Defining dialogue in ancient Rome

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre De Giorgio

This article investigates the process whereby Greek dialogue was reinvested in the Roman world, based on a study of Cicero’s De oratore. This work is considered in the light of classical theories of the literary genre developed in the 1st century BCE, under the influence of Hellinistic research, and in the light of the modern notion of interaction. Situated on the frontier between drama and the social practice of conversation, philosophical dialogue established itself as a legitimate constitutive discourse in the field of Roman literature.

1996 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myles Mcdonnell

A familiar image from the Roman world is a Pompeian portrait of a man and woman sometimes identified as Terentius Neo and his wife. He has a papyrus roll under his chin, while she looks out with a writing tablet in one hand, a stylus held to her lips in the other. The message of the attributes presented would seem to be: ‘ We can and do read and write’. But how should the message be interpreted? To judge from the houses in which this and similar portraits were found, the couple was not of the elite decurion class, but belonged to that difficult to define group of varying social, economic and cultural statuses recently described by Keith Hopkins as ‘sub-elites’. Does the display of book and pen then reflect the social reality of the sub-elite orders of Pompeian society, or is the self-representation rather an expression of social pretension, with the couple attempting to emulate the Roman elite? If the latter is the case, what does the image say about the habits of the Roman ruling class? This question has been raised in relation to the issue of literacy, particularly women's literacy, but the image invites another question.


This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.


Author(s):  
Steven J. R. Ellis

Tabernae were ubiquitous among all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections, and in numbers not known by any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city—indeed in the very definition of urbanization—is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, or at best assumed. The Roman Retail Revolution is a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop. With a focus on food and drink outlets, and with a critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, Ellis challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city. A new framework is forwarded, for example, to understand the motivations behind urban investment in tabernae. Their historical development is also unraveled to identify three major waves—or, revolutions—in the shaping of retail landscapes. Two new bodies of evidence underpin the volume. The first is generated from the University of Cincinnati’s recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts. The second comes from a field survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with an interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.


Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann

Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it is a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people’s dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age. This book aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus’ theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation; it also aims to help the reader to understand the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. The book includes chapters on Artemidorus’ life, career, and worldview; his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth and history. The book is intended to serve as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond, published simultaneously with this volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series.


Author(s):  
Stefan Schröder

This chapter addresses secular humanism in Europe and the way it is “lived” by and within its major institutions and organizations. It examines how national and international secular humanist bodies founded after World War II took up, cultivated, and transformed free-religious, free-thought, ethical, atheist, and rationalist roots from nineteenth century Europe and adjusted them to changing social, cultural, and political environments. Giving examples from some selected national contexts, the development of a nonreligious Humanism in Europe exemplifies what Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt call “Multiple Secularities”: different local or national trajectories produced a variety of cultures of secularity and, thus, different understandings of secular humanism. Apart from this cultural historization, the chapter reconstructs two transnational, ideal types of secular humanism, the social practice type, and the secularist pressure group type. These types share similar worldviews and values, but have to be distinguished in terms of organizational forms, practices, and especially policy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092199329
Author(s):  
Tulips Yiwen Wang ◽  
Allan B. I. Bernardo

The present investigation explored Chinese people's attitudes toward the social practice of going “through the back door” or zouhoumen. Zouhoumen is an informal approach to achieve one’s goal through personal connections (called guanxi). We propose that Chinese people distinguish between different acts of zouhoumen and propose at least two types that differ in terms of social cognitive aspects, and that the two types evoke different perceptions of fairness that shape attitudes towards zouhoumen. Two experiments (total N = 414) provided evidence for the differentiation between facilitative zouhoumen and expropriative zouhoumen and also explore the role of type of guanxi in attitudes towards the two types of zouhoumen. Both experiments indicated that facilitative zouhoumen was less unacceptable than expropriative zouhoumen, but there were no marked differences in attitudes between zouhoumen involving expressive or instrumental guanxi. The results support a more nuanced theoretical account of a pervasive social phenomenon in Chinese society that we assume is adaptive responses to features of Chinese historical socioeconomic context.


2000 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 257-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Kirk ◽  
George Williams ◽  
A. Caseldine ◽  
J. Crowther ◽  
I. Darke ◽  
...  

Excavations at the Glandy Cross monumental complex during 1991 and 1992 formed part of an integrated programme of evaluation, rescue, and research by Dyfed Archaeological Trust (DAT). Enclosures, pit circles, standing stones, and cairns were excavated and their environs systematically surveyed. Radiocarbon dates show the monumental complex to have been constructed between c. 2190–1530 cal BC. However, the earliest activity at the site may date to c. 4470–4230 cal BC. A defended enclosure was constructed on the peripheries of the complex c. 830–510 cal BC.The 1991–92 excavation results are presented along with a summary of survey, salvage, and research spanning the period 1981 to 1992. This new data set is tentatively interpreted in terms of historical process and the social practice of monumental construction. A brief commentary on heritage management at Glandy Cross is also presented.A note on authorship: one of the authors (George Williams) directed the Glandy Cross excavations during 1991–92 and prepared an initial draft of the project report. Following his retirement from DAT a project editor (Trevor Kirk) was commissioned by Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments to guide the project towards publication. This paper was largely penned by the project editor, though the excavation and survey data were produced by George Williams and his fieldwork team. The excavation and survey archives are held at the offices of DAT.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-701
Author(s):  
Heiko Hausendorf ◽  
Kenan Hochuli ◽  
Johanna Jud ◽  
Alexandra Zoller

Abstract The present paper is concerned with the lecture hall as the natural home of lecturing. We will focus on constructed, designed and equipped space as a material and communicative manifestation of science which fundamentally contributes to the multimodal practice of lecturing. Taking an interactionist point of view, we start off with introducing our concept of architecture-for-interaction which aims at spatial built-in features as a resource for social interaction, namely for situational anchoring among those present. In a second step, we identify key architectural elements of the lecture hall as material sediments of communicative problems connected with the social practice of lecturing. In doing so, we will also give a high-level overview of the historical development of the lecture hall (and its precursors) since the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Turning to current data from lecturing in times of the pandemic, we will then deal with so called „ghost lectures“ behind closed doors. This current development brings out a refiguration process due to which the lecture hall undergoes a change from the classical auditorium with copresent participants to a multi-media hub allowing for tele-present participants.


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