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OverviewThe turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In Staging Memory, Staging Strife, Lauren Donovan Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the contests over memory after Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife with a ruling family waging war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord. In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg contextualizes the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Lauren Donovan Ginsberg (, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 23.40cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 16.00cm Weight: 0.476kg ISBN: 9780190275952ISBN 10: 0190275952 Pages: 248 Publication Date: 19 January 2017 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Tertiary & Higher Education , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsReviewsGinsberg's stimulating study of the pseudo-Senecan <em>Octavi</em>a moves the play, our sole example of a Roman historical tragedy, from the margins to the center not only of Latin literary history but also of Roman imperial history. Drawing evidence from imperial coinage, inscriptions, history and biography, as well as from the most famous authors of the Latin literary canon (Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca), she shows how the Octavia both reflects, and reflects upon, the construction of the memory of the Julio-Claudian emperors in the aftermath of the dynasty's fall from power. A must-read for scholars of imperial Roman politics, Latin literary culture, and cultural memory studies. --Alison Keith, University of Toronto Ginsberg offers a refreshing new approach to the <em>Octavia</em>, that unique yet perpetually underestimated staging of Nero's household and world. On her reading the Roman historical play centers upon a memory-contestation that is nothing short of a civil war in words and dramatic action, where the role of Lucan's poetry looms especially large. --James Ker, University of Pennsylvania Through its intense focus on the patterns of intertexual and cultural memory embedded in the <em>Octavia</em>, this study sheds important new light on the drama by reinterpreting it as a searching Flavian critique of the Julio-Claudian era's (self-)image as a stabilizing period of Roman reconstruction and peace. By appeal to the counter-memory generated by allusion to a more discordant vein of civil-war poetics, Ginsberg deftly demonstrates how the Octavia is haunted by memories of Rome's violent past: the Julio-Claudian pretension to destiny and peace dissolves before her compelling argument that the drama plots the tragic unfolding of the civil-war tendencies that Rome's first dynasty replicated from the Republic. --Gareth Williams, Columbia University Ginsberg's stimulating study of the pseudo-Senecan Octavia moves the play, our sole example of a Roman historical tragedy, from the margins to the center not only of Latin literary history but also of Roman imperial history. Drawing evidence from imperial coinage, inscriptions, history and biography, as well as from the most famous authors of the Latin literary canon (Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca), she shows how the Octavia both reflects, and reflects upon, the construction of the memory of the Julio-Claudian emperors in the aftermath of the dynasty's fall from power. A must-read for scholars of imperial Roman politics, Latin literary culture, and cultural memory studies. --Alison Keith, University of Toronto Ginsberg offers a refreshing new approach to the Octavia, that unique yet perpetually underestimated staging of Nero's household and world. On her reading the Roman historical play centers upon a memory-contestation that is nothing short of a civil war in words and dramatic action, where the role of Lucan's poetry looms especially large. --James Ker, University of Pennsylvania Through its intense focus on the patterns of intertexual and cultural memory embedded in the Octavia, this study sheds important new light on the drama by reinterpreting it as a searching Flavian critique of the Julio-Claudian era's (self-)image as a stabilizing period of Roman reconstruction and peace. By appeal to the counter-memory generated by allusion to a more discordant vein of civil-war poetics, Ginsberg deftly demonstrates how the Octavia is haunted by memories of Rome's violent past: the Julio-Claudian pretension to destiny and peace dissolves before her compelling argument that the drama plots the tragic unfolding of the civil-war tendencies that Rome's first dynasty replicated from the Republic. --Gareth Williams, Columbia University Author InformationLauren Donovan Ginsberg is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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