Divine Qualities: Cult and Community in Republican Rome
This book explores an aspect of how Romans thought about themselves. Its subject is 'divine qualities': qualities like Concord, Faith, Hope, Clemency, Fortune, Freedom, Piety, and Victory, which received public cult in Rome in the Republican period. Anna Clark draws on a wide range of evidence (literature, drama, coins, architecture, inscriptions and graffiti) to show that these qualities were not simply given cult because they were intrinsically important to 'Romans'.
Take a look at your hands. See them as wondrous vehicles of power. Feel the energy that flows through everything you do. Tap into that power! Carve a symbol, dip a candle, mix fragrant herbs, sculpt clay, and make your life all that you want it to be. When crafts are used to create objects intended for ritual or to symbolize the divine, the connection between the craftsperson and divinity grows more intense.
Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
For Plato, the daemonic is a sensibility that brings individuals into contact with divine knowledge; Socrates was also inspired by a "divine voice" known as his "daimonion." Goethe was introduced to this ancient concept by Hamann and Herder, who associated it with the aesthetic category of genius. This book shows how the young Goethe depicted the idea of daemonic genius in works of the Storm and Stress period, before exploring the daemonic in a series of later poetic and autobiographical works.
Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon.
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy has, despite its enormous popularity and importance, often stymied readers with its multitudinous characters, references, and themes. But until the publication in 2007 of Guy Raffa’s guide to the Inferno, students lacked a suitable resource to help them navigate Dante’s underworld. With this new guide to the entire Divine Comedy, Raffa provides readers—experts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Dante neophytes, and everyone in between—with a map of the entire poem, from the...
