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Fighting Hydra Like Luxury
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Book Synopsis Fighting Hydra-like Luxury by : Emanuela Zanda
Download or read book Fighting Hydra-like Luxury written by Emanuela Zanda and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Old Testament to Elizabethan England, luxury has been morally condemned. In Rome, sumptuary laws (laws controlling consumption) seemed the only weapon to defeat 'hydra-like luxury', the terrible monster that was weakening even the strongest citizens. The first Roman sumptuary law, the Lex Appia, declared that no woman could possess more than a half ounce of gold, wear a dress of different colours, or ride in a carriage in any city unless for a public ceremony. Laws listed how many different colours could be worn by members of different social classes: peasants could wear one colour, soldiers in the army could wear two, army officers could wear three, and members of the royal family could wear seven. A law passed by Emperor Aurelian stated that men couldn't wear shoes that were red, yellow, green, or white, and that only the emperor and his sons could wear red or purple shoes. A variety of other laws limited how much people could spend on parties and how many people they could invite. In this book, Emanuela Zanda explores the purposes behind the enactment of such legislation in Rome during the Republic. She engages with the historical-literary polemic against luxury and focuses on government intervention in matters of extravagance by taking into consideration not only sumptuary laws but also other measures that dealt with self-indulgence. She addresses and answers a number of questions about what exactly the ruling class was trying to achieve, about its real motivations, and about the significance of the ideological discourse surrounding the enactment of these laws.
Book Synopsis Utopianism for a Dying Planet by : Gregory Claeys
Download or read book Utopianism for a Dying Planet written by Gregory Claeys and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.
Book Synopsis Roman Luxuria by : Francesca Romana Berno
Download or read book Roman Luxuria written by Francesca Romana Berno and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests—and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as the opposite of the ideal Roman way of life, to the Christian poet Prudentius, who represents it in an allegorical fight with Sobriety. The book attends both to key authors and to wider literary genres, such as historiography and satire. Particular consideration is given to the rhetorical device of personification, which can be traced from the first appearances of luxuria in Latin literature to those of late antiquity. Berno devotes detailed attention to Seneca the Younger, whose work is often preoccupied with this passion. Seneca both defends himself from the charge of luxuria and violently attacks it in others, describing it as the archenemy of a philosophical life. Along the centuries, the focus on luxuria shifts from the economic sphere (and the waste of money) to the erotic, to the extent that in the Christian world it becomes one of the Seven Capital Sins representing the vice of lust.
Book Synopsis Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law by : Hunter Ian Hunter
Download or read book Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law written by Hunter Ian Hunter and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over his long and illustrious career, Knud Haakonssen has explored the role of natural law in formulating doctrines of obligation and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. The essays collected in this volume range across this exciting and contested field. These 13 new essays acknowledge Haakonssen's immense academic achievement and give us new insights into the cultural and political role of law and rights in a variety of historical contexts and circumstances.
Book Synopsis A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in Antiquity by : Mary Harlow
Download or read book A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in Antiquity written by Mary Harlow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whilst seemingly simple garments such as the tunic remained staples of the classical wardrobe, sources from the period reveal a rich variety of changing styles and attitudes to clothing across the ancient world. Covering the period 500 BCE to 800 CE and drawing on sources ranging from extant garments and architectural iconography to official edicts and literature, this volume reveals Antiquity's preoccupation with dress, which was matched by an appreciation of the processes of production rarely seen in later periods. From a courtesan's sheer faux-silk garb to the sumptuous purple dyes of an emperor's finery, clothing was as much a marker of status and personal expression as it was a site of social control and anxiety. Contemporary commentators expressed alarm in equal measure at the over-dressed, the excessively ascetic or at 'barbarian' silhouettes. Richly illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.
Book Synopsis Risk in the Roman World by : Jerry Toner
Download or read book Risk in the Roman World written by Jerry Toner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk is everywhere in the modern world. The Roman world was no different but its solutions were very different.
Download or read book Infamy written by Jerry Toner and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like a scream in an alley. But was it as bad as all that? Join the historian Jerry Toner on a detective's hunt to discover the extent of Rome's crimes. From the sexual peccadillos of Tiberius and Nero to the chances of getting burgled if you left your apartment unguarded (pretty high, especially if the walls were thin enough to knock through) he leaves no stone unturned in his quest to bring the Eternal City to book. Meet a gallery of villains, high and low. Discover the problems that most exercised its long-suffering citizens. Explore the temptations of excess and find out what desperation can make a pleb do. What do we see when we look at Rome? A hideous vision of ancient corruption - or a reflection of our own troubled age?
Book Synopsis Rome, Empire of Plunder by : Matthew Loar
Download or read book Rome, Empire of Plunder written by Matthew Loar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary exploration of Roman cultural appropriation, offering new insights into the processes through which Rome made and remade itself.
Book Synopsis The Right to Dress by : Giorgio Riello
Download or read book The Right to Dress written by Giorgio Riello and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a global history of dress regulation and debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised.
Book Synopsis The Reception of Jewish Tradition in the Social Imagination of the Early Christians by : John M.G. Barclay
Download or read book The Reception of Jewish Tradition in the Social Imagination of the Early Christians written by John M.G. Barclay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume take as their theme the reception of Jewish traditions in early Christianity, and the ways in which the meaning of these traditions changed as they were put to work in new contexts and for new social ends. Special emphasis is placed on the internal variety and malleability of these traditions, which underwent continual processes of change within Judaism, and on reception as an active, strategic, and interested process. All the essays in this volume seek to bring out how acts of reception contribute to the social formation of early Christianity, in its social imagination (its speech and thought about itself) or in its social practices, or both. This volume challenges static notions of tradition and passive ideas of 'reception', stressing creativity and the significance of 'strong' readings of tradition. It thus complicates standard narratives of 'the parting of the ways' between 'Christianity' and 'Judaism', showing how even claims to continuity were bound to make the same different.
Book Synopsis Architectural Restoration and Heritage in Imperial Rome by : Christopher Siwicki
Download or read book Architectural Restoration and Heritage in Imperial Rome written by Christopher Siwicki and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the treatment and perception of historic buildings in Imperial Rome, examining the ways in which public monuments were restored in order to develop an understanding of the Roman concept of built heritage. It considers examples from the first century BC to the second century AD, focusing primarily on the six decades between the Great Fire of AD 64 and the AD 120s, which constituted a period of dramatic urban transformation and architectural innovation in Rome. Through a detailed analysis of the ways in which the design, materiality, and appearance of buildings - including the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and hut of Romulus - developed with successive restorations, the case is made for the existence of a consistent approach to the treatment of historic buildings in this period. This study also explores how changes to particular monuments and to the urban fabric as a whole were received by the people who experienced them first-hand, uncovering attitudes to built heritage in Roman society more widely. By examining descriptions of destruction and restoration in literature of the first and second centuries AD, including the works of Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder, Martial, Tacitus, and Plutarch, it forms a picture of the conflicting ways in which Rome's inhabitants responded to the redevelopment of their city. The results provide an alternative way of explaining key interventions in Rome's built environment and challenge the idea that heritage is a purely modern phenomenon.
Book Synopsis Roman Frugality by : Ingo Gildenhard
Download or read book Roman Frugality written by Ingo Gildenhard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores frugal thought and practice in Roman history, from the archaic period to the early empire and beyond.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World by : Paul Turquand Keyser
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World written by Paul Turquand Keyser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 1065 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a focus on science in the ancient societies of Greece and Rome, including glimpses into Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, 'The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World' offers an in depth synthesis of science and medicine circa 650 BCE to 650 CE. 0The Handbook comprises five sections, each with a specific focus on ancient science and medicine. The Handbook provides through each of its approximately four dozen essays, a synthesis and synopsis of the concepts and models of the various ancient natural sciences, covering the early Greek era through the fall of the Roman Republic, including essays that explore topics such as music theory, ancient philosophers, astrology, and alchemy.
Book Synopsis Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World by : Maia Wellington Gahtan
Download or read book Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World written by Maia Wellington Gahtan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World offers the first general overview of the reasons why ancient civilizations from Archaic Greece to the Early Christian period amassed objects and displayed them together in public, private and imaginary contexts.
Book Synopsis Author and Audience in Vitruvius' De architectura by : Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
Download or read book Author and Audience in Vitruvius' De architectura written by Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vitruvius' De architectura is the only extant classical text on architecture, and its impact on Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci is well-known. But what was the text's purpose in its own time (ca. 20s BCE)? In this book, Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols reveals how Vitruvius pitched the Greek discipline of architecture to his Roman readers, most of whom were undoubtedly laymen. The inaccuracy of Vitruvius' architectural rules, when compared with surviving ancient buildings, has knocked Vitruvius off his pedestal. Nichols argues that the author never intended to provide an accurate view of contemporary buildings. Instead, Vitruvius crafted his authorial persona and remarks on architecture to appeal to elites (and would-be elites) eager to secure their positions within an expanding empire. In this major new analysis of De architectura from archaeological and literary perspectives, Vitruvius emerges as a knowing critic of a social landscape in which the house made the man.
Book Synopsis Servilia and her Family by : Susan Treggiari
Download or read book Servilia and her Family written by Susan Treggiari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Servilia is often cited as one of the most influential women of the late Roman Republic. Though she was a high-born patrician, her grandfather died disgraced and her controversial father was killed before he could stand for the consulship; she herself married twice, but both husbands were mediocre. Nevertheless, her position in the ruling class still afforded her significant social and political power, and it is likely that she masterminded the distinguished marriages of her one son, Brutus, and her three daughters. During her second marriage she began an affair with Iulius Caesar, which probably lasted for the rest of his life and is further indicative of the force of her charm and her exceptional intelligence. The patchiness of the sources means that a full biography is impossible, though in suggesting connections between the available evidence and the speculative possibilities open to women of Servilia's status this volume aims to offer an insightful reconstruction of her life and position both as a member of the senatorial nobility and within her extended and nuclear family. The best attested period of Servilia's life, for which the chief source is Cicero's letters, follows the murder of Caesar by her son and her son-in-law, Cassius, who were leaders among the crowd of conspirators in the Senate House on the Ides of March in 44 BC. We find her energetically working to protect the assassins' interests, also defending her grandchildren by the Caesarian Lepidus when he was declared a public enemy and his property threatened with confiscation. Exploring the role she played during these turbulent years of the late Republic reveals much about the ways in which Romans of both sexes exerted influence and sought to control outcomes, as well as about the place of women in high society, allowing us to conclude that Servilia wielded her social and political power effectively, though with discretion and within conventional limits.
Download or read book Theorising Rome written by Rhiannon Evans and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorising Rome asks the questions: what did ‘Rome’—the physical location, the political entity, the literary construct—mean in antiquity? Equally, what has it meant in subsequent centuries? This volume addresses these broad questions in a number of complementary ways, and each chapter shows that ancient Rome has been recontextualised and remade—and, in fact, re-theorised—by successive historical periods and literary genres to perform their cultural labour. The contributions here approach this question through the lens of Roman literary, historical and philosophical texts, as well as reception texts which create a new vision of Rome through adaptation, allusion and critique. Whether ancient or modern, these studies show how Rome and Roman texts are recast for each new audience.
