Search results for "Ancient World"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Libraries and Intellectual Debate in the Late Republic: the Case of the Aristotelian Corpus
2013
The present chapter explores the catalyzing function of libraries in the intellectual debate of the late Roman Republic, by focusing on the significant case of the Aristotelian esoteric corpus. A careful analysis of the literary and historical evidence concerning the use of Peripatetic texts allows to detect the presence of at least two important libraries containing Aristotle's 'pragmatiai' in Roman Italy: Lucullus' collection in Tusculum and Sulla's one in Cumae. Several Greek and Latin sources bear witness to the vicissitudes of such libraries, and the present paper reassesses their accounts in order to point out the close connection between intellectual patterns and material culture - i…
Presentazione
2017
Introduzione agli atti del convegno Responsabilità e merito nel mondo antico. Retorica, Giustizia, Società (Palermo, 10-11 febbraio 2016) Introduction to the proceedings of the conference "Responsibility and Merit in the Ancient World. Rhetoric, Justice, Society (Palermo, 10-11 February)
Venerari Contendere Adicere: Roman Emulation, Intergenerational Reciprocity, and the Ancient Idea of Progress
2019
Over the past few decades, the successful emergence of intertextuality, with its careful investigation of the dynamics of imitation, allusion, and emulation, has effectively challenged the Romantic notions of creativity and individual authorship. In the wide-open field left by the postmodern ‘death of the author’, however, the territory of culture as a network of patterns hiding behind the text has often been restricted within the boundaries of literary culture. In this paper, I will attempt to enlarge such a text-centred perspective by highlighting the often neglected connections between family education, intergenerational reciprocity, and aesthetic thought in Roman culture. Indeed, long b…
Memoria, spazio, identità. Una premessa
2023
Memory, which has always been a subject of research and reflection, entered by right with Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss into the space of 'total social facts', i.e. the group of those aspects of human behaviour that support the ideological structure of social universes and regulate the capacity to perform a given action, regardless of intentionality, of both individuals and groups. What emerges is the problematic nature of the very nature of memory and its relationship to history and historians.
rec. D. Foraboschi, Violenze Antiche. Testo pubblicato postumo a cura di Silvia Bussi
2020
review of Daniele Foraboschi, Violenze Antiche: Testo pubblicato postumo a cura di Silvia Bussi. Il volume di Daniele Foraboschi è uscito postumo, poco dopo la scomparsa dell’autore l’11 settembre 2018. Ne è curatrice Silvia Bussi, cui si deve anche un ritratto intellettuale di Foraboschi
Vox Naturae: The Myth of Animal Nature in the Latin Roman Republic
2016
The paper examines the representation of animals as embodiment of nature in the culture of the late Roman republic. By discussing a selection of passages from Sallust, Cicero and Lucretius in conjunction with other Greek and Latin sources, the paper shows that the typically Western myth of 'animal nature' - the cultural belief that animal mirror a perennial state of nature, as opposed to human society - played a very important role in the ethical debate of the first century BC and took in this period a form which was bound to influence the centuries to come.
Measurements of diachronic stability of agrarian exploitation
2007
International audience; Off-site material has two main interesting properties which are that it is spatially continuous and diachronic. Such data can be used to estimate how ancient societies invested in a space in terms of intensity, durability and stability, over the long term. This micro-analysis is based on a precise record of off-site material based on collection units which never exceed five hectares. Each off-site sherd was dated and attributed to one of seven chronological phases. Three new indicators are proposed to measure the level of investment of ancient societies. The computing and mapping of these indicators was done using GIS software. The data used in this paper come mainly…
Barking at the Threshold
2019
Over the past few years, students of ancient Mediterranean societies have shown consistent interest in the cultural construction of dogs as reflected in texts, artefacts, and other media. However, whereas the cultural and literary implications of the Greek representation of dogs have been the subject of thorough investigations, Roman dogs have remained at the margins of the scholarly debate. By adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that combines cognitive theory, rhetorical analysis, and socio-anthropological research, the present paper discusses some affordances of dogs (in the terms of James Gibson’s 'ecological approach to visual perception') that are given special significance withi…
Crescere/Svilupparsi. Teorie e rappresentazioni fra mondo antico e scienze della vita contemporanee
2020
Il volume raccoglie i contributi scientifici di diversi autori, la maggior parte dei quali avevano presentato le loro relazioni già nell'ambito del Convegno di studi intitolato "Memoria scientiae 2019. Crescere/Svilupparsi" (Palermo, 21-23 febbraio 2019) sulle teorie e rappresentazioni della crescita umana e degli altri organismi viventi nel mondo antico (in particolare greco e romano) e nelle moderne scienze della vita. The volume collects the scientific contributions of various authors, most of whom had presented their reports already in the context of the study conference entitled "Memoria scientiae 2019. Grow / Develop" (Palermo, February 21-23, 2019) on theories and representations of …
Introduzione al volume Crescere/Svilupparsi
2020
Complessivamente 12 sono i saggi che compongono questa raccolta dedicata alla riflessione antica e moderna sulla crescita e sviluppo delle forme di vita. Ogni saggio rappresenta un vero e proprio viaggio che attraversa diverse regioni del sapere: i classici antichi, greci e latini, sono in effetti quantitativamente predominanti, e questo a ragione dei prevalenti interessi scientifici dei curatori, i quali però si sono ben guardati dall’isolare il ‘classico’ nella sua idiosincratica prospettiva ante litteram, ma hanno cercato e trovato la collaborazione con altri settori della ricerca scientifica. Il che si traduce nella partecipazione al progetto editoriale e scientifico anche di antropolog…