GRW Theory postulates a stochastic mechanism assuring that every so often the wave function of a quantum system is `hit', which leaves it in a localised state. How are we to interpret the probabilities built into this mechanism? GRW theory is a firmly realist proposal and it is therefore clear that these probabilities are objective probabilities (i.e. chances). A discussion of the major theories of chance leads us to the conclusion that GRW probabilities can be understood only as either single (...) case propensities or Humean objective chances. Although single case propensities have some intuitive appeal in the context of GRW theory, on balance it seems that Humean objective chances are preferable on conceptual grounds because single case propensities suffer from various well know problems such as unlimited frequency tolerance and lack of a rationalisation of the principal principle. (shrink)

The rapid turnover of senatorial families during the Principate is a well-known phenomenon, but one which awaits satisfactory explanation. Comparative evidence shows the rate of turnover to have been unusually high. For example, the old aristocratic families of early modern Europe gave way to new at a much slower rate. Patterns of Roman property-holding and of the transmission of wealth from one generation to the next must have been closely associated with this rapid turnover. When an aristocratic family (...) produced no offspring who reached adulthood, the normal pattern of passing the bulk of the estate from one generation to the next within the family was interrupted. On the other hand, if a family produced many children, it might well become impoverished in the process of providing for all of them. Consequently, to perpetuate the family line with its status intact required careful financial and family planning. It was necessary to use or to take into account the various laws and customs regarding the family, including those regulating division of the estate among heirs, adoption, dowry and so on. (shrink)

Il est commun, aujourd'hui, d'associer la démocratie au consensus, et ce d'une double manière : d'une part en admettant qu'elle est le meilleur régime politique possible, d'autre part en considérant que l'accord vaut intrinsèquement mieux que le désaccord, et l'entente que le conflit: La qualité de la démocratie tiendrait à ses débats publics, qui à la fois rendent possible la confrontation des points de vue, tout en y mettant fin par l'obtention de consensus éclairés et légitimés par la règle de (...) la majorité. Et si le conflit, au contraire, dans certaines conditions, devait servir de principe à la vie politique? Il ne suffit pas de vivre en démocratie pour rendre la démocratie vivante. La démocratie n'est pas un régime mais un questionnement. Elle exige des citoyens une interrogation continue sur le bien commun à suivre. Machiavel n'était pas un démocrate. Mais c'est étrangement en actualisant sa pensée, dans le sillage des travaux de Lefort, qu'il est possible d'associer le conflit civil avec l'imaginaire social pour redynamiser la démocratie par la tension conflictuelle entre l'idéologie et l'utopie. Penser la démocratie à partir de ce que donne à penser Machiavel : voilà ce que s'efforce de faire Sébastien Roman, pour proposer dans une perspective républicaine le modèle d'un espace public dissensuel."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models such as the billiard ball model of a gas, the Bohr model of the atom, the MIT bag model of the nucleon, the Gaussian-chain model of a polymer, the Lorenz model of the atmosphere, the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey interaction, the double helix model of DNA, agent-based and evolutionary models in the social sciences, or general equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains are cases in point. (...) Scientists spend a great deal of time building, testing, comparing and revising models, and much journal space is dedicated to introducing, applying and interpreting these valuable tools. In short, models are one of the principal instruments of modern science. -/- Philosophers are acknowledging the importance of models with increasing attention and are probing the assorted roles that models play in scientific practice. The result has been an incredible proliferation of model-types in the philosophical literature. Probing models, phenomenological models, computational models, developmental models, explanatory models, impoverished models, testing models, idealized models, theoretical models, scale models, heuristic models, caricature models, didactic models, fantasy models, toy models, imaginary models, mathematical models, substitute models, iconic models, formal models, analogue models and instrumental models are but some of the notions that are used to categorize models. While at first glance this abundance is overwhelming, it can quickly be brought under control by recognizing that these notions pertain to different problems that arise in connection with models. For example, models raise questions in semantics (what is the representational function that models perform?), ontology (what kind of things are models?), epistemology (how do we learn with models?), and, of course, in philosophy of science (how do models relate to theory?; what are the implications of a model based approach to science for the debates over scientific realism, reductionism, explanation and laws of nature?). (shrink)

Le christianisme a mené une guerre contre le paganisme et ses manières végétales de faire des mondes, qui ont été reléguées dans l'indifférence ou la simple ornementation. Refoulées, elles n'ont cessé pourtant de rejaillir : en philosophie, mais aussi dans l'architecture ou la littérature. La description de la cathédrale gothique, de l'arabesque musulmane ou du roman proustien, par exemple, ouvrent un nouveau champ pour l'esthétique, comprise comme l'ensemble des expériences faites sur un monde commun pour créer des mondes nouveaux. (...) Un principe de floraison dégagé au ras des herbes et de la poussée des plantes remplace alors le principe de raison sacrificielle juché au surplomb du monde, qui nous rend incapables d'entendre les forces imperceptibles de la croissance végétale. Comme un premier pas sur le chemin d'une nouvelle philosophie de la Nature... (shrink)

Le processus révolutionnaire de 2011 a fourni les conditions nécessaires à l’émergence d’une forme particulière d’activisme ayant pour objet principal le territoire urbain. L’activisme urbain égyptien milite pour l’abandon des instruments de la planification urbaine rationnelle et dénonce les dérives des pratiques gouvernementales et des actions des agences de développement internationales calquées sur celles de l’entreprise privée. En renouant avec les grandes lignes des politiques néolibérales du régime de Moubarak qui ont échoué à résorber la pauvreté urbaine, la politique de (...) grands projets lancée par Sissi remet en question les quelques avancées observées depuis la révolution de 2011 dans le champ de l’urbanisme et de l’aménagement du territoire. (shrink)

Marie-Sophie Caruel Articulé autour de huit chapitres, l’ouvrage de L.E. Tacoma sur les migrations romaines aborde les questions liées au genre aux chapitres sur la famille (chap. 4) et sur le travail (chap. 6). La place faite aux femmes demeure donc relativement modeste et assez conventionnelle même si les apports sur la question ne sauraient être qualifiés de négligeables pour un sujet longtemps en marge des études sur la mobilité. Le cadre théorique proposé dans cet ouvrage est celui d’une...

