Essays designed to illuminate the nature of politics at the end of the late Republic and during the first dynasty of the Principate.

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...

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...

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...

The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject...