Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination / / ed. by Virginia M. Closs, Elizabeth Keitel.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Ebook Package English 2020
• MitwirkendeR: Bromberg, Jacques A.,; Chapman, Honora Howell,; Clark, Jessica H.,; Closs, Virginia,; Farrell, Joseph,; Joseph, Timothy,; Kraus, C. S.,; Köster, Isabel,; Nethercut, Jason,; Zanker, Andreas T.,
• HerausgeberIn: Closs, Virginia M.,; Keitel, Elizabeth,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes , 104
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XI, 286 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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