While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination

Description

While Rome Burned attends to the intersection of fire, city, and emperor in ancient Rome, tracing the critical role that urban conflagration played as both reality and metaphor in the politics and literature of the early imperial period. Urban fires presented a consistent problem for emperors from Augustus to Hadrian, especially given the expectation that the princeps be both a protector and provider for Rome’s population. The problem manifested itself differently for each leader, and each sought to address it in distinctive ways. This history can be traced most precisely in Roman literature, as authors addressed successive moments of political crisis through dialectical engagement with prior incendiary catastrophes in Rome’s historical past and cultural repertoire. Working in the increasingly repressive environment of the early principate, Roman authors frequently employed “figured” speech and mythopoetic narratives to address politically risky topics. In response to shifting political and social realities, the literature of the early imperial period reimagines and reanimates not just historical fires, but also archetypal and mythic representations of conflagration. Throughout, the author engages critically with the growing subfield of disaster studies, as well as with theoretical approaches to language, allusion, and cultural memory. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: The Vigilant Princeps: Augustan Responses to Fire at Rome Chapter 2: Destruction and Dynasty: Imperial Cremations, Apocalyptic Anxieties, and Book-Burning in the Early First Century CE Chapter 3: Sequitur Clades: The Neronian Trajectory into Catastrophe Chapter 4: From the Ashes: Post-Neronian Rome and Literary Memory Chapter 5: A Rome Restored? Myth, Memory, and Cycles of Destruction in Trajanic and Hadrianic Rome Conclusion: Leaders, Conflagration, and Destruction in the Eternal City and Beyond Notes Bibliography Index Locorum General Index While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination