Books
The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory
Co-edited with David H. J. Larmour. Oxford: OUP. 2007
Rome was a building site for much of its history, a city continually reshaped and reconstituted in line with political and cultural change. In later times, the conjunction of ruins and rebuilding lent the cityscape a particularly fascinating character, much exploited by artists and writers. This layering and changing of vistas also finds expression in the literary tradition, from classical times right up to the twenty-first century. This collection of essays offers glimpses, sideways glances and unexpected angles that open up Rome in its widest possible sense, and explores how the visible components of Rome - the hills, the Tiber, the temples, the Forums, the Colosseum, the statues and monuments - operate as, or become, the sites/sights of Rome.The analyses are informed by contemporary critical thinking and draw on ancient historical narrative, Roman poetry, Renaissance literature and cartography, art of the Grand Tour era, Russian and Soviet interpretations, and twentieth-century cinema.
Like (2)Advice and its Rhetoric in Greece and Rome
Co-edited with Elena Theodorakopoulos. Bari: Levante. 2007
Commencing with the Iliad and focusing on the complex socio-cultural and rhetorical tensions embodied in the practice of giving and receiving advice, the contributors consider how and why the classical world returned again and again to the nature of the relationship between adviser and advisee. This book’s particular focus is on the performative element embodied in this relationship, and the concepts of gift-exchange and the role of the adviser in a shame-honour culture are also explored. A particular strength of this volume is that it showcases the dynamics of advice-giving, and more importantly, the rhetorical strategies adopted, not just in the most high-profile authors and texts (e.g. Cicero’s First Catilinarian oration; Xenophon’s Anabasis; Homer; Plato; Seneca), but also in political tracts On Kingship, the epistles of Pliny, and early Christian literature. The collection developed out of a conference held in 2000, but additional chapters were commissioned to provide a synthetic but also wide-ranging study of this phenomenon.
Contents:
Preface
- Introduction (Diana Spencer and Elena Theodorakopoulos)
- 1. 'Good men who have skill in speaking': performing advice in Rome, Diana Spencer and Elena Theodorakopoulos
- 2. On the receiving end: the hidden protagonist of Plato's Laches, Andrew Barker
- 3. Advice and Advisers in Xenophon's Anabasis, Tim Rood
- 4. Consul and consilium: suppressing the Catilinarian conspiracy, Catherine Steel
- 5. Telling it like it is: Seneca, Alexander and the dynamics of epistolary advice, Diana Spencer
- 6. Advice from on high - Pliny and Trajan, Andy Fear
- 7. Dio Chrysostom and the development of On Kingship literature, Harry Sidebottom
- 8. 'That's not funny': advice in skoptic epigram, Gideon Nisbet
- 9. Afterword: giving advice in Greek letters, Desmond Costa
- Bibliography
- Index.
[unfortunately google books only provides a 'snippet' view]
The Roman Alexander: Reading a Cultural Myth
Exeter: University of Exeter Press. 2002
This book seizes on one of the eternal objects of widespread attention in Ancient History and turns the tables on the scholarship that has shaped and dominated the field.
Instead of scrutinising the documents in order to reconstruct the biography and assess the historical significance, Diana Spencer traces the deployment and development of the mythical figure of Alexander. She explores and synthesises a selection of Latin texts, from the Late Republic to Hadrian, to form a series of themed discussions which investigate the cultural significance of Alexander for Rome.
The selected texts - drawn from verse and prose, history, epic and oratory - are presented alongside their English translation, and provide an insight into a world where to think about Alexander was to engage with the burning ideological issues of Rome during a period of intense and often violent political and cultural change. The book makes clear how particular texts and issues may be readily accessed, providing a valuable resource for teachers and their students, whilst also offering a new approach to cultural histories of Rome and Alexander.
[unfortunately google books only provides a 'snippet' view]
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