I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.
I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.
Why This New Race offers a radical new way of thinking about the origins of Christian identity. Conventional histories have understood Christianity as a religion that from its beginnings sought to transcend ethnic and racial distinctions. Denise Kimber Buell challenges this view by revealing the centrality of ethnicity and race in early definitions of Christianity. Buell's readings of various texts consider the use of "ethnic reasoning" to depict Christianness as more than a set of shared religious practices and beliefs. By asking themselves, "Why this new race?" Christians positioned themselves as members of an ethnos or genos distinct from Jews, Romans, and Greeks. Buell focuses on texts written before Christianity became legal in 313 C.E., including Greek apologetic treatises, martyr narratives, and works by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian. Philosophers and theologians used ethnic reasoning to define Christians as a distinct people within classical and ancient Near East society and in intra-Christian debates about what constituted Christianness. Many characterized Christianness as both fixed and fluid-it had a real essence (fixed) but could be acquired through conversion (fluid). Buell demonstrates how this dynamic view of race and ethnicity allowed Christians to establish boundaries around the meaning of Christianness and to develop universalizing claims that all should join the Christian people. In addressing questions of historiography, Buell analyzes why generations of scholars have refused to acknowledge ethnic reasoning in early Christian discourses. Moreover, Buell's arguments about the importance of ethnicity and religion in early Christianity provide insights into the historical legacy of Christian anti-Semitism as well as contemporary issues of race.
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