Whilst he was writing De principatibus, was Machiavelli really as out of touch with the Florentine politico-institutional world as his letter of December 1513 claims? Who read Il principe prior to its publication, and how? Why did the philosopher Agostino Nifo, one of the major proponents of Renaissance Averroism, plagiarize it? To what extent is the Machiavellian "principato civile" comprehensible only by way of its Medicean and Florentine affiliation? Did the young Lorenzo de' Medici's political programme seek to eliminate the (...) Roman church? What politicocultural stance is hidden behind certain political terms from the humanist tradition that Machiavelli revisited in Il principe? To what extent was the Machiavellian relationship between animality and humanity, simulation and dissimulation, influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's ceuvre? And, finally, what are the questions that remain open in Il principe? This compilation offers some possible answers to these questions, thus providing new critical tools for the study of Niccolo Machiavelli's Il principe -- Back cover. (shrink)

The Upanisads, the basic philosophical texts of Hinduism, represent the height of Vedic philosophy. Many of the older Upanisads can be dated in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. This newly reissued scholarly work by S. Radhakrishnan, first published in 1953 and long out of print, contains in full the classical Upanisads, those commented on or mentioned by the eighth-century Indian philosopher Shankara. The Sanskrit text, transliterated into Roman script, is followed, verse-by-verse, with an English translation. The volume also (...) includes a commentary on the argument, notes on the vocabulary, and a very detailed introduction by Dr. Radhakrishnan. (shrink)

Fundamentally, Roman economic history is the study of how and why inhabitants of the Roman world produced, distributed and exchanged goods and services. By understanding the economic actions, events, institutions and products of the Roman world, Roman economic historians come to understand better the Romans themselves: their motivations, values, relationships and identities, among other things. With such a broad remit, today's Roman economic and monetary historians not only scour traditional sources for evidence of Roman (...) commerce, prices, labour, capital and contracts, but they now deploy an ever-broadening range of methodologies, theories and approaches – some of which originate well outside the disciplines of both history and economics. Some Roman economic historians, for example, create, investigate and run simulations, using massive digital archives of data gleaned from ancient evidence. Others compare micro-nutrients in ancient wheat varieties with their modern counterparts to gain a better understanding of diet, nutrition and economic prosperity in Roman cities. Increasingly, specialists in some aspect of the Roman economy find themselves members of internationally funded interdisciplinary teams seeking to understand what Arctic ice cores or North-American tree rings say about money production in the Roman principate. Roman economic historians’ scholarly sprawl has never been more challenging to describe, but I believe it is possible to group recent developments in the field into three overlapping areas: digitisation, particularisation and consilience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 451-454 [Access article in PDF] Susan P. Mattern. Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. xxi + 259 pp. Cloth, $35.00. This well-written book is nothing if not bold. Its time frame is, broadly speaking, the first two and a half centuries A.D. Its basis is the view that has met (...) increasingly wide acceptance over the past quarter-century, that the Romans' conduct of foreign relations was altogether different from what we assume of modern states. The Roman mindset, motivation, intelligence, and strategy are all alien to us and thus require evaluation on their own terms. Consequently, in five chapters Mattern first examines the character and education of Rome's small decision-making elite. She next moves to their "image of the world," variously gained through campaigning, geographical knowledge, intelligence, and ethnology. A chapter on strategy follows, treating the size and deployment of the Roman army and the different means by which the empire was defined and defended. Income and expenditure are the focus of the fourth chapter, with particular reference to the expense of maintaining the army, the cost of warfare, and the economic gain to be made from conquests. Finally a chapter on "values" concludes the book--the unashamed glorification of conquest, the prestige accruing to the Romans in general and to the emperor in particular, and reinforcement of the sense that it was discipline, both moral and organizational, that made Rome supreme over other peoples. [End Page 451]The discussion of all these aspects displays insight and balanced judgment, and the accompanying bibliography is valuable (some notes are repetitious, however: cf. 117 n. 163 with 172 n. 36). The work of Ampelius (ed. Budé 1993) might have been cited (25) as another example of how weak even a schoolmaster's geographical knowledge could be. Although, to be sure, it is true that "bird's-eye view" was hardly an option for Roman representations of the world (26), we might still recall Artemidorus' (Oneirocritica 2.68) vision of dreamers flying along and looking down at the landscape below, while the presentation of Rome's Marble Plan is large-scale and ichnographic. The Tabula Banasitana (AE 1971.534) merits citing as a prime example of Marcus Aurelius' pondering with care the bestowal of benefits upon people on a remote fringe of the empire (180). In stating that we shall never know where the Teutoburg Forest was, let alone the site of Varus' defeat (167), Mattern seems to overlook the finds made at Kalkriese (see now W. Schlüter in J. D. Creighton and R. J. A. Wilson, eds., Roman Germany: Studies in Cultural Interaction [1999] 125-59); equally, she shows no awareness of a kernel of truth in the tradition that Hadrian abandoned Dacia, at least in part (104; cf. Barrington Atlas, Directory, 1376). In treating the Roman concern to save "face" (177), there is more to be made of L. Caesennius Paetus as scapegoat. The major step of annexing Armenia must surely reflect instructions he brought with him from Rome, rather than just a personal preference (cf. 92 n. 46), but all the blame for the rapid, catastrophic failure of the annexation attempt is then heaped upon him alone. Tacitus grasped Rome's vulnerability in this region. He has the Parthian cavalry commander Vasaces coolly dismiss Paetus' bluster about long-standing Roman control there: "imaginem retinendi largiendive penes nos, vim penes Parthos" (Ann. 15.14). Later, after Corbulo's diplomatic victory, Tacitus can detail the official tokens of respect insisted upon by Tiridates during his journey to Rome and conclude ironically: "scilicet externae superbiae sueto non inerat notitia nostri apud quos vis imperii valet, inania tramittuntur" (Ann. 15.31).These and other sundry observations aside, it is the book's principal thesis that invites comment, namely Mattern's sweeping claim: "I would argue that Rome's real strategy lay in the realm of psychology. The empire was defended not by 'scientific frontiers,' however we might choose to... (shrink)

