Matthew B Roller
Biographic Data
| ID | 1118112 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew B Roller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew B |
| FAMILY NAME | Roller |
| SIGNATURE | ROLLER M B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8784-4112 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 167 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Rituals and Ceremonial
The texts and images in this chapter illustrate events involving the Roman imperial court that can be regarded as rituals. These included regular occurrences that took place on a daily or near-daily basis, such as the salutatio , dinners, and religious sacrifices. They also included special occasions like festivals, diplomatic receptions, lavish banquets, and the acclamation of a new emperor. Some of these events occurred in court spaces, and inv…
Dining and Hunting as Courtly Activities in the Roman Empire
This chapter focuses on dining as a key social ritual in which emperors and courtiers articulated and negotiated relationships among themselves. It also includes a briefer discussion of hunting and related activities as contexts for such negotiations, attested for at least a few emperors. The chapter discusses where imperial banquets ( convivia ) were staged, which kinds of courtiers were present, and how participants interacted. Conviviality was…
The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire
412 PHOENIX propose that, in spite of wealth, the urbanized Roman lifestyle led to deteriorating health during the empire; he concludes that further evidence and analyses are required. In the final chapter he succinctly summarizes his main arguments and places them in an even broader context, suggesting that the impact of private-order enforcement may have reduced economic performance and stifled innovation. Overall, Terpstra’s work is credible, …
Amicable and Hostile Exchange in the Culture of Recitation
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Models from the Past in Roman Culture
Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew B. Roller's book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is flesh…
Dining Women
This chapter examines the historical and ideological aspects of women's dining. The scholarship reveals that, during early periods, women sat to dine while men reclined; whereas “now,” women too recline to dine, just as men do—their posture must therefore have changed at some point. On the other hand, by linking the alleged shift in women's posture to overall moral decline, these studies reveal that the distinction between the two postures has id…
Dining Posture in Ancient Rome
Dining Children
This chapter focuses on the analysis of freeborn children's posture in the context of Roman (and Graeco-Roman) dining. It aims to understand children's dining posture more broadly, along with the meanings associated with the various practices. Free children are marked for status and privilege by their convivial posture, just as free adults and slaves are. The “handbook” view is that, if such children were present at all among the adults, they sat…
Dining Men
This chapter analyzes the link between reclining dining and otium within three types of media: literary texts, funerary monuments, and wall paintings. These media are treated separately not only because they emerge from and address themselves to different social strata, but also because each medium has a distinctive place in the spaces and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Thus, to discuss representations of reclining dining in the different media …
The Dialogue in Seneca’s Dialogues (and Other Moral Essays)
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Precept(or) and Example in Seneca
This chapter argues that, while Seneca frequently deploys everyday Roman exemplary discourse in a fairly traditional way, in Letters 94 and 108 he subjects this discourse to a searching critique, identifying, from a Stoic viewpoint, a series of deficiencies in its capacity to register and assign moral value. A given glorious deed may have been motivated by a vice, not a virtue; a virtuous condition of soul can be inferred only on the basis of mul…
Teaching “Theory” in Topical Graduate Seminars
This paper discusses a method of teaching theory to graduate students in the context of graduate seminars that are constructed around classical topics—particular ancient texts or authors, specific historical or art-historical or archaeological questions, and so forth. This method ties the necessary theory directly to the seminar’s topic, and thereby subordinates the exposition of theory to the overall problematic of the seminar. This approach con…
The Difference an Emperor makes
Arguably, the earliest moment at which one might look for a reception of the Roman Republican senate is in the early Imperial age. For if we regard the term ‘Republican’ as designating a particular era and a particular governmental regime, it seems to me that this period and regime must be seen to be over and closed before the question can be posed as to how a governmental organ like the senate functioned, or what its characteristics were, under …
Georg H. B. Luck
On the Intersignification of Monuments in Augustan Rome
The erection of public monuments in Rome was an arena of aristocratic competition, as scholars have long recognized. Victorious generals, who set up temples, porticoes, statues, columns, and the like, typically selected these monuments’ appearance and location to create a studied contrast with preexisting monuments. This dynamic, which I call “intersignification,” bears fruitful comparison with the “intertextual” dynamics of Latin poetry. I offer…
The consul(ar) as exemplum
Introduction Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem. Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem. Ergo postque magisque viri nunc gloria claret. Ennius, Annales fr. 363–5 Skutsch One person, by delaying, restored the commonwealth for us. He did not set people's criticisms (sc. of him) before safety. Therefore it is afterward, and more, that the hero's glory now shines out. These three hexameter verses, composed probably in the 170s or early 160s bc , co…
Culture-Based Approaches
