Urban Disasters And The Roman Imagination (trends In Classics - Supplementary)

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.

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.

FM 1 Contents 5 Acknowledgments 7 List of Figures 9 Abbreviations 11 Introduction 13 Urban Disasters and Other Romes: The Case of Veii 27 “One city captures us”: Lucan’s Inverted Roman Disaster Narrative 43 Pliny’s Telemacheia: Epic and Exemplarity under Vesuvius 59 Rome’s Sicilian Disaster: Invective and the City in Cicero’s Verrines 81 Winning Too Well: Pompey’s Victories as Urban Disaster at Rome 101 Urbs/Orbis: Urban Cataclysm in Lucretius’ De rerum natura 123 Horace on Moral Clades in Odes 3.6 and the Carmen saeculare 139 The Unmaking of Rome: Nero, Seneca, and the Fire(s) of 64 in the Roman Imagination 161 Josephus’ Memory of Jerusalem: A Study in Urban Disaster 187 The Sacks of Rome, 390 BCE–2017 CE 207 Bibliography 241 List of Contributors 267 Index Locorum 269 General Index 279