Michèle Lowrie
Biographic Data
| ID | 410976 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michèle Lowrie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michèle |
| FAMILY NAME | Lowrie |
| SIGNATURE | LOWRIE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 141 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Culture of Civil War? Bellum civile and Political Communication in Late Republican Rome
Political Thought
Roman concepts and institutions have been formative for Western political forms and the Romans’ thinking about power has had a deeper influence on Western traditions of political thought than is recognized in political theory. Recent developments have sparked the interest of political theorists in genres and artefacts that convey thinking about politics through means besides distinct argumentation. At the same time, the political turn in the stud…
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future developme…
Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond
Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine),…
Security
Married to Civil War
Civil War, the Soul, and the Cosmos at Seneca, Thyestes 547–622
Roman Law and Latin Literature
The law and literature movement is less active in Roman studies than in modern national languages despite the importance of ancient Rome for subsequent traditions. This chapter hopes to spur further research by surveying a range of representative topics individually familiar to Latinists, but whose interconnections become clearer under the “law and literature” rubric. These are: discursive media; censorship; law and theatricality; educative ficti…
Translatio Babylonis
Exemplarity and Singularity
Exemplarity and singularity
The Egyptian Within
Poetics and Theory
The Graduate Certificate Program in Poetics and Theory at New York University provides a flexible curricular structure for students to make room in their schedule for a more systematic exploration of theoretical approaches than can usually be accommodated within national or area-studies literature programs. It is a structure more than a canon and, while a common seminar, reading groups, and an annual conference provide community, the students are…
Vergil and Founding Violence
This chapter contains sections titled: Law-Making and Law-Preserving Violence Mythical Violence Divine Violence Vergil and the Roman Exemplum Further Reading
Horace
This chapter contains sections titled: Overcoming resistance Allusion and return Performance, writing, and the power of speech The communal voice and the eclipse of light poetry The aesthetics of praise Virtus, decorum, and morals
Beyond Performance Envy
Horace's literary epistles, contrary to their own written medium, are fascinated with performance. It is not just that the Ars Poetica is a didactic poem on how to write tragedy and Epistles 2.1 focuses mostly on drama in its literary history. Horace is interested in the function of the poet in society. He claims a plenitude for choral lyric and for the archaic poet's role as a founder that is lacking for himself. Although he had already composed…
Arma uirumque cano
Vergil begins the Aeneid with a strong proclamation of song: ‘I sing of arms and the man’. The Sibyl offers an allegory of both the advantages and disadvantages of song that indirectly reflects Vergil's self-definition with regard to his own media. The Sibyl's direct inspiration by god guarantees the validity of her prophecy, but her resistance to violent possession shows that authority comes with a price. This chapter maps the differences betwee…
Occasion and Monument
The Ara Pacis is a monument representing a procession. Along with Augustus' Mausoleum, sundial, and ustrinum, it formed part of a dynamic complex on the Campus Martius that united writing with performance, static representation with ritual reenactment. As with much of Augustus poetry, it heralds occasionality while the actual occasion depicted on it is hard to pin down.
Ovid's Triumphs in Exile
Exile provides a situation of extreme separation between author and reader, poet, and addressee. Ovid returns to the semiotic issues he explored in the Heroides in his exile poetry. The triumph in particular is a locus for him to examine the extent to which presence is necessary to performative felicity. He concludes that his imagination is such that he neither needs to witness such a performance nor that it even needs to take place for him to be…
Literature and the Law
The book's last section examines the literary representation in Augustan Rome of the interrelation of literature and the law as competing discourses. Both have a complex mediality and despite our initial assumption that the law wields power by contrast with literature, the latter's control of representation compensates over time for deficiencies in its authors' political power. In Sermones 2. 1, Horace stages a dialogue between himself and a juri…
The Performance of Horatian Lyric
The performance of Horace's Odes offers a test case for determining the interrelation between a poet's own self-definition and the actual reception of his poetry. Debate has raged in the 20th century over whether the language of song in this body of poetry is literal or metaphoric. Speech act theory starting with J. L. Austin offers a tool that helps understand the problematics of referentiality, but cannot in the end determine whether any partic…
De‐ and Re‐contextualization
Recitation had become a strong venue for poets to reach a public in Augustan Rome. Horace, however, resists this medium on the grounds that it exposed a poet to the exigencies of the rat race. Epistles 1. 19 analyzes its own poet's hypocrisy in wanting to avoid social climbing while reserving his poetry for Augustus' ears.
Inscription and Testimony
In elegy 4. 11, Propertius uses the death of Cornelia, a member of Augustus' family, as an occasion to make a statement about the law and representation under Augustus. He deploys many of the strategies outlined throughout this book. He presents an impossible speech situation that spans various performance media and writing; he puns on lex and legere; he presents Cornelia as an exemplum in many ways like Augustus himself. The typical elegiac twis…
Auctoritas and Representation
This is one of two chapters to analyze actual monuments at Rome. Augustus' Res gestae was an inscription erected on pillars outside his Mausoleum on the Campus Martius but also copied and disseminated across the empire. As such, it is a document with a strong affiliation with writing, iteration, and death. Nevertheless, Augustus describes his own power in this document as auctoritas, a word with a strong performative dimension. The performative d…
The Pragmatics of Literature
In Tristia 2, Ovid makes a case to Augustus for his return from exile. The poem's pragmatic aim ostensibly failed and the poet was never recalled. But Ovid does more than try to change his fate. His systematic punning on lex and legere invites comparison between the powerlessness of his own written discourse to the power of Augustus' ability to determine the law. But we should not end with a picture of powerful orality versus impotent writing. Th…
Writing, Performance, and Authority in Augustan Rome
This book examines how the Romans conceived of their poetic media. Song has links to the divine through prophecy, while writing offers a more quotidian, but also a more realistic way of presenting what a poet does. In a culture of highly polished book production where recitation was the fashion, to claim to sing or to write was one means of self-definition. This book examines the stakes of literary claims to one medium or another. Generic definit…
Horace’s Narrative Odes
Narrative has not traditionally been a subject in the analysis of lyric poetry. This book deconstructs the polarity that divides and binds lyric and narrative means of representation in Horace's Odes. While myth is a canonical feature of Pindaric epinician, Horace cannot adopt the Pindaric mode for aesthetic and political reasons. Roman Callimacheanism's privileging of the small and elegant offers a pretext for Horace to shrink from the difficult…
"Horace's "Carmen Saeculare
This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 B.C.E. for choral performance at the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games. The poem is the first fully preserved Latin hymn whose circumstances of presentation are known, and it is the only lyric of Horace we can be certain was first presented orally. Michael C. J. Putnam offers a close and sensitive reading of this hymn, shedding new li…
Slander and Horse Law in Horace, Sermones 2.1
Sermones 2.1 stages a dialectic between satire and the law through a dialogue between a satirist, Horace, and a jurist, Gaius Trebatius Testa. At stake is the relative power of the two rival discourses and what each says about contemporary politics. Caesar Augustus has recently consolidated power and put an end to civil war, changing what people could say in public. Through allusion to more and less familiar laws, Horace explores the extent to wh…
Sovereignty before the Law
2007). Sovereignty before the Law: Agamben and the Roman Republic. Law and Humanities: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 31-55
A Parade of Lyric Predecessors
Lyric's "Elegos" and the Aristotelian Mean
A Sympotic Achilles, Horace Epode 13
Lyric's "Elegos" and the Aristotelian Mean
A Parade of Lyric Predecessors
Personal Narrative and the Fantastic, or, the Poet Out of Bounds
Mostly, the stories Horace tells about himself engage poetics, no matter the genre. A cavalier blend of the mundane with the fantastic characterizes the lyric stories. The poet averts a wolf’s attack by singing; he misplaces his shield (like a good lyrist), and Mercury air-lifts him from battle; his near death by a falling tree (almost) causes an underworld vision of Sappho and Alcaeus; he witnesses Bacchus teaching nymphs and satyrs their lesson…
Praising Caesar
Although I would have liked to end this book with the questions posed of narrative interpretability in C. 3. 27, Horace will not let us do so. Odes 4 breaks the seal of the closure set on Odes 1 – 3, with much fanfare attending the return to lyric (Putnam 1986: 30 and passim). The circularity of lyric time always allows for return, but linear history imposes difference. The primary difference for the topic of narrative is that narration in Odes 4…
History and Epic
The personal narratives discussed in the last chapter herald Something Big: the Roman Odes. These poems fly on the wings of a swan (C. 2. 20) over all of Horace’s self-imposed, loudly promulgated boundaries. The Ars Poetica states a problem: sectantem levia nervi / deficiunt animique; professus grandia turget (‘sinews and spirit fail the one who pursues levity; he who professes grandeur swells’, 26 – 7). The solution is for a professus levia (one…
Dedication
Abbreviations
Lyric Discourses
The degree zero of lyric discourse is utterance, a dramatic speaking out grounded in occasion (Heinze 1923; Johnson 1982: 4, 30; Nussbaum 1981: 2099 et al.). This said, we must qualify. Occasion and speech are always subject to fiction, and thereby fail to provide more than a semblance of origins. Utterance, within its realm, is all-encompassing, and all-empowering, so that narrative (the formal category) is one possible speech act among others. …
Programmatic Narrative
With this chapter begins the close reading of Horace’s narratives, but we will hardly leave poetics behind. This is not because all of Horace’s poetry is metapoetry, though that may be true. The poems with extended mythological narratives in the Odes opening sweep are paradigmatic for the narratives in the rest of the collection. C. 1. 7 in particular offers itself as the solution to the questions it raises.