This article examines some of the ways the concept of culture has been deployed in Roman Studies, and in classical scholarship more generally. In so doing, it hopes to show what kinds of critical work this concept can be made to do; to make explicit some of the intellectual commitments that accompany the various uses of this term; to illustrate how these commitments are manifested in scholarly works which seem (to the author) to represent useful …
The Politics of Aristocratic Competition
The exemplary past in Roman historiography and culture
The modern reader of any Roman text that concerns itself with the Roman past - principally, but not only, narrative historiography - is inevitably struck by the prominence accorded “great deeds” and the actors who perform them. It is a familiar feature of Roman historical consciousness that, at any given time, the past could be regarded as a storehouse of practices, orientations, and values - sometimes referred to as the mos maiorum , “the custom…
Dining Posture in Ancient Rome
What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the day-to-day lives of the city's inhabitants. This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three principal dining p…
Exemplarity in Roman Culture
Horizontal Women
This paper examines literary and visual evidence for women's dining posture at Rome. I distinguish actual social practice from the ideology of representation, while recognizing their interdependence. Contrary to the view that "respectable" women dined seated until the Augustan era, I argue that a women (of any status) could always dine reclining alongside a man, and that this signifies a licit sexual connection. The sitting posture, seen mostly i…
Constructing Autocracy
Constructing Autocracy
Rome's transition from a republican system of government to an imperial regime comprised more than a century of civil upheaval and rapid institutional change. Yet the establishment of a ruling dynasty, centered around a single leader, came as a cultural and political shock to Rome's aristocracy, who had shared power in the previous political order. How did the imperial regime manage to establish itself and how did the Roman elites from the time o…
Color-Blindness
Exemplarity in Roman Culture
Color-Blindness
Constructing Autocracy
Rome's transition from a republican system of government to an imperial regime comprised more than a century of civil upheaval and rapid institutional change. Yet the establishment of a ruling dynasty, centered around a single leader, came as a cultural and political shock to Rome's aristocracy, who had shared power in the previous political order. How did the imperial regime manage to establish itself and how did the Roman elites from the time o…
On the Intersignification of Monuments in Augustan Rome
The erection of public monuments in Rome was an arena of aristocratic competition, as scholars have long recognized. Victorious generals, who set up temples, porticoes, statues, columns, and the like, typically selected these monuments’ appearance and location to create a studied contrast with preexisting monuments. This dynamic, which I call “intersignification,” bears fruitful comparison with the “intertextual” dynamics of Latin poetry. I offer…
Dining Posture in Ancient Rome
What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the day-to-day lives of the city's inhabitants. This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three principal dining p…
Horizontal Women
This paper examines literary and visual evidence for women's dining posture at Rome. I distinguish actual social practice from the ideology of representation, while recognizing their interdependence. Contrary to the view that "respectable" women dined seated until the Augustan era, I argue that a women (of any status) could always dine reclining alongside a man, and that this signifies a licit sexual connection. The sitting posture, seen mostly i…
Culture-Based Approaches
This article examines some of the ways the concept of culture has been deployed in Roman Studies, and in classical scholarship more generally. In so doing, it hopes to show what kinds of critical work this concept can be made to do; to make explicit some of the intellectual commitments that accompany the various uses of this term; to illustrate how these commitments are manifested in scholarly works which seem (to the author) to represent useful …
Color-Blindness
Constructing Autocracy
Rome's transition from a republican system of government to an imperial regime comprised more than a century of civil upheaval and rapid institutional change. Yet the establishment of a ruling dynasty, centered around a single leader, came as a cultural and political shock to Rome's aristocracy, who had shared power in the previous political order. How did the imperial regime manage to establish itself and how did the Roman elites from the time o…
Horizontal Women
This paper examines literary and visual evidence for women's dining posture at Rome. I distinguish actual social practice from the ideology of representation, while recognizing their interdependence. Contrary to the view that "respectable" women dined seated until the Augustan era, I argue that a women (of any status) could always dine reclining alongside a man, and that this signifies a licit sexual connection. The sitting posture, seen mostly i…
Constructing Autocracy
Exemplarity in Roman Culture
Dining Posture in Ancient Rome
What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the day-to-day lives of the city's inhabitants. This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three principal dining p…
The Politics of Aristocratic Competition
The exemplary past in Roman historiography and culture
The modern reader of any Roman text that concerns itself with the Roman past - principally, but not only, narrative historiography - is inevitably struck by the prominence accorded “great deeds” and the actors who perform them. It is a familiar feature of Roman historical consciousness that, at any given time, the past could be regarded as a storehouse of practices, orientations, and values - sometimes referred to as the mos maiorum , “the custom…
Culture-Based Approaches
