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Roman Social Imaginaries
Language and Thought in the Context of Empire
Clifford Ando (Author)
9781442650176
Hardback, published 20 April 2015
136 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.6 cm, 0.36 kg
‘This is a fascinating book – perceptive, effective, and reasoned… This is not only a singularly important contribution, but also a most welcome one.’
In an expansion of his 2012 Robson Classical Lectures, Clifford Ando examines the connection between the nature of the Latin language and Roman thinking about law, society, and empire. Drawing on innovative work in cognitive linguistics and anthropology, Roman Social Imaginaries considers how metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation helped create the structures of thought that shaped the Roman Empire as a political construct. Beginning in early Roman history, Ando shows how the expansion of the empire into new territories led the Romans to develop and exploit Latin’s extraordinary capacity for abstraction. In this way, laws and institutions invented for use in a single Mediterranean city-state could be deployed across a remarkably heterogeneous empire. Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today’s most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.
Introduction: Roman Social Imaginaries Chapter 1: Belonging Chapter 2: Cognition Chapter 3: The Ontology of the Social Conclusion: Making Romans