William Fitzgerald

King's College London | KCL · Department of Classics

ROMAN LAUGHTER - Beard ( M.)Laughter in Ancient Rome. On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up. (Sather Classical Lectures 71.) Pp. x + 319, pls. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2014. Cased, £19.95, US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-520-27716-8. - Volume 65 Issue 2 - William Fitzgerald

The purpose of this paper is to describe some aspects of the agenda of listening in the Western tradition. Ancient and modern versions of some of the myths of listening (Orpheus, the Sirens) are compared to illustrate what might be at stake in the activity of listening. A basic contrast is drawn between ancient rhetorical ideas of the power of musi...

PutnamM. C. J., Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 171. ISBN 0-6911-2537-6. £26.95. - Volume 97 Issue 1 - William Fitzgerald

This chapter examines Pliny's Letter found in Book 7, with particular reference to its status and some of the ways in which the letter was seen as the thing itself, as well as a symbol for the relation between the first and last letters of the book. The question of the status of Pliny's Letters in his project of self-immortalization is not unrelate...

In this age of the sound bite, what sort of author could be more relevant than a master of the epigram? Martial, the most influential epigrammatist of classical antiquity, was just such a virtuoso of the form, but despite his pertinence to today’s culture, his work has been largely neglected in contemporary scholarship. Arguing that Martial is a...

ScherfJ.: Untersuchungen zur Buchgestaltung Martials. Pp. 136. Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2001. Cased. ISBN: 3-598-77691-8. - Volume 53 Issue 1 - William Fitzgerald

Arethusa 29.3 (1996) 389-418 For most sections of the Roman population we possess no written account of their lives and experience as they themselves saw it: there are no slave narratives, no diaries, and no laborer poets from ancient Rome. At the most we have inscriptions left by those commemorating the dead which tell us something about how the l...

Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relat...

Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore,...