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Product Description
Book Description
Features
Comprehensive introduction provides the historical background, organizational analysis, and grammatical idiosyncracies of the inscription
Complete unadapted Latin text of the inscription with appendix (327 lines) including macrons with same- and facing-page vocabulary and notes
Grammatical, lexical, and historical commentary in facing-page notes
Eight black-and-white illustrations, maps, and photographs
Index of proper names with textual references and identifications
Complete vocabulary
Author Bio
Rex E. Wallace is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts, where he has been teaching since 1985. He received his PhD in Linguistics from The Ohio State University in 1984. His major research and teaching interests are Greek and Latin linguistics, historical linguistics, and English morphology and lexicography. He has coedited two books on linguistics, Language Files2 (with Jean Godby and Catherine Jolley; Reynoldsberg, 1982) and Morphology (with Arnold Zwicky; Columbus, 1984). Wallace has also authored/coauthored over 30 articles on Italic linguistics, Etruscan, and ancient Greek. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
About the Author
WHEN Augustus died on 19 August, AD 14, he left behind him four documents, entrusted to the Vestal Virgins for sage keeping; these documents as listed by Suetonius (Aug. 101, 4) were: his will; instructions for his funeral; 'a catalogue of his achievements which he wished to be inscribed on bronze tablets and set up in front of his mausoleum'; and a summary of the military and financial state of the whole empire. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
In essence the Res Gestae is a lengthy obituary notice written by the Princeps himself and updated to the year he died [14 CE]. It was ordered to be engraved on two bronze tabulae outside his mausoleum in Rome. These have not survived, but copies of the Latin original or of the authorised Greek translation were also engraved on temples at Ancyra, Apollonia, and Antioch in Pisidia. By utilising these separate sources it is possible to reconstruct the complete text.
It is improbable that Augustus would have recorded any false statements in this kind of document. However if he presented the truth it was not of necessity the whole truth. Those aspects of his career which were best forgotten were accorded only passing mention, while those for which he hoped to be celebrated were accentuated. The bitter civil wars are only briefly covered and none of his previous opponents are mentioned by name. Indeed the defeat of Sextus Pompeius is attested by a single statement, "Mare pacavi a praedonibus." The record of military and diplomatic triumphs conveys no suggestion that the Arabian expedition [25 BCE] was unsuccessful, or that the attempts to maintain client kings in Armenia failed. The withdrawal of Roman forces from the Elbe to the Rhine following the catastrophic defeat of Quintilus Varus and the loss of three legions [9 CE], also goes unmentioned.
In conclusion, this book will continue to remain an invaluable reference tool for both students and any serious reader interested in Roman history. Within its compass of less than one hundred pages much important source material for the study of the "Roman revolution" however that concept is viewed or interpreted today, may be easily accessed.
Incidentally my own copy, which was purchased new in 1977, still retains pencilled in on the top right hand corner of the title page the contemporary retail price of 60p.
The book is actually surprisingly honest if only because Augustus doesn't choose to cover such controversial elements as proscriptions, the one exception to this is often thought to be his claim he returned the res publica to the senate - for many however this is a misunderstanding of what Augustus and the contemporary Roman elite understood by that term. The res publica is not the state as government, but the moral and social status of Rome, aspects his Julian laws were deliberately designed to influence (he personally, and his family still more so, totally ignored them).
The book is short but none the less essential for anyone interested by a man who makes Machiavelli look like an amateur - Machiavelli never got the chance to successfully use his vaunted skills to seize an empire for himself and his heirs or to create an empire that would last in one form or another for fourteen hundred years until the fall of Byzantium.
Augustus ruled so long that Tacitus could correctly point out that by AD14 and his death, few remembered what the republic had been. He created a new political system without destroying the old, his skill in twisting the fabric of Republican government into a form which supported his absolute power is truly awesome, especially bearing in mind that until the accession of Vespasian, who was given the unconditional right to do that which he felt was in the public interest, the emperor was in theory only the Princeps, the first amongst equals and held no offices not held in Republican Rome (though rather more of them).
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