Ellen O’gorman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4427376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ellen O’gorman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ellen |
| FAMILY NAME | O’gorman |
| SIGNATURE | O’GORMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1611-6783 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
That golden sentence of Tacitus: Tacitean quotation as the medium of political knowledge in Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso
Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) provides us with a satirically inflected view of how Tacitean quotation was used throughout the sixteenth century as a medium of political knowledge. A detailed analysis of some Tacitean scenes in Ragguagli will help us to elicit some of the issues underlying the turn to Tacitus in the intellectual climate of the period: the search for truth in a new era of moral relativism; debates about the applicability…
Embedded Speech and the Embodied Speaker in Roman Historiography
This paper considers the presentation of speech performance in Roman historiography. It proposes the use of media theory to analyse the different medial elements of performed speech in Roman rhetorical culture. It identifies traces of performance in written speech and how similar traces are exploited in the historian’s composition of speeches and narrative frames to speech. These traces are analysed as instances of ‘intermediality’ which help to …
Hugh Last Fellowship: The Roman imperial sententia and the transmission of thought from antiquity to the Renaissance
An abstract 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
Conspicuous Absence: Tacitus’ De Re Publica
Germania is read as a response to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico , and contrasted with Tacitus’ account of conquest in the Agricola . Focusing on the absence of historical narrative, discussion goes beyond the well-recognized denial of history to the Germanic Other to consider the implications of moments when Germania comes close to recounting history without doing so. Narrativity and the predominance of description are discussed, with a view to under…
Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech: Truth to Power
This study examines how Tacitus’ representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to c…
Imperial History and Biography at Rome
This chapter examines historical writing during the period between about 31 and 27 bc, when a succession of extraordinary settlements between the Roman senate and the future emperor Augustus created—in effect—a constitutional change from oligarchy to autocracy. It first considers both biographical and historical writings under the general heading of 'history', before turning to generic difference and its political significance. Three issues arise…
Repetition and exemplarity in historical thought: Ancient Rome and the ghosts of modernity
In this chapter I explore some of the various ways in which modernity configures repetition as an improper relation to the past. This exploration mediates the wider question of what modernity wants to do with the past, whether it is to break with it, to sublimate it, or to form a new kind of relation altogether. This leads us to consider the tropes of repetition and of exemplarity as the grounds for an engagement with the past. That is to say, mo…
Intertextuality and historiography
The Annals of Tacitus begin at the death of Augustus, whose funeral is narrated in chapters 8-10 of the first book. The ninth and tenth chapters, beginning “then there was much talk about Augustus himself,” record various interpretations of the emperor's life current at the time of his death; as has been “recognized” for nearly a century, these chapters contain precise and pointed allusions to Augustus' self-representation in the text entitled Re…
The Politics of Sallustian Style
The existence of two monographs and only the fragments of his five-book history might suggest to us that Sallust's work only barely clung to survival from antiquity. On the contrary, a glance at commentaries and manuscript traditions from late antiquity onwards shows us that this historian of the late republic was never out of fashion, and influenced our views of Roman history and imperialism perhaps more than any other. The stylistic comments of…
Alternate Empires: Tacitus's Virtual History of the Pisonian Principate
O'Gorman analyses the significance of a distinct but "virtual" dynasty, the Pisones, whose presence overarches and intertwines the narratives of Tacitus's Histories and Annals: (a) Germanicus's rival Piso in Annals 1, (b) the Piso who unsuccessfully challenged Nero in Annals 15, (c) Galba's short-lived successor, Piso, in Histories 1, (d) the son of the Neronian challenger, Calpurnius Galerianus, put to death by order of Mucianus (Histories 4.11)…
Citation and authority in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis
Seneca’s Menippean satire, often entitled Ludus de morte Claudii (“Funning with the death of Claudius”), offers a sort of interlude from the play of the Roman satirists and their critics. Indeed, many features of this branch of satire seem to preclude its being comfortably set alongside Horace, Persius, Juvenal, or even Petronius (which is not to imply that these four are at all comfortable set alongside each other ...). While all satirists (some…
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, plac…
Decadence and Historical Understanding in Flaubert's Salammbo
This article considers the issue of decadence and historical understanding through a reading of Flaubert's Salammb . To understand any period as "decadent" is to raise fundamental questions about the possibility and worth of historical understanding itself. Flaubert's novel, I argue, constitutes a radical attempt to free the decadent from a history of progress and to allow it to work not only on that history of progress but on the idea of history…
Irony and Misreading in the "Annals" of Tacitus
Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus
This 2000 book examines Tacitus' Annals as an ironic portrayal of Julio-Claudian Rome, through close analysis of passages in which characters engage in interpretation and misreading. By representing the misreading of signifying systems - such as speech, gesture, writing, social structures and natural phenomena - Tacitus obliquely comments upon the perversion of Rome's republican structure in the new principate. Furthermore, this study argues that…
Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy Ellen O'Gorman Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales. Salman Rushdie 1 Much of the writing on the intersection of the two characters, Ovid and Augustus, centres on the account of the events of a.d. 8 and on speculations as to the exact cause of these events. Taking the censorship of the Ars Amatoria as a starting point, I propose to exam…
R. Strocchio, I significati del silenzio nell'opera di Tacito (Memorie dell'Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, ser. v, vol. 16). Turin: Accademia delle Scienze, 1992. Pp. 48
An abstract 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
No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus
The Germania , as its full title de origine et situ Germanorum implies, is about Rome. This is clearest from passages couched almost entirely in negative terms, as in chapter 19— ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nullis spectaculorum illecebris, nullis conviviorum irritationibus corruptae. litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant...nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nee corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur. (19.1-3) Therefore they live within …
No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus
The Germania , as its full title de origine et situ Germanorum implies, is about Rome. This is clearest from passages couched almost entirely in negative terms, as in chapter 19— ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nullis spectaculorum illecebris, nullis conviviorum irritationibus corruptae. litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant...nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nee corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur. (19.1-3) Therefore they live within …
Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus
This 2000 book examines Tacitus' Annals as an ironic portrayal of Julio-Claudian Rome, through close analysis of passages in which characters engage in interpretation and misreading. By representing the misreading of signifying systems - such as speech, gesture, writing, social structures and natural phenomena - Tacitus obliquely comments upon the perversion of Rome's republican structure in the new principate. Furthermore, this study argues that…
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy Ellen O'Gorman Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales. Salman Rushdie 1 Much of the writing on the intersection of the two characters, Ovid and Augustus, centres on the account of the events of a.d. 8 and on speculations as to the exact cause of these events. Taking the censorship of the Ars Amatoria as a starting point, I propose to exam…
Alternate Empires: Tacitus's Virtual History of the Pisonian Principate
O'Gorman analyses the significance of a distinct but "virtual" dynasty, the Pisones, whose presence overarches and intertwines the narratives of Tacitus's Histories and Annals: (a) Germanicus's rival Piso in Annals 1, (b) the Piso who unsuccessfully challenged Nero in Annals 15, (c) Galba's short-lived successor, Piso, in Histories 1, (d) the son of the Neronian challenger, Calpurnius Galerianus, put to death by order of Mucianus (Histories 4.11)…
No Place Like Rome: Identity and Difference in the Germania of Tacitus
The Germania , as its full title de origine et situ Germanorum implies, is about Rome. This is clearest from passages couched almost entirely in negative terms, as in chapter 19— ergo saepta pudicitia agunt, nullis spectaculorum illecebris, nullis conviviorum irritationibus corruptae. litterarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant...nemo enim illic vitia ridet, nee corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur. (19.1-3) Therefore they live within …
R. Strocchio, I significati del silenzio nell'opera di Tacito (Memorie dell'Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, ser. v, vol. 16). Turin: Accademia delle Scienze, 1992. Pp. 48
An abstract 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
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy
Love and the Family: Augustus and the Ovidian Legacy Ellen O'Gorman Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales. Salman Rushdie 1 Much of the writing on the intersection of the two characters, Ovid and Augustus, centres on the account of the events of a.d. 8 and on speculations as to the exact cause of these events. Taking the censorship of the Ars Amatoria as a starting point, I propose to exam…
Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War
Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus
This 2000 book examines Tacitus' Annals as an ironic portrayal of Julio-Claudian Rome, through close analysis of passages in which characters engage in interpretation and misreading. By representing the misreading of signifying systems - such as speech, gesture, writing, social structures and natural phenomena - Tacitus obliquely comments upon the perversion of Rome's republican structure in the new principate. Furthermore, this study argues that…
Irony and Misreading in the "Annals" of Tacitus
