How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.

Volume 2 of the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic presents seven articles. Contributors explore the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Empedocles, investigate the nature of formulaic language, reveal Greek tragedy's connections with epic, and study the characters of Ganymede and Hekamede. This diverse collection will be of interest to all students and scholars of ancient Greek epic. Contributors are: Joel P. Christensen, Xavier Gheerbrant, Ahuvia Kahane, Lynn Kozak, Bruce Louden, Sheila Murnaghan, Polyxeni Strolonga.

Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time - from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative - are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.

This edited volume, arising from the 2019 conference "Orality and Literacy: Repetition," explores some of the many forms and uses of repetition, in poetry, philosophy, and inscriptions, from Homeric epic through the Latin novel and the Gospels to reception in the twentieth century. All human communication depends on repeating signs that are comprehensible to the speaker and the addressee. Yet "repetition" takes many specific forms, in different performance contexts, time periods, and literary genres. Repetition may operate within one utterance, or across several times, places, and artists. The relationship between two repeated utterances cannot always be determined with certainty. But repetition offers exciting ways to understand the communicative process in oral and literate contexts across the ancient world.

Classical Greek Tragedy offers a comprehensive survey of the development of classical Greek tragedy combined with close readings of exemplary texts. Reconstructing how audiences in fifth-century BCE Athens created meaning from the performance of tragedy at the dramatic festivals sponsored by the city-state and its wealthiest citizens, it considers the context of Athenian political and legal structures, gender ideology, religious beliefs, and other social forces that contributed to spectators' reception of the drama. In doing so it focuses on the relationship between performers and watchers, not only Athenian male citizens, but also women and audiences throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. This book traces the historical development of these dynamics through three representative tragedies that span a 50 year period: Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Helen. Topics include the role of the chorus; the tragic hero; recurring mythical characters and subject matter; Aristotelian assessments of the components of tragedy; developments in the architecture of the theater and their impact on the interactions of characters, and the spaces they occupy. Unifying these discussions is the observation that the genre articulates a reality beyond the visible stage action that intersects with the characters' existence in the present moment and resonates with the audience's religious beliefs and collective psychology. Human voices within the performance space articulate powerful forces from an invisible dimension that are activated by oaths, hymns, curses and prayers, and respond in the form of oracles and prophecies, forms of discourse which were profoundly meaningful to those who watched the original productions of tragedy.

This new introduction to Euripides' fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy - students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep their stories alive. A series of concise and engaging chapters explore the functions of the characters and chorus, and how their roles change over the course of the play; the language and imagery that affects the audience's response to the events on stage; the themes at work in the tragedy, and how Euripides forges them into a coherent theatrical experience; the later reception of the play, and how an array of writers, directors and filmmakers have interpreted the original. Euripides' Electra has much to say to us in our contemporary world. This thorough, richly informed introduction challenges our understanding of what Greek tragedy was and what it can offer modern theatre, perhaps its most valuable legacy.

Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious, and literary contexts. Drawing on the recent Representational Turn in the study of imperial power, these essays examine how literary authors working in various genres, both Latin and Greek, and of differing religious affiliations construct and manipulate the depiction of a series of emperors from the late third to the late fourth centuries CE. In a move away from traditional source criticism, this volume opens up new methodological approaches to chart intellectual and literary history during a critical century for the ancient Mediterranean world.

Comedy created a joyful mode of perceiving rhetoric, grammar, and literary criticism through the somatic senses of the author, the characters, the actors and the spectators. This was due to generic peculiarities including the omnivore mirroring of contemporary (scholarly) ideas, the materiality of costumes and masks, and the embodiment of abstract notions on stage, in short due to the correspondence between body, language and environment. The materiality of words, letters and syllables in ancient grammar and stylistic criticism is related to the embodied criticism found in Greek comedy. How are scholarly discourses embodied? The act of writing is vividly enacted on stage through carving with effort the shape of the letter 'rho' and commenting emotionally on it. The letters of the alphabet are danced by the chorus, the cognitive and communicative power of gestures and body expression providing emotional context. A barking pickle brine from Thasos is perhaps an olfactory somatosensory visual and auditory embodiment of Archilochean poetry, whilst the actor's foot in dance is a visual and motor embodiment of a metrical foot on stage. Comedy with its actors, costumes, masks, and props is overflowing with such examples. In this book, the author suggests that comedy made a significant contribution to the establishment of scholarly discourses in Classical Greece.

This book focuses on one of the basic - yet still rather neglected in Latin linguistics- grammatical categories: comparison of adjectives and adverbs. Which Latin adjectives and adverbs allow for comparative and superlative forms, and which ones do not? This question may seem trivial to those working with modern languages but is not at all trivial in the case of a dead language such as Latin that has no native speakers and a limited corpus of written texts. Based on extensive data collection, the book aims to provide today's readers of Latin with some objective criteria for determining the answer.

Hercules is the best-known character from classical mythology. Seneca's play Hercules Furens presents the hero at a moment of triumph turned to tragedy. Hercules returns from his final labor, his journey to the Underworld, and then slaughters his family in an episode of madness. This play exerted great influence on Shakespeare and other Renaissance tragedians, and also inspired contemporary adaptations in film, TV, and comics. Aimed at undergraduates and non-specialists, this companion introduces the play's action, historical context and literary tradition, critical reception, adaptation, and performance tradition.

This volume highlights the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean by combining in a comprehensive overview popular eastern tales along with their Greek adaptations and examining Byzantine love tales, both learned and vernacular, alongside their Persian counterparts and the later adaptations of Western romances.

Brill's Companion to Classics in the Early Americas illuminates the remarkable range of Greco-Roman classical receptions across the western hemisphere from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Bringing together fifteen essays by scholars working at the intersection of Classics and all aspects of Americanist studies, this unique collection examines how Hispanophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone, and/or Indigenous individuals engaged with Greco-Roman literary cultures and materials. By coming at the matter from a multilingual transhemispheric perspective, it disrupts prevailing accounts of classical reception in the Americas which have typically privileged North over South, Anglophone over non-Anglophone, and the cultural production of hegemonic groups over that of more marginalized others. Instead it offers a fresh account of how Greco-Roman literatures and ideas were in play from Canada to the Southern Cone to the Caribbean, treating classical reception in the early Americas as a dynamic, polyvocal phenomenon which is truly transhemispheric in reach.

The poetry of Horace was central to Victorian male elite education and the ancient poet himself, suitably refashioned, became a model for the English gentleman. Horace and the Victorians examines the English reception of Horace in Victorian culture, a period which saw the foundations of the discipline of modern classical scholarship in England and of many associated and lasting social values. It shows that the scholarly study, translation and literary imitation of Horace in this period were crucial elements in reinforcing the social prestige of Classics as a discipline and its function as an indicator of 'gentlemanly' status through its domination of the elite educational system and its prominence in literary production. The book ends with an epilogue suggesting that the framework of study and reception of a classical author such as Horace, so firmly established in the Victorian era, has been modernised and 'democratised' in recent years, matching the movement of Classics from a discipline which reinforces traditional and conservative social values to one which can be seen as both marginal and liberal.

Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect, providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as material "affect," an intense flow of energies between bodies, animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the physicality of Greek tragedy.

The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most important, central and popular scriptures of Hinduism. A medieval Sanskrit text, its influence as a religious book has been comparable only to that of the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Ithamar Theodor here offers the first analysis for twenty years of the Bhagavata Purana (often called the Fifth Veda ) and its different layers of meaning. He addresses its lyrical meditations on the activities of Krishna (avatar of Lord Vishnu), the central place it affords to the doctrine of bhakti (religious devotion) and its treatment of older Vedic traditions of knowledge. At the same time he places this subtle, poetical book within the context of the wider Hindu scriptures and the other Puranas, including the similar but less grand and significant Vishnu Purana. The author argues that the Bhagavata Purana is a unique work which represents the meeting place of two great orthodox Hindu traditions, the Vedic-Upanishadic and the Aesthetic. As such, it is one of India s greatest theological treatises. This book illuminates its character and continuing significance."