Ausonius - Ausonius

The Greek city was far from a homogeneous entity. Rather, it was composed of a multitude of communities  – civic subdivisions, associations, families, social groups, etc. – which Aristotle identifies as the “parts” of the political community. This book examines these sub-civic communities as constituent fragments of the polis. It addresses the enduring (...)

Just as the Imperial form of government was not conceived all in one go, so the soldier of the High Empire did not emerge fully armed from the mind of Augustus. Yet most existing studies on soldiery focus on the High Empire as a whole and so give pride of place to the richer and more varied documentation from the Flavian and Antonine periods. This bias (...)

How did ancient literature come down to us? A standard answer is to refer to the manuscripts, papyri and the copyists who passed on ancient writings. This book focuses not so much on the copies of Lucan’s Bellum ciuile as on another vector of transmission – quotations. Ancient and medieval literature abounds with quotations from Lucan’s civil war epic, (...)

Following research in the social sciences on the performativity of texts and actions, that is, on the capacity of words and deeds to produce meaning, to act on and to transform the world, archaeologists and art historians have taken an interest in this concept with a view to analysing the function of material data and the images featuring on it. This question (...)

From the Middle Ages to the present day, the castle has provided a favourable setting to literary production, a place of refuge, a suitable environment that allows the writer - voluntarily secluded or not – to find security, the solitude necessary for the completion of his or her work and also sometimes sources of inspiration and material resources. It is at (...)

Among the well-known murals of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe (11th century, UNESCO), three hagiographic cycles have been overlooked in the past owing to their poor state of preservation. However, archeological surveys have now made it possible to identify the saints of varying importance venerated in the abbey church: Savin and Cyprian, the church’s patron saints, (...)

This book proposes a parallel between two paradoxical extensions of ‘art’, in the ancient sense of technical knowledge when extended to life as a whole: a poetical and parodic version of it by Ovid, and a serious and profoundly philosophical one with Seneca. In both cases, the book aims to examine how the concept of art is redefined, how this singular ‘art’ is (...)

The Princess Nausicaa, daughter of king Alcinous and queen Arete, who rule the Phaeacians, appears in the Odyssey throughout the sixth book and then, sporadically, in the following two. She and her companions have come from the palace to wash the family laundry. Warned in a dream by Athena of his impending marriage, Nausicaa welcomes Odysseus, who has been worn (...)