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18962 results in Cambridge Histories

Page 895 of 949

  • 10 - Lucretius

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 207-229

  • Summary

    The De rerum natura of Lucretius represents one of the rarest of literary accomplishments, a successful didactic poem on a scientific subject. Epicureanism was the most conservative of the Hellenistic philosophies, but it was not immune to change and modification. While Lucretius was writing, Epicurean philosophers like Philodemus were busy developing the master's doctrine and attempting to answer the objections of their philosophical opponents. Lucretius was familiar with Philodemus or was in any way influenced by his work. More significant is the poet's relationship with contemporary Stoicism. If the central question in Lucretian criticism is the relationship between poetry and philosophy, then it is important to understand the extent to which Lucretius accurately reflects the spirit of Epicurus. The idea of introducing the old Homeric myth of Venus and Mars may in fact have come to Lucretius from Empedodes, who is said to have used it for the two great forces of love and strife which control the Empedoclean universe.

  • 2 - Literary criticism

  • from PART I - READERS AND CRITICS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 33-50

  • Summary

    Literary critics today fall into two broad categories. There are the academics, out to impress their colleagues and instruct their pupils. And there are, in the great tradition of Dryden, creative writers meditating on their craft. In Greece scholars seem to have been called kritikoi before they took over the term grammatikos. With Quintilian the authors come to a professional rhetor, well qualified, as well as inclined, to assess Cicero as well as praise him. Quintilian knew how literary criticism of oratory should be conducted. It is a mark of his sophistication that only recently has scholars approached Cicero in this wide and unprejudiced way. Cicero brought to the theory of oratory a width that it had never known before and was rarely to know again. He thinks often of an ideal orator, who shall have all the qualities of Cicero himself and more besides.

  • 19 - Horace

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 370-404

  • Summary

    Horace is commonly thought of as a comfortable cheerful figure, well adjusted to society and loyally supporting the Augustan regime. The traditional stereotype is popular and superficial, the two divergent views are represented by several important works of scholarship. This chapter considers Horace's poetry that offers a number of contrasting features, such as public/private, urban/rural, Stoic/Epicurean, grand/plain. It focuses on a critique of the academic dichotomy. The chapter shows how small light poems can be structurally complex, and how within a given ode the style may shift from one level to another. It examines how parodies use solemnity for comic effect, how in a recusatio the grand style can be disavowed and employed at the same time, and how a contrast can be exploited by juxtaposition. Only a small proportion of Odes was written in praise of Augustus and those odes were notably restrained in comparison with the usual type of Hellenistic panegyric.

  • 33 - Technical writing

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 667-673

  • Summary

    Columella's Res rustica, 'Agriculture', the fullest treatment of the subject in Latin literature, is a product of wide reading and long personal experience. Pliny is one of the prodigies of Latin literature, boundlessly energetic and catastrophically indiscriminate, wide-ranging and narrow-minded, a pedant who wanted to be a popularizer, a sceptic infected by traditional sentiment, and an aspirant to style who could hardly frame a coherent sentence. The Natural history, dedicated in an unwieldy and effusive preface to the heir apparent Titus, comprises list of contents in relation to medicine, and mineralogy. Frontinus' two surviving works, De aquis and Strategemata, have somewhat limited pretensions to be literature. The De aquisis exactly what it claims to be, a systematic account of the water-supply of Rome. Frontinus asserts that this Strategemata too is practical: the information he has arranged and classified will be of use to generals.

  • Appendix of authors and works

  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 797-935

  • Summary

    ANDRONICUS, LUCIUS LIVIUS

    LIFE

    (1) Name. Livius, L. Livius, or Livius Andronicus in extant sources. The name T. Livius (twice in Nonius, once in Jerome) is presumed to be an error due to confusion with the Augustan historian. That he was called L. Livius Andronicus is strictly an inference.

    (2) Status and origin. Apparent implication of these tria nomina is that the poet was a Greek by birth, named Andronikos, that somehow he became a slave in the household of a Roman Livius, and that he was manumitted and became a cituis liberrinus with the praenomen Lucius; he might, however, be the son of such a person. Accius in his Didascalica (reported by Cic. Brut. 72 and Jerome, Chron. 187 B.C.) said that he was a native of Tarentum and came to Rome in 209 B.C. when the city was taken by the Romans (Livy 27.15–16; for problems in the Cicero passage see A. E. Douglas, M. Tulli Cicerorus Brutus (Oxford 1966) 62–4); further, that he was granted his freedom by M. Livius Salinator (he has in mind the victor of the battle at the Metaurus in 207 B.C., RE 33), as a reward for teaching his children (cf. Suet. De gramm. et rhet. 1 for A. as teacher)

    (3) Career according to Accius. Most circumstantially documented fact in A.'s life is that in 207 B.C. he composed or re-used a ritual hymn to be sung by thrice nine girls in procession; during a rehearsal the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine was struck by lightning; as an important part of the especially elaborate rite of expiation which the curule aediles ordered, the girls performed A.'s hymn in procession to Juno's temple (Livy 27.37, cf. 31.12).

  • 34 - Rhetoric and scholarship

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 674-680

  • Summary

    Quintilian, the leading rhetor, 'teacher of rhetoric', of the Flavian period, fostered and, in his own writing, represented a reaction in literary taste against the innovations of Seneca, Lucan, and their contemporaries. In the long technical sections of Books 3-9 Quintilian attempts mainly to evaluate existing theories rather than to propound new ones: he is flexible and undogmatic. Cicero is his principal model, but he is no thoughtless imitator. Quintilian exercised vast influence on critics and teachers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: he seemed to offer precepts they could accept and ideals they could try to realize. Fronto is a rhetorician, confirmed by an introduction to his projected history of Lucius' Parthian campaigns: he apparently intended to work up Lucius' own notes. The principal interest of the correspondence lies in language and style. Aulus Gellius retails numerous fascinating details of Greek and Roman life, language, and thought, suitably predigested.

  • 38 - History

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 732-754

  • Summary

    The writing of history had different roots, going back to Polybius, Isocrates, and Thucydides. Some of it was merely belles-lettres, designed to give pleasure or to move the emotions harmlessly. In the second century, Arrian of Nicomedia wrote not only a history of Alexander based on reliable contemporary sources, but also a whole series of local or provincial histories. Christians were beginning to write in Greek either on the history of the church or on universal history seen from the Christian point of view. Florus wrote his summary of Roman history from the foundation of the city to Augustus in the books in the reign of Hadrian. Aurelius Victor's compendium dealt only with the history of Rome since Augustus. Ammianus Marcellinus, though writing in Latin, was a Greek, familiar with the living tradition and practice of Greek historiography and welding it together with Roman gravity and sense of tradition to form a new whole.

  • 36 - Poetry

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 692-722

  • Summary

    The Latin epic had come to an end with the generation of Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus at the end of the first century AD. Personal elegy, that peculiarly Roman creation, had ended with Ovid. Annianus' and Serenus' poems on the joys of country life follow neither the pattern of Virgil's Eclogues nor that of Tibullus' elegiac poems, but are written in a variety of metres. The earliest major poem surviving from the fourth century is the Evangeliorum libri by Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus. Ausonius provides an interesting example of the social mobility which literary distinction could bring in the fourth century. Most of Ausonius' poems are in hexameters or elegiac couplets. Prudentius takes over classical forms in language, metre and figures of speech without the body of classical allusion which traditionally accompanied them. Claudian and Prudentius tried to do something new with a very old and by now rigid literary tradition.

  • 32 - History and biography

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 639-666

  • Summary

    Several major historians, including Aufidius, Servilius, and Pliny, flourished in the century between Livy and Tacitus. Of the historical writing of this period only two representatives survive, Curtius and Velleius. Velleius is much indebted to Livy and Sallust, more to the former, though he sets great store by brevity. Curtius writes volubly, almost precipitately, as if embarrassed by a surplus of material, but he is never in real difficulties. Tacitus never became a classic or school-book in antiquity, for he arrived too late to enter a limited repertoire. As a traditionalist in an age of declining standards he was averse from outline history and scandalous biography, and his brevity defied the tribe of excerptors and abbreviators. In the Agricola, his earliest work, Tacitus amalgamates biography and historical monograph. Tacitus' historical style is a masterful and strange creation, difficult to characterize.

