Product Description: This ambitious book investigates a major yet underexplored nexus of themes in Roman cultural history: the evolving tropes of enclosure, retreat and compressed space within expanding, potentially borderless empire. In Roman writers' exploration of real and symbolic enclosures - caves, corners, villas, bathhouses, the 'prison' of the human body itself - we see the aesthetic, philosophical and political intersecting in fascinating ways, as the machine of empire is recast in tighter and tighter shapes...read more

Product Description: This provocative book is a major contribution to our understanding of Martial's poetics, his vision of the relationship between art and reality, and his role in formulating modern perceptions of Rome. The study shows how on every scale from the microscopic to the cosmic, Martial displays epigram's ambition to enact the sociality of urban life, but also to make Rome rise out of epigram's architecture and gestures...read more

Demonstrates how to read and interpret Petronius' 'Satyricon,' calling attention to the prominence of the body as a metaphor, reading for unity rather than individual episodes, and noting the mirroring of imagery and paradoxes.

Product Description: The Greek and Roman novels can be seen as an important transitional moment in the trajectory from performance to reading, from oralism to textuality, that has underpinned the history of discourse in European consciousness since the 5th century BC...read more