In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as endemic but as an import from the East in the aftermath of military conquests--and as a cause of fatal decline. Following these etymological and semantic origins, Roman Luxuria: A Literary and Cultural History discusses the influence of Greek culture on the Roman concept and the peculiar characteristics of Roman luxuria. It analyses Roman views on luxuria through close readings in historical order from Cato the Elder, who regards luxuria as the opposite of the ideal Roman way of life, to the Christian poet Prudentius, who represents it in an allegorical fight with Sobriety. The book attends both to key authors and to wider literary genres, such as historiography and satire. Particular consideration is given to the rhetorical device of personification, which can be traced from the first appearances of luxuria in Latin literature to those of late antiquity. Berno devotes detailed attention to Seneca the Younger, whose work is often preoccupied with this passion. Seneca both defends himself from the charge of luxuria and violently attacks it in others, describing it as the archenemy of a philosophical life. Along the centuries, the focus on luxuria shifts from the economic sphere (and the waste of money) to the erotic, to the extent that in the Christian world it becomes one of the Seven Capital Sins representing the vice of lust.

Sharrock.--William C. Fitzgerald, University of California, Berkeley "American Historical Review"

A collection of papers that introduces the notion of the technosoma (techno body) into discussions on the representations of the body in classical antiquity. By applying the category of the technosoma to the ‘natural’ body, this volume explicitly narrows down the discussion of the technical and the natural to the physiological body. In doing so, the present collection focuses on body technologies in the specific form of beautification and body enhancement techniques, as well as medical and surgical treatments. The volume elucidates two main points. Firstly, ancient techno bodies show that the categories of gender and sexuality are at the core of the intersection of the natural and the technical, and intersect with notions of race, age, speciesism, class and education, and dis/ability. Secondly, the collection argues that new body technologies have in fact a very ancient history that can help to address the challenges of contemporary technological innovation. To this end, the volume showcases the intersection of ‘natural’ bodies with technology, gender, sexuality and reproduction. On the one hand, techno bodies tend to align with normative ideas about gender, and sexuality. On the other hand, body modification and/or enhancement techniques work hand in hand with economic and political power and knowledge, thus they often produce techno bodies that are shaped according to individual needs, i.e. according to a certain lifestyle. Consequently, techno bodies threaten to alter traditional ideas of masculinity, femininity, male and female sexuality and beauty.

The brief word-histories in this book are meant to provide background on some words that everyone learns when they study Latin, as well as some rarer terms that have interesting stories to tell about Roman culture. This book lists a new word or phrase that came into American English every year from 1975 to 1998, with a selection of early additions from 1497 to 1750, and discusses the history behind the adoption of each. Teachers and students of Latin can benefit from the slightly more formal, but still anecdotal, approach taken here to some key words in the Latin lexicon.

Latin literature is crowded with portraits of Romans in transit, but despite this ubiquity scholars have been reluctant to read vehicles as significant conveyors of textual and cultural meaning. This book offers the first systematic analysis of the representation of Roman vehicles in Latin literary texts. By moving past approaches that count such vehicular portrayals as either transparent glimpses of reality or soaring poetic symbols, it demonstrates how these conveyances work as a system of representation to structure both the texts in which they appear and underlying cultural discourses surrounding power, gender, and empire. Arranged as a series of interlocking studies, each chapter explores the representation of a particular conveyance across author and text, from the humblest and most quotidian (plaustrum) to the most exalted and symbol-laden (currus).

Roman Historical Drama is the first comprehensive interpretation of ancient historical drama in relation to the Octavia, revealing how the play mirrors the genre's traditions by mixing formats and stock characters from traditional tragedy with elements drawn from new developments of the Hellenistic and Roman stage.

Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.