  • 5 - Drama

  • from PART II - EARLY REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 77-137

  • Summary

    The acting profession came to depend and to thrive on a circuit of musical and dramatic festivals among which Athens was only one of several centres. This chapter looks at the importance of the theatrical traditions of South Italy and Sicily. Andronicus is a major figure in the history of literature as the first to tackle the problems of literary translation. His approach was crucial for the subsequent development of Latin literature. All kinds of Roman drama were far more musical and operatic than Greek. Grammarians drew a distinction between tragoediae, modelled on Greek tragedy, and fabulae praetextae 'Hem-' or 'Robe-plays ', on Roman themes, ancient and modern. This is parallel to the distinction of comoediae and fabulae togatae. Accius, the polemical scholar, the Pergamene rhetorician, the authority on orthography, the head of the college of poets, the historian of the Greek and Roman theatre, and the Hellenistic tragedian evinces a new self-confidence and artistic awareness.

  • 42 - Apuleius

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 774-786

  • Summary

    In the history of Latin literature, Apuleius has two main claims to attention. As a philosopher without original genius he is important for his transmission of the ideas of Middle Platonism, and as a writer of fiction he is the author of the Metamorphoses, the one Latin romance to have survived complete from the classical period. The Apologia was a speech of self-defence delivered before the proconsul Claudius Maximus at Sabrata. The extant philosophical works traditionally attributed to Apuleius are De deo Socratis, De Platone et eius dogmate, De mundo and Asclepius. The discussion of Plato's physics is preceded by a hagiographical life, important as preceding the not dissimilar account of Diogenes Laertius. The treatment of physics is faithful to the Timaeus and Republic, but the explanation of ethical tenets owes more to the post-Platonist tradition. Middle Platonism had incorporated Peripatetic and Stoic elements into the developed system, and the later systematization Apuleius misleadingly attributes to Plato himself.

  • 8 - Predecessors

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 173-177

  • Summary

    The short poems of Catullus, which he himself calls nugae 'trifles', confront the critic with a paradox: poetry of obviously major significance and power which belongs formally to a minor genre. Aulus Gellius and Cicero have preserved five short epigrams by a trio of accomplished amateurs, Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus and Qyintus Lutatius Catulus. These are freely adapted from Hellenistic Greek originals, most of which can be identified in the Greek Anthology. Cicero is a more important figure in the history of Latin poetry than is commonly acknowledged. For one of the hallmarks of the new school of poets was their insistence on careful and exact craftsmanship. Cicero's hexameters, flat and lifeless as they read, are technically much more like those of Catullus than those of Ennius or even Lucretius. The precise part played by Cicero in the development of Latin poetry is bound to remain obscure, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence.

  • 7 - The satires of Ennius and Lucilius

  • from PART II - EARLY REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 156-172

  • Summary

    Ennius was not only a major dramatist and the author of the most ambitious Roman epic. He also extended the range of Latin poetry in a series of compositions in the genus hundle, the low key, some based on Greek models, and others original. This chapter focuses on the nature and origin of Latin satire. Ennius' minor works as a whole remind one of many features of lowkey, unpretentious Alexandrian poetry and moralizing literature. A judicious modern account of fourth- and third-century Greek literature as it relates in style, intent, and variety to all of Ennius' minor works remains a desideratum. The language and form of those earliest works were those of drama, as was only natural, since Ennius had established the iambo-trochaic metres and diction of the form as the ordinary medium for any poetry of less than heroic pretensions; including in Lucilius' time even epitaphs.

  • 21 - Ovid

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 420-457

  • Summary

    The design and execution of the Amores can be properly understood only in relation to Ovid's predecessors. The chronology of Ovid's early poetry is perplexed and obscure, so that the composition of the Heroides cannot be exactly placed in a sequence with the two editions of the Amores and with the Ars amatoria. The material of the Heroides comes principally from Greek epic and tragedy. Ovid's language implies that the Metamorphoses will manage to be both Callimachean and un-Callimachean at once. Attempts have been made to detect a unity and hence a message in such aspects of the poem as its structure or its symbolism, even in its very diversity. In the technical sphere Ovid left a mark on the Latin poetic tradition that still endures: for the modern composer of elegiac couplets is normally expected to abide by the Ovidian rules.

  • 28 - Flavian epic

  • from PART V - EARLY PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 558-596

  • Summary

    Each of the three epic writers of the Flavian era, Valerius Flaccus, Papinius Statius, Silius Italicus sought to be Virgil's successor: a laudable but daring aspiration. All ancient poets were bound by the principle of imitatio. This implied not merely respect for the past but a desire to reach new and individual standards of excellence. Statius was rarely, if ever, subservient to those whom he would have named with pride as his models. Valerius also took pains to create his own interpretation of the Argonautic myth, reassigning to Jason a heroic status which the cynical Apollonius had eroded. Even Silius, the most patently dependent of the three, did not hesitate to modify the events of the Punic War to illuminate a wider philosophical perspective. The Punic War provided Silius with rich scope for discursiveness and for pedantic disquisition.

  • 23 - Minor figures

  • from PART IV - THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 467-494

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the literary form Appendix Vergiliana and other minor forms especially epigram and elegy. It also describes didactic, mythological epic and tragedy, other drama, and historical epic. Virgilian authorship is claimed by external sources for the whole Catalepton, a title used, incidentally, by Aratus for a collection of short poems. A group of poems directly addressed to three of Virgil's associates: Octavius Musa, a historian who was involved in the land disputes around Mantua, and Varius and Tucca, Virgil's later editors. Antiquity had no specialized scientific or technological idiom, and writers of textbooks and tracts were for the most part at the mercy of rhetoric. Vitruvius, the author of books on architecture, left style to the experts and schools. Celsus is more stylistically accomplished than Vitruvius but now of greater interest to historians of medicine than students of literature.

  • 6 - Prose literature

  • from PART II - EARLY REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 138-155

  • Summary

    Prose literature, as opposed to mere writing, may be said to have begun when men began to exploit the fact that their views on important matters could be disseminated by means of the liber or uolumen which could be multiplied. The intended readers of the kind of technical works reviewed in this chapter were influential Romans professionally interested in the subjects treated. The chapter discusses some kinds of writing which are best described as political manifestos or memoirs. In the Greek world it had long been the custom of authors to address poems, histories, and technical works to a patron or friend, so that the work might take on the appearance of a private letter of didactic character. By using Latin in his own pithy way, M. Porcius Cato the Elder was asserting the new importance of the language in international diplomacy, and implicitly rejecting the attitude and the Greek rhetoric of a T. Quinctius Flamininus.

  • 14 - Prose and mime

  • from PART III - LATE REPUBLIC
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 286-294

  • Summary

    The trivium and quadrivium of medieval education descend ultimately from Varro's Disciplinae, a work of his eighties. Indeed traces of Varronian systematization still lurk in modern university syllabuses. Characteristic methods, of research and of disposition, can be detected in widely scattered areas: they serve to reveal the Roman polymath at work and to explain how, in a full life, one man's output could be so colossal. Varro found in Menippus, a third-century Syrian freedman writing under Cynic influence, a model for profitable imitation and his 150 Menippeae, combining prose and verse, humour and moral improvement, dominated the literary output of his active public life. Nepos is an intellectual pygmy whom one finds associating uneasily with the literary giants of his generation. Cornelius Nepos and Varro diverge sharply from the narrow traditions of Roman and familial pride, which constitute the origins of Roman biography. Cicero acknowledges with embarrassment his pleasure in the mime's humour.

Page 895 of 949