Clio is Muse of history, her 'cosmetics' the adornments of rhetoric. Peter Wiseman's influential book, first published in 1979 and now for the first time in paperback, concerns the writing of history during the first century BCE, when Rome was in process of becoming the centre of the Greek, as much as her own, literary world. Historians, trained in the schools of rhetoric, prized elegant plausibility above the empirical objectivity we expect of them today. Legend and history intermingled; history and poetry overlapped.This study divides into three distinct parts. The first treats the problems...
Clio is Muse of history, her 'cosmetics' the adornments of rhetoric. Peter Wiseman's influential book, first published in 1979 and now for the first t...
This collection of essays explores the key issue of the nature of the boundary between fact and fiction, an issue which has become prominent especially through the upsurge of interest in the ancient novel and recent work on the rhetorical character of ancient historiography. The collection covers early Greek poetry (E.L. Bowie), Greek and Roman historiography (John Moles and T.P. Wiseman), Plato (Christopher Gill) and the Greek and Roman novel (John Morgan and Andrew Laird), and especially considers how far 'lying' was distinguished from 'fiction' at different periods and in different...
This collection of essays explores the key issue of the nature of the boundary between fact and fiction, an issue which has become prominent especiall...
Why is Caesar a giant? Because he effectively created the Roman Empire, and thus made possible the European civilization that grew out of it. As the People's champion against a corrupt and murderous oligarchy, he began transformation of the Roman republic into a quasi-monarchy and a military and fiscal system that for four centuries provided western Europe, north Africa and the Middle East with security, prosperity and relative peace. His conquest of Gaul and his successors' conquests of Germany, the Balkans and Britain created both the conditions for -western culture- and many of the...
Why is Caesar a giant? Because he effectively created the Roman Empire, and thus made possible the European civilization that grew out of it. As the P...
In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome-as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn't write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of...
In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society ...
