This book affords new perspectives on urban disasters in the ancient Roman context, attending not just to the material and historical realities of such events, but also to the imaginary and literary possibilities offered by urban disaster as a figure of thought. Existential threats to the ancient city took many forms, including military invasions, natural disasters, public health crises, and gradual systemic collapses brought on by political or economic factors. In Roman cities, the memory of such events left lasting imprints on the city in psychological as well as in material terms. Individual chapters explore historical disasters and their commemoration, but others also consider of the effect of anticipated and imagined catastrophes. They analyze the destruction of cities both as a threat to be forestalled, and as a potentially regenerative agent of change, and the ways in which destroyed cities are revisited — and in a sense, rebuilt— in literary and social memory. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the Roman conception of disaster in terms that are not exclusively literary or historical. Instead, they explore the connections between and among various elements in the assemblage of experiences, texts, and traditions touching upon the theme of urban disasters in the Roman world.

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Yes, you can access Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination by Virginia M. Closs, Elizabeth Keitel, Virginia M. Closs, Elizabeth Keitel in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

De Gruyter

Year

2020

ISBN

9783110674736

Edition

Topic

Literature

Subtopic

Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

Index

Literature

Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Literary Elaborations of the Urbs Capta Motif
Urban Disasters and Other Romes
“One city captures us”
Pliny’s Telemacheia
Part II: The Causes of Urban Disasters
Rome’s Sicilian Disaster
Winning Too Well
Urbs/Orbis
Horace on Moral Clades in Odes 3.6 and the Carmen saeculare
Part III: Commemoration of Disasters
The Unmaking of Rome
Josephus’ Memory of Jerusalem
The Sacks of Rome, 390 BCE–2017 CE
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index Locorum
General Index