Elegy configures the household ( domus ) as a response to emerging concepts of the Roman family, an institution whose constitution had been disrupted during the civil wars that preceded the Principate. The Tibullan amator, foregrounding the domus ' role in shaping personal identity, weighs allegiance to his ancestral estate against the houses of Messalla and puella, and finally professes devotion to Nemesis' threshold; the Propertian amator, exposing the nomenclature of familial relationships as an unstable resource for self-representation, (...) also turns to Cynthia in a final attempt to consecrate the domus. Such appropriations of the Roman household are best interpreted as a means by which the amatores locate themselves outside the Augustan vision of normative family relationships. (shrink)

In the two centuries covered by this volume, from about AD 250 to 450, the Roman Empire suffered a period of chaos followed by drastic administrative and military reorganization. Simultaneously Christianity emerged as a new religious force, to be first recognized by Constantine and then eventually to become the official religion of the Roman state. The old pagan culture continued to provide the basis for education and the staple literary diet of the leisured classes; but it now had (...) perforce to coexist and indeed to compete with a new, specifically Christian-oriented literature. These and associated developments are reflected in the Latin books of the period. Of the traditional forms and genres, some atrophied, some were transformed and invigorated; and yet others, such as autobiography in something like the modern sense, emerged in response to the pressures of the times. Professor Browning's masterly and comprehensive survey is mostly concerned with pagan literature, but takes into account Christian texts written in classical forms and directed at classically educated readers. The volume ends with a chapter on Apuleius by Professor Walsh, followed by a brief Epilogue from the same hand, sketching the part played by classical studies in the formation of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between early Germany and Rome following the defeat of the Romans in Germany in 9 BCE. The theories of several historians as to why the Romans did not try to conquer Germany and how the loss affected the Romans following the defeat.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000) 655-658 [Access article in PDF] RONALD MELLOR. The Roman Historians. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. x + 212 pp. Paper, $21.99. This is a textbook, the purpose of which is to provide "an introduction to the masterpieces of Roman historical and biographical writing" (ix). Although the question of the usefulness of these writings to the modern historian is not overlooked, (...) the principal concern is "to take Roman historical writing on its own terms" (196). Very little background is assumed, and no Latin (by "Roman" the title refers to works composed in Latin, regardless of subject matter: hence Nepos' Pelopidas is in, but Polybius, Diodorus, and Dio are out, except [End Page 655] as background or comparanda). The author is a distinguished Tacitean scholar, and his style is at once clear and attractive. His survey begins with the origins of Roman historiography, with special attention given to what can be known of the early annalists, to the contribution of the elder Cato, and especially to Cicero's verdict on the efforts of them all. Fine chapters on Sallust and Livy follow, and, naturally in view of the author's predilections, a long and adoring chapter on Tacitus. Ammianus Marcellinus also gets his due, in a chapter that is actually longer than Sallust's. A single chapter is devoted to Roman biography (Nepos, Tacitus once more, Suetonius and the Historia Augusta), another to autobiography (Caesar, Augustus' Res Gestae). An appraisal of the Roman achievement, and its influence, concludes the book. The strengths of Mellor's treatment of every author and every subject are many. He is keenly attentive to ancient expectations and the particular context of the central authors whose works he examines; he is especially good at fitting the purposes of a historian's writings to the historian's actual circumstances. He constantly reminds the reader of the differences between Roman and modern conceptions of historical writing. He appreciates the importance of style in appraising and understanding ancient historiography. And he makes frequent acute observations that will save instructors who use this book a good deal of time and explanation, as when he remarks of Tacitean characterization that, "since he could not easily explain ambiguities, they are expressed as contradictions" (104). In sum, then, the volume is intelligent, congenial, and will be very serviceable in courses dealing with Roman history or with historiography.It is inevitable, when anyone reviews a work of such scope, that there will be quibbles. Let me record a few of mine. Students are likely to be misled by the use of "plebeian" on p. 20. To say that, in 52 B.C., Clodius Pulcher was "Caesar's man," in contrast to Milo who by implication was Pompey's (31), is to get it wrong (cf. W. Jeffrey Tatum, The Patrician Tribune [Chapel Hill 1999] 214-15, 234-35). Since Caesar reached the senior magistracies at the earliest possible age, it is not clear to me that "his early career progressed slowly" (171). The view of Roman marriage represented on p. 69 is somewhat old-fashioned, and, along those lines, it is anachronistic to speak of "the bigamous marriage celebration of the empress Messalina" (90: Tacitus' Narcissus is accurate when at Ann. 11.30 he asks Claudius: an discidium... tuum nosti?). One does not often hear, these days, of the "clinical objectivity of Thucydides" (44). In discussing Sallust's attraction to Thucydides (43-45), it might have been helpful to discuss the (admittedly not uncomplicated) issue of Atticism in late-first-century Rome. I am less convinced than Mellor is that the speech of Sallust's Caesar constitutes the historian's "plea for common sense" (38) in the midst of the triumviral proscriptions; after all, Sallust wrote Cato's speech as well. It can hardly be true, if only in view of Pliny's keen interest in his friend's literary productivity, that Suetonius' Lives "is a book written by and for the equestrian" (152), nor do I think the description of the imperial equestrian order that is given on [End Page 656] that page... (shrink)

Phenomenology of music has been a perspective trend of phenomenological aesthetics for more than a hundred years. The topic of the paper is fixation the main problems and vectors of development of phenomenology of music. The authors execute an analysis of Roman Ingarden’s position in the discussions concerning the methodological and ontological problems of phenomenology of music. The paper aims at revealing succession in Roman Ingarden’s solutions to the phenomenology of music problems. The other aim is reflection on (...) the originality of Ingarden’s ideas in the context of phenomenological interpretations of music in 20th and 21st centuries. The solution to these tasks allows the authors to fix key problems and identify the principal positions of phenomenology of music. The main sources of the comparative and historical analysis are the studies carried out by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Clifton, and Ihde. The most important ontological problems of phenomenology of music are: spatiotemporal constitution of music, reduction of a work of music to its performance, and ontological status of a work of music. The analysis of Ingarden’s position on these problems allows us to characterize it as something different from the existing versions. According to the conception, the time of music is a special type of time, that is, quasi-time. A piece of music is a purely intentional, heteronomous, and intersubjective object. There are a number of methodological specificities of Ingarden’s approach: a refusal of reduction of musical theoretical data, a tendency for independence of a piece of music from conscious and mental processes, and an interpretation of a piece of music as a non-sounding phenomenon. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate how the originality and radical nature of Ingarden’s conclusions made his position defenseless against critique and simultaneously marked the tendency in the contemporary phenomenological studies of music. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 127.1 (2006) 149-152 [Access article in PDF] Mario Erasmo. Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. xii + 211 pp. Cloth, $45. [Erratum]This is a study of Roman tragedy from Livius Andronicus to Seneca. Erasmo states that his aim is to study the development of the form, "focusing on the process of how Roman tragedy became increasingly theatricalized (...) and the role [End Page 149] played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage" (x). The center of the study is, therefore, the incorporation into Roman tragedy, either in the script produced by the dramatist or in the same script as manipulated in performance, of material drawn from Roman life and political culture and, by extension, the reflection of theatrical figures and motifs in the world outside. Most interesting, therefore, is the material handled in chapters 3 and 4 (52–121), where Erasmo engages inter alia with Pompey's restaging of the Clytemnestra of Accius, with the Iter of Cornelius Balbus, and with the Thyestes of Varius Rufus. There are some provocative suggestions here which merit attention. There is also much of which this cannot fairly be said.Erasmo begins his account with the tragedies of Livius Andronicus (9–14) and moves on to Naevius (14–18), Ennius (18–28), Pacuvius (34–42), and Accius (42–51). Each author is given a brief introduction, and his place in the history of the genre is set out. Erasmo then takes one play of each of these writers and attempts to set out what can be inferred from the extant fragments that remain. It often appears that the principal criterion for selection of this sample work is simply that its remains are rather more numerous than those of any other work of the author in question. There is little guarantee that they will actually develop Erasmo's central thesis. This finally makes for one rather unsatisfactory coda after another. More effective is the deployment of the material to hand in chapters 3 and 4 (52–121), although it was probably unnecessary to print the dream narrative of the Accian Tarquin twice (62–63 and 92–93). Seneca takes center stage only in the brief chapter 5 (122–39).Erasmo notes the rather different definitions of the term "metatheatre" offered by Gentili and Slater (5). It is probably fair to say that the definition drawn from the latter ("theatre that demonstrates an awareness of its own theatricality") is rather more familiar to most modern readers. Yet Erasmo has a further claim, and this is summarized on the same page: "allusions to personalities or events outside of the theatre or to the dramatic action of the play are needed to understand the play." This is a markedly unclear piece of prose, but what Erasmo is trying to say probably emerges rather better if we delete "outside of" and read "external to." For what "metatheatre" means in Erasmo's discussion of Ennius (19 and 22) is the playwright's inclusion in his adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia and Medea of language redolent of Roman society and custom. Now this does not directly draw attention to the modes of representation of the play at issue to the same extent as does, for example, the appearance on stage of the choragus in the Curculio, but there is little doubt that Erasmo is reaching here for something important.Some interesting work has been done of late on Pompey's rather unfortunate identification of himself with Agamemnon (see especially E. Champlin in D. Braund and C. Gill [eds.] Myth, History and Culture in Republican Rome [Exeter, 2003], 295–319; and F. R. Berno in Maia 56 [2004]). Erasmo offers his own contribution to this issue with his discussion of the staging of the Clytemnestra of Accius (83–91). Pointing to Cicero Ad Familiares 7.1.2, he treats the grand [End Page 150] spectacle of Agamemnon's entry as a reperformance of Pompey's own triple triumph six years before. Yet why put all this in the context of a drama... (shrink)

