Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Feb 22, 2007 - Art - 285 pages
The relationships between Roman emperors and their objects of desire, male and female, are well attested. The salacious nature of this evidence means that it is often omitted from mainstream historical inquiry. Yet that is to underestimate the importance of 'gossip' and the act of thinking about an emperor's private life. In this book Dr Vout takes the reader from Rome, and Martial's and Statius' poems about Domitian's favourite eunuch, to Antioch and dialogues in praise of Lucius Verus' mistress, to the widespread visual commemoration and cult of Hadrian's young male lover, Antinous. She explores not the relationships themselves but rather the implications of their description. Such description provides a template with which to examine the relationship between emperor and subject, gods and mortals, East and West, centre and periphery. It thus contributes to the fields of imperial representation, court society and the imperial cult.
 

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Contents

Section 1
27
Section 2
31
Section 3
33
Section 4
38
Section 5
52
Section 6
58
Section 7
64
Section 8
69
Section 14
82
Section 15
83
Section 16
90
Section 17
97
Section 18
98
Section 19
101
Section 20
113
Section 21
167

Section 9
73
Section 10
77
Section 11
79
Section 12
80
Section 13
81
Section 22
175
Section 23
200
Section 24
217
Section 25
218
Section 26
226

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Epigrammi
Strato,Lucia Floridi
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About the author (2007)

CAROLINE VOUT is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Nottingham. She studied at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and has been a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome. She has published widely on aspects of Roman imperial culture and curated the exhibition Antinous: Face of the Classical Antique at the Henry Moore Institute in summer 2006.

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