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Ramsay Macmullen - The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch - 9780472117987 - V9780472117987
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The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch

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Description for The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch Hardcover. An inviting exploration of Rome's founding centuries Num Pages: 200 pages, Illustrations, map. BIC Classification: HBLA; HBTB. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 23. Weight in Grams: 469.

The ancient Romans' story down to 264 B.C. can be made credible by stripping away their later myths and inventions to show how their national character shaped their destiny.

After many generations of scholarly study, consensus is clear: the account in writers like Livy is not to be trusted because their aims were different from ours in history-writing. They wanted their work to be both improving and diverting. It should grow out of the real past, yes, but if that reality couldn't be recovered, or was uncertain, their art did not forbid invention. It more than tolerated dramatic incidents, passions, heroes, ... Read more

To doubt the written sources has long been acceptable, but this or that detail or narrative section must always be left for salvage by special pleading. To press home the logic of doubt is new. To reach beyond the written sources for a better support in excavated evidence is no novelty; but it is a novelty, to find in archeology the principal substance of the narrative—which is the choice in this book. To use this in turn for the discovery of an ethnic personality, a Roman national character, is key and also novel.

What is repeatedly illustrated and emphasized here is the distance traveled by the art or craft of understanding the past—"history" in that sense—over the course of the last couple of centuries. The art cannot be learned, because it cannot be found, through studying Livy and Company. Readers who care about either of the two disciplines contrasted, Classics and History, may find this argument of interest.

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Product Details

Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2011
Condition
New
Weight
470g
Number of Pages
208
Place of Publication
Ann Arbor, United States
ISBN
9780472117987
SKU
V9780472117987
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15

About Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen is Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University.

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