Contested Triumphs: Politics, Pageantry, and Performance in Livy’s Republican Rome by Miriam R. Pelikan Pittenger (review)
459 apart the components of a sentence to understand its meaning. It is difficult to recommend Stroup’s work wholeheartedly, since it does have some major omissions in its approach, which limits its value for the social and cultural historian. And curiously, at first glance this seems to be the market at which the book is primarily aimed. Nonetheless, I suspect Stroup’s monograph would better serve the interests of philologists working on Cicero (and to a more limited extent Catullus) and students of literary history of the Late Republic. For these, Stroup does have some valuable insights and interpretations that are well worth further consideration.
Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire by Josiah Osgood (review)
461 her conclusion (275-298). Thus, the second section as a whole builds upon two important works of Livy scholarship of the last decade, Chaplin’s Livy’s Exemplary History and Feldherr’s Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History. It has become a topos of a review of a book on Livy to begin or end by referring to the successful rehabilitation of author in the last half-century. This book makes a contribution to our understanding of the sophistication of the AVC. P.’s Livy is both a confident and adept historian, representing faithfully Roman (hyper)sensitivity towards their collective identity and the complexities of the consensus political discourse of the Middle Republic.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.