Catullan Questions Revisited offers a new insight into the brilliant poet who loved an aristocratic girl, attacked Julius Caesar and became a satirical playwright. Insisting on scrupulous use of the primary sources, Peter Wiseman combines textual, historical and even archaeological evidence to explode the orthodox view of Catullus' life and work. 'Lesbia' was not a woman in her thirties, as has been believed for 150 years, but a girl only recently married; Catullus' poems were written for performance, private or public, and it was only in 54 BC, at what he saw as the turning-point of his life, that he collected their texts into a sequence of probably seven volumes. His subsequent literary career, equally successful but much less well attested, was as a 'mime'-dramatist. This book is intended for everyone who is interested in poetry and history, and who does not believe that literary texts exist in a vacuum.

In the Roman republic, only the People could pass laws, only the People could elect politicians to office, and the very word republica meant 'the People's business'. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The main reason is that most of what we know about it we know from Cicero, a great man and a great writer, but also an active right-wing politician who took it for granted that what was good for a small minority of self-styled 'best people' (optimates) was good for the republic as a whole. T. P. Wiseman interprets the last century of the republic on the assumption that the People had a coherent political ideology of its own, and that the optimates, with their belief in justified murder, were responsible for the breakdown of the republic in civil war.

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 historic cities in which it has flourished.

A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the Palatine Caesar Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word "palace" originates. A startling reassessment of textual and archaeological evidence, The House of Augustus demonstrates that Augustus was never an emperor in any meaningful sense of the word, that he never had a palace, and that the so-called "Casa di Augusto" excavated on the Palatine was a lavish aristocratic house destroyed by the young Caesar in order to build the temple of Apollo. Exploring the Palatine from its first occupation to the present, T. P. Wiseman proposes a reexamination of the "Augustan Age," including much of its literature. Wiseman shows how the political and ideological background of Augustus' rise to power offers a radically different interpretation of the ancient evidence about the Augustan Palatine. Taking a long historical perspective in order to better understand the topography, Wiseman considers the legendary stories of Rome's origins-in particular Romulus' foundation and inauguration of the city on the summit of the Palatine. He examines the new temple of Apollo and the piazza it overlooked, as well as the portico around it with its library used as a hall for Senate meetings, and he illustrates how Commander Caesar, who became Caesar Augustus, was the champion of the Roman people against an oppressive oligarchy corrupting the Republic. A decisive intervention in a critical debate among ancient historians and archaeologists, The House of Augustus recalibrates our views of a crucially important period and a revered public space.

In the Roman republic, only the People could pass laws, only the People could elect politicians to office, and the very word republica meant 'the People's business'. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The main reason is that most of what we know about it we know from Cicero, a great man and a great writer, but also an active right-wing politician who took it for granted that what was good for a small minority of self-styled 'best people' (optimates) was good for the republic as a whole. T. P. Wiseman interprets the last century of the republic on the assumption that the People had a coherent political ideology of its own, and that the optimates, with their belief in justified murder, were responsible for the breakdown of the republic in civil war.

The first attempt to read the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus in the context of the realities of first century Rome delves into his social background, literary world and the variety of audiences he addressed.

Who were Roman authors writing for? Only a minority of the population was fully literate and books were very expensive, individually hand-written on imported papyrus. So does it follow that great poets and prose authors like Virgil and Livy, Ovid and Petronius, were writing only for the cultured and the privileged? It is this modern consensus that is challenged in this volume. In an ambitious overview of a thousand years of history, from the formation of the city-state of Rome to the establishment of a fully Christian culture, T. P. Wiseman examines the evidence for the oral delivery of 'literature' to mass public audiences. The treatment is chronological, utilizing wherever possible contemporary sources and the close reading of texts. Wiseman sees the history of Roman literature as an integral part of the social and political history of the Roman people, and draws some very unexpected inferences from the evidence that survives. In particular, he emphasizes the significance of the annual series of 'stage games' (ludi scaenici), and reveals the hitherto unexplored common ground of literature, drama, and dance. Direct, accessible, and clearly written, The Roman Audience provides a fundamental reinterpretation of Roman literature as part of the historical experience of the Roman people, making it essential reading for all Latinists and Roman historians.

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 Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out - like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.

Clio is Muse of history, her cosmetics the adornments of rhetoric. 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 rapidly 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. The book divides into three distinct parts. The first treats the problems that arise from reading first-century history as if it was written by modern nonrhetorical standards. The second examines the pseudo-history of the gens Claudia, fabricated in the first century and transmitted to us by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The third discusses Catullus' dedication of his poetry to the historian Cornelius Nepos against the background of the two authors' common intellectual heritage. Wiseman's book represents a significant contribution towards an appreciation of ancient historiography, of Greek preoccupations and their reception in Roman culture. It views history as rhetoric, as myth-making, and as poetry.

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