04 Oct The Style is the Empire: Caesar’s Writing Reevaluated
Christopher B. Krebs (Classics, Stanford)
Friday, October 4 / 3:00 PM
HSSB 4080
Caesar’s style has been admired for its stringency and simplicity–and to the detriment of a fuller appreciation of its complexities. His classic texts are worth a second glance. They reveal not only far greater debts to the administrative language of the Roman Empire than previously assumed (hence the title) but also a good number of extremely rare words, including hapax legomena, which may allow for a look into the smithery of the Latin Language of the 1st century BCE. Was Caesar himself a wordsmith?
Krebs is Associate Professor of Classics at Stanford University and author of A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich(2011) as well as numerous articles.
Sponsored by the Dept. of Classics, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of Linguistics, and the IHC.