

In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposed satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours.