Altera Roma explores the confrontation of two cultures, European and Amerindian, and two empires, Spanish and Aztec. In an age of exploration and conquest, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and merchants brought an array of cultural preconceptions. Their encounter with Aztec civilization coincided with Europe's rediscovery of classical antiquity, and Tenochtitlan came to be regarded a "second Rome," or altera Roma. Iberia's past as the Roman province of Hispania served to both guide and critique the Spanish overseas mission. The dialogue that emerged between the Old World and the New World shaped a dual heritage into the unique culture of Nueva Espana. In this volume, ten eminent historians and archaeologists examine the analogies between empires widely separated in time and place and consider how monumental art and architecture created "theater states," a strategy that links ancient Rome, Hapsburg Spain, preconquest Mexico, and other imperial regimes.

As recent years have revealed, the concept of »translation« has grown increasingly important in a globalizing world and a multi-media society. Seeing translation as the negotiation of differences in identity construction does not only contribute to the understanding of contemporary cultural processes - it also makes it possible to find orientation and critical insights in a world of constantly changing social, political and media spaces. This collection of essays discusses the »translational turn«, proposing new theoretical approaches and providing new insights into the relation between narration and identity construction, between translation processes and the media.

This volume is based on the section “Transnationalities – Transidentities – Hybridities – Diasporization”, organized by the Ibero-American and Francophone Research Centres of the University of Leipzig as part of the First Annual Conference of the Centre for Area Studies at the University of Leipzig. By now, already a decade has passed since our conference section took place and it is due to various circumstances that this volume has not been published earlier. It carries along, in some sense, its own migration trace. Nevertheless, the questions examined in the contributions have reached even more relevance since then in both, the Old World and the New, due to the various political, social, economic and ecological crisis around the globe that have led to the increased arrival of refugees to Europe and the harsh discussion about a concrete or “intelligent” wall to shield the USA from Latin American migrants, among others. Today, there is an urgent political and social need for concepts of living together in much more heterogeneous and much less familiar societies. The questions, notions and cases explored in the nine contributions that comprise this publication focus on this emergency. Participants on the volume: A. Chanady; A. de Toro; W. Ch. Dimock; D. Ingenschay; J. Mecke; M. Rössner; G. Pisarz-Ramirez; C. Sieber. ALFONSO DE TORO is Professor emeritus for Spanish, Portuguese, Ibero-American and Francophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leipzig. He is the founder and director of the Ibero-American and Francophone Research Centers (IAFS and FFSL). His research and publications are focused on theatre, narrative, and poetry in France, the Maghreb, Spain, Latin America, and Italy; as well as on culture, post-modern, post-colonial theories and hybridity and diaspora theories. CORNELIA SIEBER is Professor for Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Culture at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – Germersheim. She is director of the Centre for Latin American and Transatlantic Studies (CELTRA) and Co-Director of the IAFS. Her research and publications are focused on transcultural and migratory dynamics, gender structures and post-coloniality. ******** This volume is based on the section “Transnationalities – Transidentities – Hybridities – Diasporization”, organized by the Ibero-American and Francophone Research Centres of the University of Leipzig as part of the First Annual Conference of the Centre for Area Studies at the University of Leipzig. By now, already a decade has passed since our conference section took place and it is due to various circumstances that this volume has not been published earlier. It carries along, in some sense, its own migration trace. Nevertheless, the questions examined in the contributions have reached even more relevance since then in both, the Old World and the New, due to the various political, social, economic and ecological crisis around the globe that have led to the increased arrival of refugees to Europe and the harsh discussion about a concrete or “intelligent” wall to shield the USA from Latin American migrants, among others. Today, there is an urgent political and social need for concepts of living together in much more heterogeneous and much less familiar societies. The questions, notions and cases explored in the nine contributions that comprise this publication focus on this emergency. Participants on the volume: A. Chanady; A. de Toro; W. Ch. Dimock; D. Ingenschay; J. Mecke; M. Rössner; G. Pisarz-Ramirez; C. Sieber. ALFONSO DE TORO is Professor emeritus for Spanish, Portuguese, Ibero-American and Francophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Leipzig. He is the founder and director of the Ibero-American and Francophone Research Centers (IAFS and FFSL). His research and publications are focused on theatre, narrative, and poetry in France, the Maghreb, Spain, Latin America, and Italy; as well as on culture, post-modern, post-colonial theories and hybridity and diaspora theories. CORNELIA SIEBER is Professor for Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Culture at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – Germersheim. She is director of the Centre for Latin American and Transatlantic Studies (CELTRA) and Co-Director of the IAFS. Her research and publications are focused on transcultural and migratory dynamics, gender structures and post-coloniality.

Some critics of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) have dismissed his work as a compendium of stale narratives and conventional attitudes. Gary B. Miles reveals in Livy's history a creative interplay between traditional stories, contemporary ideological assumptions, and the historian's own perspective at the margins of Roman aristocracy. Drawing on a range of critical approaches, Miles considers Livy's stance as a historian, the ways in which he reworked his sources, and his interpretation of such historical phenomena as recurrence, continuity, and change. Miles focuses on the foundation stories with which Livy begins his account, detecting in Livy's rendition certain original conceptions of historical time including the suggestion that Roman identity and greatness might be preserved indefinitely through successive reenactments of a historical cycle. Miles pays particular attention to two stories—those of the abduction of the Sabine women and of Romulus and Remus, showing how Livy's versions of these traditional narratives—far from leading to a simplistic moral—address unresolved political issues of his day. According to Miles, Livy shows an unusually tenacious willingness to confront dilemmas in historiography and Roman ideology which were commonly ignored or suppressed by both his predecessors and his contemporaries.

The modern age is not the only one in which Romans and visitors to Rome have been fascinated with the city's striking juxtapositions of past and present. Rome's wealth of history also captured the imagination of the ancients. Livy's Written Rome, by Mary Jaeger, shows how one writer explored the relationship between events in Roman history, the landscape in which they occurred, and the monuments that commemorated them. While Augustus reconstructed the physical city to reflect the ideology of the Empire, the historian Livy created a written Rome and taught his readers to look beyond the city's dramatically altered landscape. In so doing, they gained insight into the lessons of the lost Republic. Drawing upon modern discourse on the connection between private mental spaces and public civic spaces, this first in-depth study of Livy's use of the urban landscape offers discerning views on his interpretation of ancient theories of historiography. Livy's Written Rome discusses the Roman idea of the monument as a place where memory and space intersect and includes fresh readings of several historical episodes, including the battle over the Sabine Women, the sedition of Marcus Manlius, and the trials of the Scipios. Scholars have long criticized Livy as a historian because his work is not in accord with modern historiographical standards. Yet even his critics agree that Livy is a masterful literary artist, and recent work on Livy has argued for the complexity and originality of his thought. Across the humanities, recent scholarship has focused on the role of memory in civic consciousness and identity. This book explores the ways in which Livy's texts question traditional assumptions about the preservation and use of the past. In doing so, it identifies a new and important facet of Livy's representation of urban Rome. Livy's Written Rome will be of interest to classicists and historians, students of ancient historiography and classical rhetoric, as well as general readers interested in memory, monuments, and historical narrative. Mary Jaeger is Professor of Classics, University of Oregon.