Spectacle, Dress, and Appearance in Ancient Christian Martyr Texts
In the second and third centuries, Christian martyr narratives were written to evoke spectacle. In Dying in Style, James Petitfils demonstrates how these accounts transform scenes of suffering into displays that assert the dignity and ethical distinction of Christians during a time of widespread belittlement and persecution. Attending to ......
Spectacle, Dress, and Appearance in Ancient Christian Martyr Texts
In the second and third centuries, Christian martyr narratives were written to evoke spectacle. In Dying in Style, James Petitfils demonstrates how these accounts transform scenes of suffering into displays that assert the dignity and ethical distinction of Christians during a time of widespread belittlement and persecution. Attending to ......
The Renaissance Continuation of Ancient Literature
How Renaissance writers rebuilt ancient texts, one fragment at a time. Across the European Renaissance, ancient literature circulated in damaged, incomplete, and fragmentary forms. Missing lines, lost endings, and textual gaps were not obstacles to reading the classics; instead, they were invitations to fill in the blanks. In Antiquity Made ......
Animals, power, and belonging in the Roman Empire. Animals were everywhere in the Roman world: in labor, ritual, entertainment, warfare, and luxury. In Citizen Beast, Martin Devecka argues that they were not merely background figures but central participants in the formation of empire. He examines how animals came to belong to Rome and how their ......
How Romans built their past-and made it speak. During the turbulent transition from Republic to Empire, Romans became intensely preoccupied with their own past. In Evoking the Dead, W. Martin Bloomer examines how memory was constructed, organized, and put to work in this moment of political uncertainty-and how literature became one of its most ......
Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island's central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome's first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily's crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from ......
An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text. Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human ......
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. The result is the first volume to map out the full spectrum of ......
How did Socrates and Plato know that our planet is shaped like a ball? How were they aware that the earth has twelve tectonic plates? Were the Persians conquered at the naval battle of Salamis thanks to missiles launched from the nearby Thriasion Plain? How can Theocritus's accurate knowledge of the American continent and Plutarch's awareness of ......
