Homer in Stone

The Tabulae Iliacae in their Roman Context

David Petrain

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107029811
• eBook ISBN: 9781107776975
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The Tabulae Iliacae are a group of carved stone plaques created in the context of early Imperial Rome that use miniature images and text to retell stories from Greek myth and history - chief among them Homer's Iliad and the fall of Troy. In this book, Professor Petrain moves beyond the narrow focus on the literary and iconographic sources of the Tabulae that has characterized earlier scholarship. Drawing on ancient and modern theories of narrative, he explores instead how the tablets transfer the Troy saga across both medium and culture as they create a system of visual storytelling that relies on the values and viewing habits of Roman viewers. The book comprehensively situates the tablets in the urban fabric of Augustan Rome. New photographs of the tablets, together with re-editions and translations of key inscriptions, offer a new, clearer view of these remarkable documents of the Roman appropriation of Greek epic.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Color plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Reading visual narrative in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds
• 2 Tabula and taxis
• 3 The semantics of the center
• 4 Narrative in frieze and panel
• 5 Findspots, display contexts, and the Roman public library
• 6 Epic in miniature
• Appendix 1 Conspectus of the Tabulae Iliacae
• Appendix 2 Description of selected Tabulae: Texts and images
• Figures
• Works cited
• Index