Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Livy

Livy

Miles, Gary B.

Hardcover

Literary CriticismAncient RomeHistoriography

ISBN10: 0801430607
ISBN13: 9780801430602
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Jul 13 1995
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.24
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.29 Depth: 9.35
Language: English

Some critics of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) have dismissed his work as a compendium of stale narratives and conventional attitudes. Gary B. Miles reveals in Livy's history a creative interplay between traditional stories, contemporary ideological assumptions, and the historian's own perspective at the margins of Roman aristocracy. Drawing on a range of critical approaches, Miles considers Livy's stance as a historian, the ways in which he reworked his sources, and his interpretation of such historical phenomena as recurrence, continuity, and change. Miles focuses on the foundation stories with which Livy begins his account, detecting in Livy's rendition certain original conceptions of historical time including the suggestion that Roman identity and greatness might be preserved indefinitely through successive reenactments of a historical cycle. Miles pays particular attention to two stories--those of the abduction of the Sabine women and of Romulus and Remus, showing how Livy's versions of these traditional narratives--far from leading to a simplistic moral--address unresolved political issues of his day. According to Miles, Livy shows an unusually tenacious willingness to confront dilemmas in historiography and Roman ideology which were commonly ignored or suppressed by both his predecessors and his contemporaries.

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