The Augustan Renaissance in Rome E-Book

Jesse Benedict Carter

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Jesse Benedict Carter, born in New York in 1872, was a prominent American classicist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a man of broad humanistic range, who had a gift for understanding and explaining the unity of arts and letters. His principal scholarly interest was topography and Roman religion, beginning with his Halle dissertation under Carl Robert (“De Deorum Romanorum cognominibus quaestiones selectae”, printed in Leipzig in 1898).
The essay The Augustan Renaissance in Rome, which we bring today to the attention of modern readers, is taken from Jesse Benedict Carter’s basic book The Religion of Numa And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome, published in New York in 1906. It is a fundamental study for understanding the spirit and religious sentiment of the period between the end of the republican age and the advent of imperial Rome, and, in particular, to understand the causes that led to the Augustan religious reinassance.

Leseprobe

Τεληστήριον

JESSE BENEDICT CARTER

THE AUGUSTAN RENAISSANCE IN ROME

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Augustan Renaissance in Rome

Author: Jesse Benedict Carter

Series: Telestèrion

Editing by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN: 979-12-5504-307-2

Cover Image: Marble relief of the Ara Pacis Augustae

(Rome, Ara Pacis Museum)

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2023 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

[email protected]

INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

Jesse Benedict Carter, born in New York on June 16 1872, was a prominent American classicist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a man of broad humanistic range, who had a gift for understanding and explaining the unity of arts and letters.

Son of Peter and Marie Louise Carter, he was educated at New York University (1889-1890), at Princeton University (A.B. 1893), and at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Ph.D. 1898), where studied with Georg Wissowa and Carl Robert.

Carter was Professor of Latin at Princeton University from 1902. In 1904 he moved to Rome to join the faculty of the American School of Classical Studies, becoming director in 1907. When the American School of Classical Studies merged with the American Academy in Rome in 1911, Carter continued on as a faculty member and became the AAR director in 1912, following the death of Francis Davis Millet aboard the Titanic.

His principal scholarly interest was topography and Roman religion, beginning with his Halle dissertation under Carl Robert (“De Deorum Romanorum cognominibus quaestiones selectae”, printed in Leipzig in 1898). He became Robert’s assistant, unusual though it was for an American to be made assistant to a German professor. His interest in religion continued through his collaboration on Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie and his chief books.

He collaborated with Christian Hülsen on topographical studies of the Forum Romanum and produced his own work on the scholarship of Roman religion (The Religion of Numa: And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome, Macmillan and Co, New York 1906, and The religious life of ancient Rome: a study in the development of religious consciousness, from the foundation of the city until the death of Gregory the Great, Houghton Mifflin, New York 1911).

Carter gave the Lowell lectures in Boston and lectured on “The Growth of Humanism in the United States” at the Sorbonne in 1916.

Carter’s life and career were cut short when he died of heatstroke while on an Italian aid mission during World War I, in Cervignano del Friuli on July 20 1917.

For his aid in Italian relief projects during World War I Carter was awarded the Order of the Crown of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.

The essay The Augustan Renaissance in Rome, which we bring today to the attention of modern readers, is taken from Jesse Benedict Carter's basic book The Religion of Numa And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome, published in New York in 1906. It is a fundamental study for understanding the spirit and religious sentiment of the period between the end of the republican age and the advent of imperial Rome, and, in particular, to understand the causes that led to the Augustan religious reinassance.

«A great part of Augustus’s success - writes Carter - was unquestionably due to a certain form of moral courage. For all his diplomacy and his desire to feel the pulse of the people he was never lacking in the courage of his own convictions. This can be seen nowhere better than in his attitude toward his adoptive father Julius Caesar. From the very beginning when he took upon himself, even at the cost of temporary impoverishment, the payment of Caesar’s legacy, he was supremely true to the man whose successor he was, and this faithfulness is especially apparent in the field of religion. (…) One who understands the political reforms of Augustus will have no difficulty in understanding his reorganisation of religion, for they were both undertaken with the same general underlying principles and along similar lines. (…) There can be no question but that he was successful in obtaining the immediate object which he was seeking after. A formal religious life was unquestionably brought into being, and such strength as that life had was exerted in behalf of the empire».

Nicola Bizzi,

Florence, June 2, 2023.