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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.
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