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.

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.

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.

This book offers new insights into the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Challenging the dominant interpretation of Nezami's poetry as the product of mysticism or Islam, this book explores Nezami's literary techniques such as his pictorial allegory and his profound conceptualization of poetry, rhetoric, and eloquence. It employs several theoretical and methodological approaches to clarify the nature of his artistic approach to poetry. Chapters explore Nezami's understanding of rhetoric and literature as Sakhon, his interest in literary genres, the diversity of themes explored in his Five Treasures, the sources of Nezami's creativity, and his literary devices. Exploring themes such as love, religion, science, wine, gender, and philosophy, this study compares Nezami's works to other giants of Persian poetry such as Ferdowsi, Jami, Rudaki, and others. The book argues that Nezami's main concern was to weave poetry rather than to promote any specific ideology.

Handlist to the rich collection of manuscripts contained in five major libraries across New York, giving a full account of their provenance. This volume provides detailed descriptions of Middle English prose materials found in the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The New York Public Library, The New York Academy of Medicine Library, and New York University Bobst Library (Special Collections). The manuscripts tend to be less well known than those in English libraries, with overlooked texts such as the Pseudo-Hildegard Anti-Mendicant Prophecy; The Book of Palmistry; a subject index of legal statutes; culinary and medical recipes; and English instructions to Latin prayers in Books of Hours. Other manuscripts of note include Trevisa's translation of De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, used as a copy-text for Wynkyn de Worde's first edition printed ca. 1495; and deluxe illustrated manuscripts of The Pilgrimage of the Soul and Ordinances of Chivalry. The introduction to the volume highlights the particular interests of the various collectors and the influences and characteristics underpinning their acquisitions. All but one of the manuscripts described from Columbia University were acquired by George A. Plimpton (1855-1936), whose firm, Ginn and Co., published spelling books. His collection records an interest in the history of education, with MS 258, a primer probably compiled for an English schoolchild, being a highlight. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) specialized in expensive, illustrated manuscripts, aided in his purchases by Belle da Costa Greene, who became the first director of the Morgan Library as a public institution under J.P. Morgan, Jr. Curt F. Bühler became the Keeper of Printed Books at the Morgan in 1934, bequeathing to the Library the manuscripts that he had bought over the years. James Lenox and John Jacob Astor established the New York Public Library, with Lenox donating two Wycliffite Bibles and Astor a third. The New York Academy of Medicine owns two manuscripts relating to the work of the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac.

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.

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."

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.

Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain's first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecia. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion. In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation. Her discussion sheds light on how clerics perceived themselves and on the connections between literature and these other activities. Drawing on an extensive collection of early cartographic materials, much of it rarely considered in conjunction with the romance, Pinet offers an original and insightful view of the mester de clerecia and the changing role of knowledge and the clergy in thirteenth-century Iberia.

Despite the significance of its contents, the so-called Demades papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 13045) has received scarce scholarly attention since the 1923 editio princeps by Karl Kunst. This unique late second-century BCE document of almost 430 lines was found in the Egyptian chora, but it is supposed to have been written in Alexandria, where it probably served as a textbook for the highest level of rhetorical education. Besides shedding new light on its find circumstances and physical aspects, the volume offers a full re-edition and commentary of the two adespota texts contained in it, namely a eulogy of the Lagid monarchy and a historical work consisting of a dialogue between Demades and his prosecutor in the trial of 319 BCE at the court of Pella. The aim of the accompanying introduction is to address the question of the origin, nature and purpose of such fragments and of the collection itself, as well as to show to what extent the papyrus contributes to a better understanding of some of the main historical events of the early Hellenistic period. This book is thus meant to fill a significant gap in Classical scholarship, all the more so as a close investigation of most of the topics dealt with therein has hitherto been lacking.

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.

Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony] ... and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enuma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and - with but one exception - a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.

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.

Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles' mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself -- all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire.

In Salvation and Sin, David Aers continues his study of Christian theology in the later Middle Ages. Working at the nexus of theology and literature, he combines formidable theological learning with finely detailed and insightful close readings to explore a cluster of central issues in Christianity as addressed by Saint Augustine and by four fourteenth-century writers of exceptional power. Salvation and Sin explores various modes of displaying the mysterious relations between divine and human agency, together with different accounts of sin and its consequences. Theologies of grace and versions of Christian identity and community are its pervasive concerns. Augustine becomes a major interlocutor in this book: his vocabulary and grammar of divine and human agency are central to Aers' exploration of later writers and their works. After the opening chapter on Augustine, Aers turns to the exploration of these concerns in the work of two major theologians of fourteenth-century England, William of Ockham and Thomas Bradwardine. From their work, Aers moves to his central text, William Langland's Piers Plowman, a long multigeneric poem contributing profoundly to late medieval conversations concerning theology and ecclesiology. In Langland's poem, Aers finds a theology and ethics shaped by Christology where the poem's modes of writing are intrinsic to its doctrine. His thesis will revise the way in which this canonical text is read. Salvation and Sin concludes with a reading of Julian of Norwich's profound, compassionate, and widely admired theology, a reading which brings her Showings into conversation both with Langland and Augustine.

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates - the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially "receptive" nature of Socrates' influence (by contrast to Plato's), chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods. Together they reveal the continuity of Socrates' idiosyncratic, polyvalent, and deep imprint on the history of Western thought, and witness the value of further research in the reception of Socrates.

In The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature Tina Boyer counters the monstrous status of giants by arguing that they are more broadly legible than traditionally believed. Building on an initial analysis of St. Augustine's City of God, Bernard of Clairvaux's deliberations on monsters and marvels, and readings in Tomasin von Zerclaere's Welsche Gast provide insights into the spectrum of antagonistic and heroic roles that giants play in the courtly realm. This approach places the figure of the giant within the cultural and religious confines of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and allows an in-depth analysis of epics and romances through political, social, religious, and gender identities tied to the figure of the giant. Sources range from German to French, English, and Iberian works.

Homer and the Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond focuses on the important question of how and why later authors employ Homeric poetry to reflect on various types and aspects of leadership. In a range of essays discussing generically diverse receptions of the epics of Homer in historically diverse contexts, this question is answered in various ways. Rather than considering Homer's works as literary products, then, this volume discusses the pedagogic dimension of the Iliad and the Odyssey as perceived by later thinkers and writers interested in the parameters of good rule, such as Plato, Philodemus, Polybius, Vergil, and Eustathios.