18 research outputs found

    The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

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    This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

    The Poet’s Pentathlon: Genre in Pindar’s First <i>Isthmian</i>

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    Pindar Fr. 75 SM and the Politics of Athenian Space

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    This dithyramb, in evoking the Altar of the Twelve Gods and adjacent shrines, was sung in and celebrates the old agora east of the Acropolis, associated with the Peisistratids, rather than the new agora of the developing democracy
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