Ricerc@Sapienza

Recensione al volume di Caroline Bishop, Cicero, Greek Learning and the Making of a Classic, Oxford 2019

Desde hace muchos años, la formación de los jóvenes pasa también por el uso de los textos mediáticos. Los medios de comunicación o media, de hecho, promueven la creación de nuevas formas de acción e interacción en el mundo social, de nuevos tipos de vínculos y nuevas formas de relacionarse con los demás y consigo mismo. Efectivamente, los media, traspasando el límite de la presencia física, permiten otras formas de relación, gracias a las cuales las personas tienen acceso a una gran cantidad de materiales simbólicos mediados.

A compact textual unit of six elegiac poems opening the third book of the Corpus Tibullianum ([Tib.] 3.1-6), the Lygdamean cycle recounts the end of a love romance, the discidium of the young lover poet Lygdamus with his elegiac mistress, Neaera.

Cicero’s involvement in the political crisis of the Late Republic elicited divergent reactions from historians, declaimers and men of letters in the early imperial period. In particular, Cicero’s controversial role in the outbreak of the civil war of 49-45 BCE ignited a fierce debate over his political legacy and the role he played in the violent transition from the Republic to the imperial regime.

Introduction to the volume and the articles with a discussion of the concept of popular culture and the research perspective on the Ancient Near East

This book is an enthusiastic celebration of the ways in which popular culture has consumed aspects of the ancient Near East to construct new realities. The editors have brought together an impressive line-up of scholars-archaeologists, philologists, historians, and art historians-to reflect on how objects, ideas, and interpretations of the ancient Near East have been remembered, constructed, reimagined, mythologized, or indeed forgotten within our shared cultural memories.

In this essay I discuss two classic horror movies from the 1970s and 1980s, The Exorcist (1973) and The Evil Dead (1981). Both movies track the evil’s origin, or at least its historical evidence, to ancient Mesopotamia. In both movies, archaeology plays a crucial role, dealing with or evoking this ancient evil. In the main part of the article, I analyze the two movies focusing on ancient Near Eastern motives and the role played by archaeology. Then I discuss how the reference to ancient Mesopotamian demons builds an idea of remoteness and pre-/intra-religious existence of evil.