"Le concept, principal ressort de l'abstraction philosophique, est aujourd'hui, paradoxalement, inadéquate pour exprimer les arguments philosophiques qui font débat en Afrique noire. Trop aride, trop étroit, trop univoque, le concept réduit ce qui est vécu comme un 'conflit de cultures' à un simple 'conflit intellectuel'. Pour éviter cet appauvrissement, le concept exige le détour par la fiction romanesque. En témoignent deux romans L'aventure ambiguë de Cheikh H. Kane et Entre les eaux de V.Y. Mudimbe. À travers eux, le romancier se (...) fait philosophe, et le philosophe pleinement écrivain. Autant dire que le discours philosophique exige un 'dehors', une extériorité radicale capable de l'éclairer. 'Philosopher en Afrique noire' relève autant du faire voir que du penser, tous deux inséparables l'un de l'autre."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Sovereign Order of Royal El Roman Intro-angeles (polygyny) Family Sub-mission of the Jesus Christ' Holy See Teachings on His Kingdoms Mission, called the SOVEREIGN ORDER OF ROYAL EL-ROMANIA, The SO°RER†‡ Mission is a Bible scriptures studies, research, publications and teachings oriented sovereign polygyny family household basis mission order whereas Council of the Queens is the major organ and Queens are the principal research associates of the mission organization, Sovereign Order of Royal El-Romania, which aim to print a book entitled (...) "Christ Ministries Words: A Book of Bible Explanatory Testimonial of His Kingdom'', as Gen Hari Seldon's co-authors. Furthermore, the scope of the mission is to studies of the Holy Bible scriptures analysis to understand the doctrines of sacred theology of God's plan towards continuing development of humanity. (shrink)

Ce livre comprend deux parties principales: 1) une introduction generale et un essai de synthese; 2) un dictionnaire de plus de 100 auteurs actifs dans le domaine de la philosophie. Le College des Jesuites a Cracovie et - a partir de 1932 - la Faculte de Philosophie erigee par la Congregation Vaticane pro Institutione Catholica dans le meme College fut le principal centre philosophique des jesuites en Pologne. Jusqu'en 1989, il y avait seulement les jesuites - sauf quelques rares exceptions (...) - qui pouvait etudier a la Faculte. Leur nombre variait suivant les annees. Entre les deux guerres mondiales, il y en avait 84 en 1932 et 127 en 1935, dont 20 etrangers. Apres la guerre, leur nombre a diminue. On note le plus grand nombre d'etudiants en 1955/56 - 104. En meme temps, il y a eu 14 professeurs. (shrink)

It has long been thought that Romans did not hunt before the time of Scipio Aemilianus because hunting was not an activity for respectable citizens. This article shows that this tradition arose from a nineteenth-century bias for hunting on horseback. The tradition was supported principally by Polybius' account of Scipio's hunting and a quotation from Sallust. Although we now recognize that Greeks and Romans in general hunted on foot, this bias has predisposed the discussion against the discovery of evidence for (...) the actual practice of hunting among the early Romans. The archaeological evidence from new excavations in Latium and previously uncited historical and legal evidence for hunting in the Republican period demonstrate that, precisely as we would expect, Romans from the earliest days hunted. Hunting as an aristocratic sport, as a communal activity associated with the military preparation of soldier-citizens, and as a practical means of survival for the poorer countrymen, were all present in Roman society. Further, Polybius' account of Scipio's hunting, contrary to what has been argued, indicates that the cause of disapproval was not the fact that Scipio hunted, but rather that he hunted instead of pleading cases in the forum. Supporting evidence from Cato the Elder, Ennius, and Plautus shows that hunting was a common and accepted activity among Romans of the mid-Republic. Finally, Sallust's criticism of hunting cannot be assumed to represent Roman views, since he condemns farming and hunting together, and we know Romans highly respected farming. No evidence supporting a negative view of hunting in Roman society is found, and the positive evidence in sum demonstrates conclusively that in all periods Romans did indeed hunt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and Its ReceptionJoseph FarrellSander M. Goldberg. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and Its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 249 pp. Cloth, $70.Just what forces in the earlier centuries of the Roman Republic gave shape to the literature of the late Republic and early Principate is an old question that has received new (...) interest in recent years. Sander Goldberg suggests that to put the question as I just have is to put things backwards. In this book he argues that it is not so much a matter of how earlier literature shaped later literature but rather of how scholars and readers in the late Republic converted the poetic remains of earlier centuries into "literature." For Goldberg, literature in the fullest sense did not exist at Rome before a sufficiently large and critically sophisticated reading public had emerged, and until the available texts had been collected, studied, and canonized; and this process, he believes, did not happen or at any rate was not complete until the time of Cicero and, especially, Varro. The latter, one of the heroes of Goldberg's story (and rightly so), was instrumental in (for instance) turning the scores of plays that traveled in his day under the name of Plautus into an authenticated oeuvre of the sort that defines literature: a corpus that can be owned, read and reread, studied, commented upon, argued over, and shared by a community of more or less like-minded, cultivated individuals. Literati, in fact.The idea is developed over a series of six chapters, plus an introduction and "Retrospective." The chapters are advertised as framing a continuous argument but also as capable of being read independently. They are arranged chronologically and bracketed thematically or imagistically by two arrivals: that of the Muse under the aegis of Rome's earliest poets and that of the one desired by Ovid, if not for himself back into Rome then for his works into the state-sponsored collection in the Palatine library. To my mind chapters 2 ("Constructing Literature") and 3 ("Comedy at Work") are the core of the book, as I have hinted [End Page 283] above and will explain further below; but subsequent chapters on tragedy (4, "Dido's Furies") and satire (5, "Enter Satire) offer novel commentaries on the history of these genres.In staking out his position, Goldberg distinguishes himself from two groups who already are rather at odds with one another. On the one hand there are those who think that Roman literature was indeed already literature from "the beginning"—i.e., from the time of Livius Andronicus. On the other are those who might agree with Goldberg that the Romans did not invent literature until the dying days of the Republic but who give credit (or blame) for this achievement mainly to a relatively small group of elite writers. So it will be fascinating to follow the reception of Goldberg's argument in both these camps. I, for my part, would not want to predict what effect the argument will have. Instead, I will mention what strike me as some of Goldberg's more salient points and will add a few comments by way of reaction.The decision to focus on readers strikes me as a positive contribution. Roman literary culture did not just happen, nor was it or could it have been created by writers alone. A public that wanted there to be a literature in Latin, one that was alive to ideas but also to the techniques that writers used to convey these ideas, was essential. Beyond this, scholars and teachers interested in the texts themselves and in showing readers what to do with them, scholars who were ambitious to create a culture of learning similar to the one that had for generations supported Greek literature, played an enormous role. Of course the writers are more visible to us, both as writers and as a peculiarly important audience for one another's work. But even in the smallest estimate of the literate population, there were many more readers than writers, and these numbers of readers are surely as important or more... (shrink)

Summary The article examines unofficial imperial nicknames, sobriquets and appellatives, from Octavian Augustus to Julian the Apostate, in the light of traditions of Roman political humour, and argues that in the political field during the Principate there were two co-existing competing modes of emperors’ naming: along with an official one, politically loyal, formalised and institutionally legitimised, there existed another – unofficial, sometimes oppositional and even hostile towards individual emperors, frequently licentious, humorously coloured and, in this regard, deeply rooted (...) in Roman Republican traditions of political humour. Many of the known imperial nicknames and appellatives belong to a specific kind of folklore and express popular public opinion. They survived for us because of ancient authors’ interest in using such material for their literary and ideological intentions, particularly to express better the individual characteristics of the historical personages. But, for the very same purposes, Greek and Roman writers could invent some names and sobriquets, following special rhetorical and moralising principles, or mere love of ridicule. All in all, most imperial nicknames, both authentic and made-up, reveal a rather good quality of humour and mockery constructed by expressive linguistic devices and various rhetorical tropes. An apt derisive nickname marked anti-values, mocked the ruler’s badness and could vilify his reputation to the extreme, stigmatise his personality, or else become a widely-used quasi-cognomen. Many nicknames and appellatives were of ephemeral, ad hoc nature, their sense and effect largely dependent on the particular context; but, taken as a whole, they demonstrate the possible scope of and common trends in naming practice. The political system of the Principate and its very atmosphere of hypocrisy did promote double meaning and double thinking reflected in the double system of the rulers’ nomenclature. Imperial nicknames were a counter-hegemonic transcript and a weapon in the struggle for symbolic capital. All the efforts which many emperors took to control their nomina were ultimately powerless against the strength of the inevitable humorous counter-naming by the ruled. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Global Empires and The Roman ImperiumBrent D. ShawP. Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and W. Scheidel, eds. The Oxford World History of Empire. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021; xxviii + 552 pp.; xxxiv + 1,318 pp.The volumes under review are an impressive if unequal diptych. The first, the slimmer of the two, entitled "The Imperial Experience," comprises a series of analytical studies on the creation, management, (...) and ideologies of empires, and forms of resistance to them. The second, "The History of Empires," is a forbidding tome of forty-four specific studies of individual empires and imperial ventures, from Ur III and Middle Kingdom Egypt to the Mongols and the British, ending, naturally, with America's "global imperium." In the analytics, the usual suspects, including Michael Doyle, Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, are on display; and the conceptual approaches of Michael Mann and Ernest Gellner are favorite points d'appui. For premodern empires, the ideas of the Maghribi thinker Ibn Khaldūn provide a different focus, so it is heartening to see Bang and others applying them more consistently (e.g., 1:13, 40, 326–9; 2:162, 246–8, 253). Especially for premodern empires, these volumes can be seen as an extension of earlier handbooks devoted to the state, one devoted to the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean state and another on ancient empires.1 As an aspect of world history, the endeavor is the culmination of a decades-long project on the history of empires fronted by Peter Bang.2 He has usefully produced detailed historical introductions not only to both volumes, but also to the subsections in each of them. Perhaps not surprisingly, empire turns out to be a virile enterprise. As Ian Morris notes, "the story of empire... is so strongly gendered that it [End Page 505] seems reasonable to call rulers and commanders 'he' throughout" (1:162 n. 14). The muscular subject is mirrored by its principal actors and by its students. All the editors are men. Reflecting the same balance, out of the forty-five authors of individual studies in the large history of empires volume, there are five (lonely) female voices. In both volumes, women as subjects of empire are, for all intents and purposes, absent.3From the perspective of an historian who has actually worked on the history of an empire, it must be plainly stated that almost all of the theories, adequately reviewed by Bang (1:20–48), are worth about as much as the paper or pixilated screens on which they have been written. Obvious and serious exceptions to every one of the definitions and hypotheticals abound. In fact, a fair number of the exemplary histories in the second volume do not obey the strictures of most of the theories advanced in the first. So it is with a sense of relief that one turns from theory to the hard quantities offered by Walter Scheidel (1:chap. 2). To a considerable degree, his analysis depends on the well-known measurements made by Rein Taagepera. Rather alarmingly, Taagepera counted as an empire "any large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign," say, like the well-known empires of Algeria, Finland, or Canada.4 What an analysis of these global entities confirms is that size or orders of magnitude mattered, and that the first entities to count as empires emerged in the 7th to 5th centuries bce in southwestern Asia (1:53; 2:161, 245). The neo-Assyrian empire was the first super-large territorial state and its successor, the Achaemenid empire, was the first "hyper-power without rival" (1:172; 2:83, 111, 161). Subsequent premodern empires were able to reach higher levels of millions of square kilometers of territory and larger populations of dozens of millions of subjects nominally under their aegis. The magnitudes reached by a given generation of super-states set base-lines above which a successor might be able to reach greater sophistication of rule, numbers of subjects, and extent of territory. In some cases, being able to piggy-back on existing empires, they were able to skip early developmental stages and to advance quickly to imperial status, as a succession... (shrink)

La ciencia es la empresa humana que se dedica a explorar, analizar y conocer el mundo físico. Las teorías y modelos son una parte íntegra de las ciencias y son esenciales para realizar dicha labor investigativa. Desde la década de 1920 se ha desarrollado un debate en filosofía de las ciencias acerca de qué son las teorías científicas, cómo se relacionan con los fenómenos y con los modelos que son empleados en la práctica científica. Durante casi un siglo de producción (...) literaria, se han discutido extensamente estos temas, desarrollándose distintas posturas filosóficas en el debate. En su libro Models and Theories: A philosophical Inquiry, Roman Frigg tiene como objetivo principal ofrecer una guía para el siglo de literatura que se ha escrito acerca de modelos y teorías en ciencias, revisando así las distintas corrientes de pensamiento que han participado de la discusión. (shrink)

La philosophie de l'art d'Étienne Gilson n'accorde aucune place au roman. Après avoir dégagé les raisons de ce rejet et en avoir dévoilé les présupposés, nous montrons que le roman a droit de cité dans la sphère des arts majeurs, et ce même à partir des principes de la théorie de Gilson.Gilson's philosophy of art leaves no room to the novel. First, we elucidate his reasons to do so, then we disclose their presuppositions, and finally we show that (...) the novel should be considered as a major form of art even on Gilson's grounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry by Pramit ChaudhuriMartin T. DinterPramit Chaudhuri. The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 386 pp. Cloth, $74.We are all fighting our own demons, but some of us—so Chaudhuri tells us—are even fighting our own gods. Accordingly, a wide range of theomachs and their representation in classical literature fills (...) the ranks of this excellent book that will certainly elbow its way onto Mt. Olympus to sit comfortably next to divine Feeney (1991 and 1998) and sublime Hardie (1986 and 1993). Indeed, Chaudhuri transcends the scope of Feeney (1991) by including not only Senecan (and Attic) tragedy but also texts and contexts ranging from panegyric to philosophy and from lyric to historiography.Chaudhuri’s book falls into three parts. Its first three chapters cover theomachy in Greek poetry (Homer and Attic tragedy), as well as the development of theomachy in Augustan epic, with chapters on Lucretius and Vergil and Ovid. Here, Chaudhuri introduces some of the main patterns and contexts that will be developed in later imperial poetry. Chaudhuri also states clearly what will not be covered here at length: the voyage myths of the Odyssey and the Argonauts, Aristophanes’ Birds, and the (pseudo-) Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Part 2 covers Neronian literature with Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Lucan, while Part 3 focuses on the Flavian era, with Silius and Statius. Statius’ Capaneus forms a highpoint amongst the theomachs and thus deservedly receives extra attention. Chaudhuri rounds off the Flavian section with a chapter on the politics [End Page 177] of theomachy, in which he samples theomachy as a trope for the confrontation between subject and ruler, ruler and god, rival emperors and the confrontation of dynasties. After all, the Flavian poets had witnessed the principate develop over time, the struggles for the throne, and the rise and fall of dynasties. This is followed by a titillating epilogue showcasing how the themes developed in the previous chapters that breach the divide between mortal and immortal (such as fame, equanimity, skepticism, and poetic and imperial apotheosis) echo through the centuries. Rarely, however, do we find simple didactic moralism. Instead, “the theomach is instrumental in generating a dialogue on the broader symbolism of fighting the gods, its stakes and implications” (323). Chaudhuri can but hint at the rich afterlife of the theomach across Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a subject that would fill a second volume. He nevertheless whets the reader’s appetite by pointing to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Dante’s Inferno, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as a host of epigraphs to each chapter, and concludes with a glance at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Richard Dawkins versus God, and modern physicists’ search for a God particle.Chaudhuri sets the volume off by contrasting theomachy with gigantomachy. While the feats of the Giants “remain far distant in time from the activities of humankind … the theomach speaks the language of humanity … offering a richer context for his radical aspirations and … inviting the audience to adopt an alternative view on the theological status quo” (5). He also places theomachy in its cultural context when he follows Momigliano’s (1984) suggestion that under Augustus poetry replaced antiquarianism and philosophy as the primary genre in which to think about the gods. The figure of the contemptor divum (despiser of the gods) thus comes to embody the contrast between piety and impiety which itself is grounded in the empirical basis of Roman religion. But rather than testing methods of communication with the divine, as the Romans so often did with divinatory practices and ritual protocols, the contemptor divum tackles the question of whether it is possible to know the divine at all and whether the gods even exist. “By placing these conflicts at the heart of their works, the epic poets expanded the cultural conversation to include the testing of the divine in the Romans’ attempts to make sense of the epistemological, theological, and political concerns pertaining... (shrink)

In these words from the Introduction, Thomas O’Meara, currently associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, makes clear that his basic interest in this book is in early nineteenth-century Roman Catholic thought and not in Schelling as such. All the individuals treated in the book, to be sure, were related to Schelling either as colleagues, disciples or critics. But it is the entire movement of thought within German Catholicism of that period that is O’Meara’s principal concern, (...) not the particular contribution made by any single individual, even by Schelling himself as its chief inspiration. Accordingly, even though one might in various places yearn for a fuller development of this or that topic, more coverage for this or that individual, one has to bear in mind that this is an account of a movement of thought which embraced three generations of philosophers and theologians. Hence a detailed treatment of any single individual, even of Schelling himself in the various stages of his intellectual career, has to be sacrificed in order to keep one’s focus on the broader picture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Delatores And The Tradition Of Violence In Roman OratorySteven H. RutledgeTwo very prominent scholars have asserted that oratory became more violent and aggressive during the early Principate, as delatores (professional accusers and informants) came to dominate the genre. 1 This assumption has a place in a number of studies on Roman history, culture, and literature which accept their premise. 2 However, such an assumption, before it (...) is accepted, needs to be set in the larger context of Roman oratory over the period from the Republic to the Empire. It is my object here to do just that, for I propose that the new style—one which is generally perceived as more violent—represents not so much a change as a continuity in Roman rhetorical practice, and that the perceived transformation is more a product of how our sources represent orators in the first century c.e. rather than oratory’s metamorphosis into something with a perceptibly more violent style. To that end my argument has two parts. First, we need to put professional accusers into their republican as well as imperial context. Professional accusers in [End Page 555] particular were by no means exclusive to the Empire, and even in Cicero’s time they were associated with a more violent style. 3 After we set them in their larger historical context, we may then set them in their rhetorical context: Roman rhetorical theorists expected prosecution, in which delatores specialized, to be more violent by its very nature—something generally overlooked by scholars. All of this is not to deny that rhetoric underwent a fundamental change between the Republic and Empire; that is indisputable. Rather, I suggest that given the nature of what delatores did, in and of itself, and given our sources, it is very difficult to conclude that the style of delatores was essentially more “savage and aggressive” than that of their predecessors under the Republic. It was the inherent nature of Roman oratory and the ever-competitive milieu of Roman politics—during both the Republic and the Empire—which worked in unison to create such continuity. It is the nature of our sources under the Empire, on the other hand, which has led scholars to a distorted impression of oratory in the first century c.e.Let us turn first to accusatio under the Republic. Accusation appears to have always been a morally dubious undertaking, and the revulsion felt by Tacitus and Pliny under the Empire at those who pursued it professionally was by no means unique to their age. Cicero, our main source for this activity during the late Republic, by all indica-tions felt accusation generally unethical and something to be avoided, for while he noted that it could indeed make a reputation, he also remarked that prosecution ought to be undertaken only in certain circumstances. 4 Pursuit of such activity, if it turned into a habit, could become [End Page 556] an embarrassment for the accuser’s family, as Cicero indicates it was for M. Brutus’: Isdem temporibus M. Brutus, in quo magnum fuit, Brute, dedecus generi vestro, qui, cum tanto nomine esset patremque optimum virum habuisset et iuris peritissimum, accusationem factitaverit (Brut. 130). But even if it was not the habit of an individual to accuse, it was necessary to justify at length the acceptance of a case for the prosecution, as Cicero illustrates in his apology, in Divinatio in Caecilium (passim), for taking up the accusation against Verres. That prosecution was an ethically questionable activity is by no means in doubt; we see an inherent bias against prosecution in Rome in Cicero’s day, one which was carried over into the Empire and which left its mark on our sources. 5This did not prevent orators, however, from habitually undertaking prosecutions. One of the initial indications that orators had started to specialize in accusation is found in Cicero’s Pro S. Roscio Amerino (89–90), where he notes that the dominatio of Cinna and Sulla served as impetus for such activity: 6Verum ego forsitan propter multitudinem patronorum in grege adnumerer, te pugna Cannensis accusatorem sat bonum fecit. Multos caesos non ad Trasumenum lacum, sed ad Servilium vidimus. Quis ibi non... (shrink)

In every generation the overwhelming majority of those who inhabited the imperium Romanum worked on the land and derived their sustenance directly from it. The notion is commonplace and scarcely admits of debate, but its implications for long have suffered unwarranted neglect. The well-being of any society ultimately rests upon the quantity and diversity of its food supplies, but the immediacy of their contact with the soil continually reminded the Roman people of this platitude with a force which few (...) students of their history today can readily appreciate. The annual yield of wheat in particular, always a staple item in the Roman diet, and to a lesser extent of such cereals as panic and millet, acutely affected every segment of the Roman community. One example will serve to illustrate the point. The dependence of the plebs urbana upon imported surpluses is notorious, equally the intense suffering and violence which typically accompanied any disruption of their supply. Such outbreaks frequently punctuated the chaotic final decades of the Republic, but they also scarred more than one régime during the first two centuries of the Principate. (shrink)

The recent article by R. P. Saller on Roman dowry in the Principate makes some interesting and important suggestions about the function of dowry and its role in the devolution of property. I am in broad agreement with a good deal of what he says, and would not dispute his views that dowry was, as shown by the requirement of collatio dotis, regarded as in a sense part of a woman's patrimony, and that the rules for the recovery (...) of dowry show that the purpose of giving dowry was not held to rest on one single principle, but included provision both for the expenses of the wife's maintenance during marriage and for a possible remarriage after divorce or widowhood. However, his remarks on both points need some qualification and amplification. Briefly, I hope to show that the oddities and anomalies noticed by Saller in the rules governing the recovery of dowry at the end of a marriage are apparent rather than real, since these rules rest, not on conflicting views about the purpose of dowry, but on the fact that the husband had full legal ownership of the dowry during marriage, together with the right of the wife or her pater to an actio rei uxoriae for recovery of dowry; that the rules for collatio dotis applied only if the woman herself chose to claim a share in her father's estate on intestacy beyond the amount of her dowry; that the use of the dowry for the wife's support was an equitable, rather than a legal, requirement. (shrink)