Author: Suetonius Publisher: ISBN: 0199686459 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 614
Book Description
Suetonius' Life of Augustus is the most commonly read ancient account of the life of Rome's first emperor, presenting a mass of historical and biographical detail about both his public and personal lives. This volume provides the first large-scale commentary on Suetonius' work in English, drawing out what is unique about Suetonius' information, discussing how it relates to other ancient accounts, and assessing its historical reliability. The commentary is the first to be accessible to readers without any knowledge of Latin or Greek due to its use of English lemmata, while the new translation remains faithful to the original Latin. Accompanied by an introduction which investigates the career of Suetonius, the date of the Lives of the Caesars, the structure of the Life of Augustus, the various sources utilized by Suetonius, and the way in which the reader should approach this complex text, the commentary also looks to examine Suetonius' work not just as a repository of facts, but as a literary artefact carefully constructed by its author.
Author: Suetonius Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141397934 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 48
Book Description
'Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mention goats in any context.' The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70-130 CE). Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars is also available in Penguin Classics.
Author: Suetonius Publisher: Hackett Publishing ISBN: 1603846034 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
Donna Hurley has done a sterling job in providing us with both an Introduction to Suetonius and a translation of The Caesars that we can confidently recommend to students. Her Introduction summarizes a complex topic succinctly and is informative without being overwhelming, set at an ideal level for the student and intelligent enthusiast. Her translation is accurate and contemporary. Her primary goal is faithfulness to the original, which she achieves, but at the same time she recognizes the need to make her text clear, entertaining, and comprehensible to the modern reader, and she strikes exactly the right balance. --Anthony Barrett, Emeritus, University of British Columbia
Author: Tristan Power Publisher: ISBN: 0199697108 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
The biographer Suetonius is one of the most fascinating writers of ancient Rome, but he is rarely afforded serious critical attention. This volume of new essays focuses on the various aspects of Suetonius' work, from his lost writing on Roman courtesans to his imperial portraits of the Caesars. Beginning with an introduction that assesses the originality of Suetonius as a writer and situates the essays within the context of debates and controversies over his biographical form, the collection addresses the issues surrounding his style, themes, and early influence on literature in three parts. The first part discusses formal features of Suetonian biography, such as his literary techniques, manners of citation and quotation, and devices of allusion and closure. The middle section is devoted to readings of the individual Lives, treating several topics - from Suetonius' decision to begin his collection with Julius Caesar, to fictional elements in his death scene of the emperor Caligula, to the theme of solitude in his Life of Domitian. The last part examines the ways in which Suetonius transgresses the boundaries of ancient biography by looking at his influence on epistolographers, antiquarians, commentators, and later biographers. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to know why Suetonius' Lives are such a unique and powerful medium for the stories of ancient Rome, and how they became the primary model for later biography.
Author: Tristan Power Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000400417 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This collection of essays by a leading authority on Suetonius, one of our most significant historical sources for the early Roman Empire, provides an in-depth examination of his works, whose literary value has in the past been overlooked. Although Suetonius is well known for his Lives of emperors such as Caligula and Nero, he is rarely studied in his own right, aside from grammatical or textual commentaries. This is the first volume by an expert on the author to make him accessible to a wider audience, looking at his biographies not only of emperors but also poets, and discovering new contemporary evidence for Jesus from one of Suetonius’ first-century sources. Other writers discussed include Homer, Sophocles, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Curtius Rufus, Josephus, Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Cassius Dio. The book contains thirty-two papers in all, eleven of which are new, which examine Suetonius’ neglected historical value and literary skills, and offer textual conjectures on both the Illustrious Men and Lives of the Caesars. It also has a new introduction and represents over a dozen years of research on an essential Latin source for Roman history. Collected Papers on Suetonius provides an invaluable resource for students and researchers working on Suetonius. It also has broader significance for anyone studying Roman imperial history and culture, Latin literature, and classical historiography.
Author: Suetonius Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691200947 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
What would Caligula do? What the worst Roman emperors can teach us about how not to lead If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. He was ideally suited to write about terrible political leaders; after all, he was also the author of Famous Prostitutes and Words of Insult, both sadly lost. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, the stories of these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies, causing almost incalculable damage. Complete with an introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Be a Bad Emperor is both a gleeful romp through some of the nastiest bits of Roman history and a perceptive account of leadership gone monstrously awry. We meet Caesar, using his aunt's funeral to brag about his descent from gods and kings—and hiding his bald head with a comb-over and a laurel crown; Tiberius, neglecting public affairs in favor of wine, perverse sex, tortures, and executions; the insomniac sadist Caligula, flaunting his skill at cruel put-downs; and the matricide Nero, indulging his mania for public performance. In a world bristling with strongmen eager to cast themselves as the Caesars of our day, How to Be a Bad Emperor is a delightfully enlightening guide to the dangers of power without character.
Author: Koen De Temmerman Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191007528 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 793
Book Description
Biography is one of the most widespread literary genres worldwide. Biographies and autobiographies of actors, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, and other famous figures have never been more prominent in book shops and publishers' catalogues. This Handbook offers a wide-ranging, multi-authored survey on biography in Antiquity from its earliest representatives to Late Antiquity. It aims to be a broad introduction and a reference tool on the one hand, and to move significantly beyond the state-of-the-art on the other. To this end, it addresses conceptual questions about this sprawling genre, offers both in-depth readings of key texts and diachronic studies, and deals with the reception of ancient biography across multiple eras up to the present day. In addition, it takes a wide approach to the concept of ancient biography by examining biographical depictions in different textual and visual media (epigraphy, sculpture, architecture) and by providing outlines of biographical developments in ancient and late antique cultures other than Graeco-Roman. Highly accessible, this book aims at a broad audience ranging from specialists to newcomers in the field. Chapters provide English translations of ancient (and modern) terminology and citations. In addition, all individual chapters are concluded by a section containing suggestions for further reading on their specific topic.
Author: the younger Pliny Publisher: Lebooks Editora ISBN: 6558942380 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
The Letters of Pliny the Younger, also known as the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, have been studied for centuries, as they offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the daily life of Romans in the 1st century AD. Through his letters, the Roman writer and lawyer Pliny the Younger (whose full name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) discusses philosophical and moral issues; but he also talks about everyday matters and topics related to his administrative duties. One of these letters, Letter 16 from Book VI, addressed to Tacitus, holds unparalleled historical value. In it, Pliny describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the city of Pompeii. Many scholars claim that with his letters, Pliny invented a new literary genre: the letter written not only to establish pleasant communication with peers but also to publish it later. Pliny compiled copies of every letter he wrote throughout his life and published those he considered the best in twelve books. This edition presents selected letters chosen for their various characteristics and covering several books, focusing mainly on Books I, II, and III. The work is part of the famous collection: 501 Books You Must Read.
Author: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Looks at the "Lives of the Caesars" as a document of the culture and attitudes of the early empire. Suetonius is placed in his true literary context as a man of learning rather than a failed narrative historian; and emperors and imperial society are seen through the eyes of a scholarly biographer who himself served a scholarly Caesar, the Emperor Hadrian.
Author: Suetonius
Author: Suetonius
Author: Suetonius
Author: Tristan Power
Author: Suetonius
Author: Tristan Power
Author: Suetonius
Author: Koen De Temmerman
Author: the younger Pliny
Author: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill