Browsing by Subject "Rome"

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    Unnatural Narrative and Temporal Distortion in Vergil's Aeneid
    (2023-08) Baker, Samuel
    The Aeneid is a work steeped in the traditions of classical epic following Homerand has been long interpreted as a successor to his poems. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, it tells a story from the epic past, but with one key difference: Vergil tells a myth of Rome’s own origins. My research explores how the Aeneid combines distinct time periods into a single narrative, transgressing conventional narrative approaches. I draw on the theory of unnatural narratology to explain how impossible or illogical events are understood in the Aeneid. Even though the hero Aeneas is a pre-Roman foundational figure, he encounters Roman influence in multiple impossible episodes throughout the epic. He meets Roman heroes in the underworld, visits the city of Rome, and views a picture of Rome’s history. All of these events should not be contemporaneous with Aeneas, but their coexistence signifies that the rules of narrative have changed. The poem folds the past and future together in unprecedented ways, disrupting the boundaries of what narrative usually does. Given the cultural context and strict genre-based rules of classical epic, these effects produce an “unnatural” narrative deviating from real-world conventions of time, space, and logic. I argue that the unnatural qualities of the narrative influence how the poem should be interpreted, particularly as a normative vision of the Roman past from the first century BCE.
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    We are not the periphery: barbarian economies and Northern Europe in the exchange patterns of Western Eurasia, 1800 BC - AD 900
    (2013-12) Lelis, Arnold A.
    Examination of long-term exchange patterns involving northern Europe and neighboring regions of western Eurasia reveals that the world of the North has, typically, played an important role both as producer and consumer. Especially in the Carolingian period (AD 700 - 900), the system as a whole can be characterized best as a vast circuit of exchange flows rather than in terms of center - periphery relationships. The major regions participating in the western Eurasian exchange circuit were the North (Scandinavia - Baltic), Latin Christendom, European Russia, Byzantium, and the Islamic world of the Middle East and North Africa. Exchange within the circuit always operated at multiple levels, including elite and non-elite gift giving and resource sharing, but also including independent, professional merchant-adventurers who redistributed goods and materials for profit. This class of entrepreneurs can be analyzed further into long-distance wholesale traders, who linked the top-level nodal places in the system, and others who linked the nodal places with points in the local area down to the capillary level of individual producers and consumers. Typically, members of the mercantile class traveled armed and formed ad hoc aggregations for mutual protection. In the Carolingian Empire, their activities were governed by rules and administrative practices derived, ultimately, from the Late Roman. Commercial exchange can and does operate successfully even in pre-state and non-urbanized societies, i.e., without elite direction or coercion. The evidence shows that pre-commercial societies will incorporate commercial modes of behavior into their socio-economic value systems when opportunity to do so arises. Even "peasants" will behave entrepreneurially, feeding into the larger exchange system both as producers and consumers.