A companion to the Neronian age
Introduction: The Neronian (Literary) "Renaissance" / Martin T. Dinter -- Part I. Nero -- The Performing Prince / Elaine Fantham -- Biographies of Nero / Donna W. Hurley -- Nero the Imperial Misfit : Philhellenism in a Rich Man's World / Sigrid Mratschek -- Part II. The Empire -- The empire in the age of Nero / Myles Lavan -- Apollo in arms : Nero at the frontier / David Braund -- Domus Neroniana : The Imperial Household in the Age of Nero / Michael J. Mordine -- Religion / Darja Eterbenc Erker -- Neronian Philosophy / Jenny Bryan -- Part III. Literature, Art and Architecture -- Seneca, Apocolocyntosis / Christopher L. Whitton -- The Carmina Einsidlensia and Calpurnius Siculus' Eclogues / John Henderson -- Seneca's Philosophical Writings : Naturales Quaestiones, Dialogi, Epistulae Morales / Jonathan Mannering -- Senecan Tragedy / Emma Buckley -- Lucan's Bellum Ciuile / Philip Hardie -- Petronius' Satyrica / Tom Murgatroyd -- Persius / Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols -- Columella, De Re Rustica / Christiane Reitz -- Literature of the World : Seneca's Natural Questions and Pliny's Natural History / Aude Doody -- Greek Literature Under Nero / Dirk Uwe Hansen -- Buildings of an Emperor : how Nero transformed Rome / Heinz-Jurgen Beste and Henner von Hesberg -- Portraits of an Emperor : Nero and the Sun / Marianne Bergmann -- Neronian Wall-Painting : A Matter of Perspective / Katharina Lorenz -- Part IV. Reception -- Nero in Jewish and Christian Tradition from the First Century to the Reformation / Harry O. Maier -- Haec monstra edidit : Translating Lucan in the early seventeenth century / Yanick Maes -- Haunted by Horror : The Ghost of Seneca in Renaissance Drama / Susanna Braund -- "Fantasies so varied and bizarre" : The Domus Aurea, the Renaissance, and the "grotesque" / Michael Squire -- Epilogue -- Nachwort: Nero from Zero to Hero / Miriam Griffin.
Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, eds. Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World. London: Routledge, 1997.
The editors of this volume aim to challenge the precepts of New Historicism (á la Foucault) as they bear upon historical change. If New Historicism had focussed on the ‘operation of power’ through time, with its implications for the periodized social construction of the individual, the editors assert that such radical discontinuity may in fact distort modern perceptions of Greek and Roman antiquity. The essays presented, beyond addressing continuity and change in the broadest sense, are not methodologically coherent, but rather give a sampling of contemporary approaches to periodization.
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.