The Time of Writing and of Song
I start from the premise that lyric time is the hie et nunc. But there are many different kinds of here and now. There is the now of the poet’s composition, the now of our reading, the now of the utterance represented in the poem. Are these the same or do we perceive them as separate but intertwined? ‘Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing. The temporality of writing …
Narrative Seduction
The Roman Odes are the climax of several developing strands in Odes 1-3, but after them, Horace returns to the conventional topics of lighter lyric. The poems that narrate or are about narrative reflect this shift: C. 3. 7, 3. 11, and 3. 27 have to do with women and love, if they fail to make of Horace a conventional erotic lyrist. As expected of our intellectual poet, the issue is less about love per se than poetry’s role in seduction and partic…
Title Pages
Forbidding Mourning
Memory in Odes I — 3 looks forward: the monumentum does not so much preserve the past as project Horace’s future immortality. Death, for Horace, has no sting. How then to cope with the death of others, particularly with the primary impulse arising from death and memory that is mourning? Can poetry compensate for death? Does a place exist for mourning in a poetics of presence? The usual threat to the ethics of carpe diem arises from anxiety about …
History and Epic
The conflation of epic, tragedy, and history in C. I. 6 sets the stage for Horace’s political voice. History, ancient or contemporary, entails a stylistic elevation Horace flags with generic terms, citations of high style predecessors, or the like. Homer, the paradigm for epic and praise poetry, is a prime candidate for this role. History, like epic, departs from lyric as narrowly construed in subject matter, style, and mode of discourse. The nar…
Horace’s Narrative Odes
Narrative has not traditionally been a subject in the analysis of lyric poetry. This book deconstructs the polarity that divides and binds lyric and narrative means of representation in Horace's Odes. While myth is a canonical feature of Pindaric epinician, Horace cannot adopt the Pindaric mode for aesthetic and political reasons. Roman Callimacheanism's privileging of the small and elegant offers a pretext for Horace to shrink from the difficult…
Allusion and Intertext
Roman Constructions
Horace, Cicero and Augustus, or the Poet Statesman at Epistles 2.1.256
Horace and Cicero: poets with a philosophic bent, Republicans who came down on the losing side of civil war in the wake of Caesar's assassination but nevertheless admired the man who became Augustus, authors preoccupied with their own immortality and who thought hard about art's commemorative task. Augustus and Cicero: statesmen with a literary bent, whose prose was more successful than their poetry, who wrote accounts of their own accomplishment…
Rome
"Horace's "Carmen Saeculare
This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 B.C.E. for choral performance at the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games. The poem is the first fully preserved Latin hymn whose circumstances of presentation are known, and it is the only lyric of Horace we can be certain was first presented orally. Michael C. J. Putnam offers a close and sensitive reading of this hymn, shedding new li…
Slander and Horse Law in Horace, Sermones 2.1
Sermones 2.1 stages a dialectic between satire and the law through a dialogue between a satirist, Horace, and a jurist, Gaius Trebatius Testa. At stake is the relative power of the two rival discourses and what each says about contemporary politics. Caesar Augustus has recently consolidated power and put an end to civil war, changing what people could say in public. Through allusion to more and less familiar laws, Horace explores the extent to wh…
Horace and Augustus
Given the conspicuous role Augustus plays in Roman poetry from the advent of his power as the young Caesar in the 30s bce to his death, it is easy to forget the novelty of this feature. No single figure so dominates Republican literature. With virtual monarchy comes a tremendous literary focus. Horace offers a unique opportunity for examining a poetic response to this concentration of power because his oeuvre spans three decades and a multitude o…
Making an Exemplum of Yourself
This chapter looks at two points in the precipitous spiral where attempts were made to control exemplarity, and particularly to turn the person trying to do the controlling into an exemplum himself. The people referred to here are Cicero and Augustus. Certainly, the failure of Cicero to meet the example he sets himself, and the tendency of the examples he uses to turn against him show that he could control neither the examples he uses, nor his ow…
The Cambridge Companion to Horace
Horace is a central author in Latin literature. His work spans a wide range of genres, from iambus to satire, and odes to literary epistle, and he is just as much at home writing about love and wine as he is about philosophy and literary criticism. He also became a key literary figure in the regime of the Emperor Augustus. In this 2007 volume a superb international cast of contributors present a stimulating and accessible assessment of the poet, …
Art (47 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (43 works) · Literature (42 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · History (35 works) · Law (25 works) · Poetry (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Linguistics (17 works) · Politics (17 works)