Commenting on the Past

Essays in Honor of Christina Shuttleworth Kraus

Jane D. Chaplin, Irene Peirano Garrison, Christopher Stray

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9783110777970
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: History

This Festschrift celebrates the career of Christina S. Kraus. For nearly four decades, Professor Kraus has been an influential voice, contributing to and sometimes defining numerous sub-fields in the study of classical literature, from commentaries to prose style and from Greek tragedy to Roman historians. She has collaborated with scholars to produce volumes on the commentary as a genre of scholarship and the idea of the canon. She is perhaps best known for her work on Livy and Roman historiography.

In seeking to honor this extensive and varied body of work, the editors invited contributions from scholars reflecting Professor Kraus's range. The resulting volume is divided into four sections: Roman historians (papers on Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus), prose style (Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Polybius, and Seneca), intertextuality (Sallust, Virgil, Livy, Tacitus, Augustine), and commentaries and reception (Tacitism, G. E. Gierig, commentaries on Vitruvius, and George Bernard Shaw).

In addition to their thematic unity, the papers are brought together both by cross-references and by the editors' introduction, which highlights the interconnections among the individual contributions. The introduction also provides summarizes of the essays.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Dedication
• Contents
• Christina S. Kraus: Publications to Date
• Polybius and Livy’s Sentence Structure
• Narrative Inconsistencies and Ethical Constructions in Livy Book 31
• “I Want to Be Great Too – but How?” Alexander, Augustus, and Livy
• There and Back Again: Structure and Crossing in Livy’s Third Decade
• Livy on the Tiber Island: Writing Rome a Solo
• Recapturing the Capitol: Yet More Livian Refoundations
• Caesar’s Shrinking Lexicon
• On Endings and Beginnings in Caesar’s Bellum civile
• Cicero’s Caesarian Histories
• Tacfarinine Disorder: Sallustian and Livian Color at Tacitus, Annals 3.20–1
• Shadows of History: Sallustian Perspectives on Book 2 of Augustine’s Confessions
• Camilla and the Guys
• How Is Maecenas Like a Syllogism? Seneca on Style in the Moral Epistles
• The divergent epistolary cultures of greece and rome 400 BCE–400 CE
• The clades variana: literary commemoration of a roman military disaster
• Tacitus for courtiers
• Sex and empire: caesar and henry higgins
• The silence of the frogs: an experiment with paratragedy
• General Index