This article examines some of the ways the concept of culture has been deployed in Roman Studies, and in classical scholarship more generally. In so doing, it hopes to show what kinds of critical work this concept can be made to do; to make explicit some of the intellectual commitments that accompany the various uses of this term; to illustrate how these commitments are manifested in scholarly works which seem (to the author) to represent useful …
The consul(ar) as exemplum
Introduction Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem. Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem. Ergo postque magisque viri nunc gloria claret. Ennius, Annales fr. 363–5 Skutsch One person, by delaying, restored the commonwealth for us. He did not set people's criticisms (sc. of him) before safety. Therefore it is afterward, and more, that the hero's glory now shines out. These three hexameter verses, composed probably in the 170s or early 160s bc , co…
Georg H. B. Luck
On the Intersignification of Monuments in Augustan Rome
The erection of public monuments in Rome was an arena of aristocratic competition, as scholars have long recognized. Victorious generals, who set up temples, porticoes, statues, columns, and the like, typically selected these monuments’ appearance and location to create a studied contrast with preexisting monuments. This dynamic, which I call “intersignification,” bears fruitful comparison with the “intertextual” dynamics of Latin poetry. I offer…
The Difference an Emperor makes
Arguably, the earliest moment at which one might look for a reception of the Roman Republican senate is in the early Imperial age. For if we regard the term ‘Republican’ as designating a particular era and a particular governmental regime, it seems to me that this period and regime must be seen to be over and closed before the question can be posed as to how a governmental organ like the senate functioned, or what its characteristics were, under …
The Dialogue in Seneca’s Dialogues (and Other Moral Essays)
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Precept(or) and Example in Seneca
This chapter argues that, while Seneca frequently deploys everyday Roman exemplary discourse in a fairly traditional way, in Letters 94 and 108 he subjects this discourse to a searching critique, identifying, from a Stoic viewpoint, a series of deficiencies in its capacity to register and assign moral value. A given glorious deed may have been motivated by a vice, not a virtue; a virtuous condition of soul can be inferred only on the basis of mul…
Teaching “Theory” in Topical Graduate Seminars
This paper discusses a method of teaching theory to graduate students in the context of graduate seminars that are constructed around classical topics—particular ancient texts or authors, specific historical or art-historical or archaeological questions, and so forth. This method ties the necessary theory directly to the seminar’s topic, and thereby subordinates the exposition of theory to the overall problematic of the seminar. This approach con…
Dining Women
This chapter examines the historical and ideological aspects of women's dining. The scholarship reveals that, during early periods, women sat to dine while men reclined; whereas “now,” women too recline to dine, just as men do—their posture must therefore have changed at some point. On the other hand, by linking the alleged shift in women's posture to overall moral decline, these studies reveal that the distinction between the two postures has id…
Dining Posture in Ancient Rome
Dining Children
This chapter focuses on the analysis of freeborn children's posture in the context of Roman (and Graeco-Roman) dining. It aims to understand children's dining posture more broadly, along with the meanings associated with the various practices. Free children are marked for status and privilege by their convivial posture, just as free adults and slaves are. The “handbook” view is that, if such children were present at all among the adults, they sat…
Dining Men
This chapter analyzes the link between reclining dining and otium within three types of media: literary texts, funerary monuments, and wall paintings. These media are treated separately not only because they emerge from and address themselves to different social strata, but also because each medium has a distinctive place in the spaces and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Thus, to discuss representations of reclining dining in the different media …
Amicable and Hostile Exchange in the Culture of Recitation
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Models from the Past in Roman Culture
Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew B. Roller's book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is flesh…
The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire
412 PHOENIX propose that, in spite of wealth, the urbanized Roman lifestyle led to deteriorating health during the empire; he concludes that further evidence and analyses are required. In the final chapter he succinctly summarizes his main arguments and places them in an even broader context, suggesting that the impact of private-order enforcement may have reduced economic performance and stifled innovation. Overall, Terpstra’s work is credible, …
Rituals and Ceremonial
The texts and images in this chapter illustrate events involving the Roman imperial court that can be regarded as rituals. These included regular occurrences that took place on a daily or near-daily basis, such as the salutatio , dinners, and religious sacrifices. They also included special occasions like festivals, diplomatic receptions, lavish banquets, and the acclamation of a new emperor. Some of these events occurred in court spaces, and inv…
Dining and Hunting as Courtly Activities in the Roman Empire
This chapter focuses on dining as a key social ritual in which emperors and courtiers articulated and negotiated relationships among themselves. It also includes a briefer discussion of hunting and related activities as contexts for such negotiations, attested for at least a few emperors. The chapter discusses where imperial banquets ( convivia ) were staged, which kinds of courtiers were present, and how participants interacted. Conviviality was…
Art (19 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · History (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Literature (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)