Clio's Cosmetics bookcover

Clio's Cosmetics

Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature
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Description

Clio is Muse of history, her 'cosmetics' the adornments of rhetoric. Peter Wiseman's influential book, first published in 1979 and now for the first time in paperback, concerns the writing of history during the first century BCE, when Rome was in process of becoming the centre of the Greek, as much as her own, literary world. Historians, trained in the schools of rhetoric, prized elegant plausibility above the empirical objectivity we expect of them today. Legend and history intermingled; history and poetry overlapped.This study divides into three distinct parts. The first treats the problems that arise from reading first century history as if it were written by modern, non-rhetorical standards. The second examines the pseudo-history of the gens Claudia, fabricated during the first century and transmitted to us by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The third discusses Catullus' dedication of his poetry to the historian Cornelius Nepos against the background of the two authors' common intellectual heritage. The book represents a significant contribution towards an appreciation of ancient historiography and Roman culture. History is viewed here as rhetoric, as myth-making, and as poetry.

Product Details

PublisherLiverpool University Press
Publish DateAugust 01, 2004
Pages222
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781904675006
Dimensions8.5 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.7 pounds
BISAC Categories: History, Literary Fiction

About the Author

T. P. Wiseman is Emeritus Professor of Roman History at the University of Exeter and a Fellow of the British Academy. He came to Exeter in 1977, and was Head of Department from 1977 to 1990. His published books include Catullan Questions (1969), New Men in the Roman Senate (1971), Cinna the Poet (1974), Catullus and his World (1985), Roman Political Life (1985), and Remembering the Roman People (2009). And on the study of Roman historiography, and from there to the myth-history of early Rome: see Clio's Cosmetics (1979), Historiography and Imagination (1994), Remus: A Roman Myth (1995), Roman Drama and Roman History (1998), The Myths of Rome (2004), which won the American Philological Association's Goodwin Award of Merit, and Unwritten Rome (2008)

Reviews

Clio's Cosmetics is an intelligent and provocative book about historical writing in the Roman Republic. It is acute and well-written, and has important things to say.-- "The Journal of Roman Studies"
Should stimulate, entertain and enlighten anyone who wants to know something about ancient historians.-- "Times Literary Supplement"
The general reader will learn a lot from this book, which can be enjoyed without a great knowledge of Latin ... Republican Rome, the period of which he (Wiseman) has shown himself the best intellectual historian now writing.-- "History Today"

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