![an inconvenient truth quizlet an inconvenient truth quizlet](https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Emperor-Nero.jpg)
How does this play teach us to approach the memory of Nero and the memory of the dynasty that gave rise to him?" she said.Īlthough "Octavia" was written nearly two millennia ago, Ginsberg's is the first book-length literary study of it.
![an inconvenient truth quizlet an inconvenient truth quizlet](https://blog.britishmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Bronze-head-of-Nero-.jpg)
![an inconvenient truth quizlet an inconvenient truth quizlet](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0d/23/a9/0d23a91a2bf3f70d95c48cf85a981661--roman-hairstyles-ancient-rome.jpg)
"I'm interested in how literature helps shape how people will be remembered, especially more controversial figures. The book, published by Oxford University Press, examines how the play uses the dramatization of the three-day period in which Nero divorces and exiles his popular wife Octavia - a move that launched riots among Romans loyal to their beloved empress - as a wider lens to expose the dark legacy of Rome's first imperial family. Reading the larger messages between the play's 982 lines has been a decade-long undertaking for Ginsberg, who reveals her findings in her new book, "Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia." "Octavia," the only surviving historical drama from ancient Rome, portrays the Julio-Claudian regime not as saviors of an imperiled state, but rather as autocrats prone to self-indulgence, Machiavellian backstabbing and tyrannical cruelty. suicide-death of Nero, the last of the line, another narrative emerged, one that challenged this rose-colored view of the infamous Roman emperor Nero and the Julio-Claudian dynastic legacy that produced him. The dynasty begins in 31 B.C., when Augustus seized absolute power in the wake of Julius Caesar's death, promising a new age in Roman history in which order and peace would be restored to an empire weary of decades of bloody civil war.Īnd so, as the story goes, over the next nearly 100 years, the Julio-Claudians - Augustus and his four successors - acted as divinely ordained bringers of peace who built massive monuments, extended Rome's borders and wealth and ushered in a golden age of Roman literature and arts.īut in the years after the 68 A.D. There are two histories of Rome's first imperial family, the Julio-Claudians, says Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. Image: University of Cincinnati classicist Lauren Donovan Ginsberg is the author of the new book 'Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia.' view moreĬredit: Andrew Higley/UC Creative Services