Decadence and Historical Understanding in Flaubert's Salammbo
This article considers the issue of decadence and historical understanding through a reading of Flaubert's Salammb . To understand any period as "decadent" is to raise fundamental questions about the possibility and worth of historical understanding itself. Flaubert's novel, I argue, constitutes a radical attempt to free the decadent from a history of progress and to allow it to work not only on that history of progress but on the idea of history…
Citation and authority in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis
Seneca’s Menippean satire, often entitled Ludus de morte Claudii (“Funning with the death of Claudius”), offers a sort of interlude from the play of the Roman satirists and their critics. Indeed, many features of this branch of satire seem to preclude its being comfortably set alongside Horace, Persius, Juvenal, or even Petronius (which is not to imply that these four are at all comfortable set alongside each other ...). While all satirists (some…
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, plac…
Alternate Empires: Tacitus's Virtual History of the Pisonian Principate
O'Gorman analyses the significance of a distinct but "virtual" dynasty, the Pisones, whose presence overarches and intertwines the narratives of Tacitus's Histories and Annals: (a) Germanicus's rival Piso in Annals 1, (b) the Piso who unsuccessfully challenged Nero in Annals 15, (c) Galba's short-lived successor, Piso, in Histories 1, (d) the son of the Neronian challenger, Calpurnius Galerianus, put to death by order of Mucianus (Histories 4.11)…
The Politics of Sallustian Style
The existence of two monographs and only the fragments of his five-book history might suggest to us that Sallust's work only barely clung to survival from antiquity. On the contrary, a glance at commentaries and manuscript traditions from late antiquity onwards shows us that this historian of the late republic was never out of fashion, and influenced our views of Roman history and imperialism perhaps more than any other. The stylistic comments of…
Intertextuality and historiography
The Annals of Tacitus begin at the death of Augustus, whose funeral is narrated in chapters 8-10 of the first book. The ninth and tenth chapters, beginning “then there was much talk about Augustus himself,” record various interpretations of the emperor's life current at the time of his death; as has been “recognized” for nearly a century, these chapters contain precise and pointed allusions to Augustus' self-representation in the text entitled Re…
Imperial History and Biography at Rome
This chapter examines historical writing during the period between about 31 and 27 bc, when a succession of extraordinary settlements between the Roman senate and the future emperor Augustus created—in effect—a constitutional change from oligarchy to autocracy. It first considers both biographical and historical writings under the general heading of 'history', before turning to generic difference and its political significance. Three issues arise…
Repetition and exemplarity in historical thought: Ancient Rome and the ghosts of modernity
In this chapter I explore some of the various ways in which modernity configures repetition as an improper relation to the past. This exploration mediates the wider question of what modernity wants to do with the past, whether it is to break with it, to sublimate it, or to form a new kind of relation altogether. This leads us to consider the tropes of repetition and of exemplarity as the grounds for an engagement with the past. That is to say, mo…
Tacitus’ History of Politically Effective Speech: Truth to Power
This study examines how Tacitus’ representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to c…
Conspicuous Absence: Tacitus’ De Re Publica
Germania is read as a response to Caesar’s De Bello Gallico , and contrasted with Tacitus’ account of conquest in the Agricola . Focusing on the absence of historical narrative, discussion goes beyond the well-recognized denial of history to the Germanic Other to consider the implications of moments when Germania comes close to recounting history without doing so. Narrativity and the predominance of description are discussed, with a view to under…
Embedded Speech and the Embodied Speaker in Roman Historiography
This paper considers the presentation of speech performance in Roman historiography. It proposes the use of media theory to analyse the different medial elements of performed speech in Roman rhetorical culture. It identifies traces of performance in written speech and how similar traces are exploited in the historian’s composition of speeches and narrative frames to speech. These traces are analysed as instances of ‘intermediality’ which help to …
Hugh Last Fellowship: The Roman imperial sententia and the transmission of thought from antiquity to the Renaissance
An abstract 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
That golden sentence of Tacitus: Tacitean quotation as the medium of political knowledge in Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso
Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) provides us with a satirically inflected view of how Tacitean quotation was used throughout the sixteenth century as a medium of political knowledge. A detailed analysis of some Tacitean scenes in Ragguagli will help us to elicit some of the issues underlying the turn to Tacitus in the intellectual climate of the period: the search for truth in a new era of moral relativism; debates about the applicability…
Art (19 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (13 works) · History (13 works) · Literature (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Classics (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Ancient history (6 works)