Dr. Josiah Osgood
Associate Professor
Office: 320 Healy Hall
ph: 202.687.7102
email: jo39@georgetown.edu
Fall 2009 Office Hours: Tuesday 1:00-2:30pm and by appointment
Download Prof. Osgood's full cv here.
Education:
B.A., Yale University
M.A., Yale University
Ph.D., Yale University
Teaching & Research Areas:
Roman history, especially of the late Republic and early Empire
Latin literatureAbout Professor Osgood:
I teach courses in both Roman history and literature in the belief that knowledge of one depends on awareness of the other. Historians often have to rely on literature as evidence-and they therefore require sound knowledge of Greek and Latin - while the literature of the Greeks and Romans should be appreciated as a way that these creative peoples came to terms with and penetrated their own cultures. Ancient authors, though, remained blind to large segments of the diverse array of men and women who lived in the Roman world, so I also work with papyri and inscriptions, along with other archeological evidence, to gain further perspectives. My goal is to evoke the experiences of those who lived through Roman history, and to assess the contributions made by individual actors, from emperors to inhabitants of small villages. Ancient history, whether it focuses on controversial political questions or a farmer's struggle for survival, shows the most remarkable capabilities, as well as the shortcomings, of humanity.
Recent Courses:
CLSG 101: Intermediate Ancient Greek
CLSL 210: Roman Drama
CLSL 245: Tacitus on Germany
CLSS 142: Roman History: Empire
CSSS 241: The Age of Augustus
CLSS 340: The Ancient Economy
Current Research:
My new book, Claudius Casear: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire, should be out next year with the Cambridge University Press. Here is a blurb:
The story of Claudius has been often told before. Ancient writers saw the emperor as the dupe of his wives and palace insiders. Robert Graves tried to rehabilitate him as a far shrewder, if still frustrated, politician. Yet a more historical viewpoint can show that many of Claudius' problems stemmed not from personal failings, but were inherent to the form of government created by Rome's first emperor Augustus.
In this new study Josiah Osgood shifts the focus off the peronsality of Claudius and onto what his tumultuous years in power reveal about the developing political culture of the early Roman Empire. What precedents set by Augustus were followed? What had to be abandoned? How could a new emperor win the support of key elements of Roman society? Emperors, Osgood shows, held onto power almost as much by the development of visual images and rituals as their manpower and money.
The discussion is richly illustrated, and draws on a range of newly discovered documents. And the narrative of events moves far beyond the city of Rome and Italy, to Egypt and Judea, Morocco and Britain. Claudius Caesar opens up a new perspective not just on Claudius himself, but all Roman emperors, the Roman empire and the nature of empires more generally.
I am also shortly to submit to Bolchazy-Carducci an intermediate/advanced Latin textbook, A Suetonius Reader, with selections from all twelve of Suetonius' imperial biographies, as well as the Life of Horace, and am also editing with Susanna Braud The Blackwell Companion to Persius and Juvenal. Other work includes a short study, The Last Days of Caesar as well as a thematic textbook on the fall of the Roman Republic.
Recent Publications:
My first book, Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2006) seeks to add new perspectives on a familiar era - Rome's transition from Republican to monarchical government under the emperor Augustus - through close analysis of a variety of evidence. By using an extraordinary body of contemporary literature, as well as archeological material, along with ancient historical texts written long after the events in question, I suggest that the struggles of the period formed the sort of 'total war' that leads to social change separate from the political circumstances that precipitated it.
Other recently published work includes an article on the nature of Julius Caesar's 'relationship' with King Nicomedes of Bithynia (in Classical Quarterly) and an article 'The Pen and the Sword: Writing and Conquest in Caesar's Gaul' (in Classical Anitquity). Forthcoming work includes a chapter on how the family functioned as a socializing force in Roman society (for The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World), an essay on Paulinus of Pella for an edited collection, an article for Greece and Rome entitled "Caesar and the Pirates; or How to Make (and Break) an Ancient Life", and entries for Oxford's Encyclopedia of Greece and Rome and Wiley-Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Ancient History.
