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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
The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta

The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta

Rohrbacher, David

Paperback

Series: Wisconsin Studies in Classics

Historical FiguresLiterary CriticismAncient Rome

ISBN10: 0299327043
ISBN13: 9780299327040
Publisher: Univ Of Wisconsin Pr
Published: Jan 21 2020
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the Historia Augusta is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. Historians of late antiquity have struggled to explain the fictional date and authorship of the work and its bizarre content (did the Emperor Carinus really swim in pools of floating apples and melons? did the usurper Proculus really deflower a hundred virgins in fifteen days?). David Rohrbacher offers, instead, a literary analysis of the work, focusing on its many playful allusions. Marshaling an array of interdisciplinary research and original analysis, he contends that the Historia Augusta originated in a circle of scholarly readers with an interest in biography, and that its allusions and parodies were meant as puzzles and jokes for a knowing and appreciative audience.

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