Catullus is one of the most popular poets to survive from classical antiquity. Above all others he seems to speak to modern readers with a modern voice. The distinguished contributors to this Companion discuss the principal subjects which drew Catullus' affection and disgust, above all his famous affair with the woman he calls 'Lesbia', and situate him in the social, historical and intellectual context of first-century BC Rome. One of the so-called 'new poets', Catullus had a profound effect on subsequent Latin poetry, and this is explored especially for the Augustan age and the late first century AD. A significant part of the volume is concerned with Catullus' survival into the modern world. There are discussions both of the manuscript tradition and of the interpretative scholarship which has been devoted to his poetry, as well as his reception by renaissance and later poets. Students in particular will appreciate this book.

Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian Rome, Thyestes is now widely regarded as one of the tragedian's finest achievements and represents Seneca's most mature reflections on power and civilization, and on the tragic theatre itself. The play's impact on European literature and drama from antiquity to the present has been considerable; now much studied in universities and colleges, and regularly adapted and performed, it still contains much that speaks pointedly to our times: its focus on appetite, lust, violence, and horror; its preoccupation with rhetoric, morality, and power; its concern with the problematics of kinship, and with political, social, and religious institutions and their fragility and impotence; its dramatization of reason's failure, the triumph and cyclicity of evil, the determinism of history, the mastery of the world through mastery of the word; its theatricalized and godless universe. This new edition of Seneca's Thyestes offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, an English verse translation designed for both performance and high-level academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary on the play. The aim throughout has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and in the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, the reception of the play by European dramatists is given especial emphasis in the introduction and throughout the commentary; this and the accessible notes on the text make this edition of particular use not only to scholars and students of classics, but also of literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and in the interplay between theatre and history.

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization and the Enlightenment through critiques of their foundational texts and to imagine the place of the Homeric epics in a new post-War humanism. The book thus also explores the reception of these writers, analyzing how Jewish child-survivors like Geoffrey Hartman and Helene Cixous and writers of the post-Holocaust generation like Daniel Mendelsohn continued to read the epics as narratives of grief, trauma, and woundedness into the twenty-first century..

Of unknown authorship, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem which incites contentious debate and has been endlessly interpreted over the centuries. This Reader's Guide provides a much-needed overview of the large body of Beowulf criticism, moving from eighteenth-century reactions to twenty-first-century responses. Jodi-Ann George: * charts the changes in critical trends and theoretical approaches applied to the poem * includes discussion of J. R. R. Tolkein's pioneering 1936 lecture on Beowulf , and Seamus Heaney's recent translation * analyses Beowulf in popular culture, addressing the poem's life in film versions, graphic novels, music and comics. Clear and engaging, this is an indispensable introductory guide to a widely-studied and enigmatic work which continues to fascinate readers everywhere.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

Since antiquity, Book 8 of Thucydides' History has been considered an unpolished draft which lacks revision. Even those who admit that the book has some elements of internal coherence believe that Thucydides, if death had not prevented him, would have improved many chapters or even the whole structure of the book. Consequently, while the first seven books of the History have been well examined through the last two centuries, the narrative plan of Book 8 remains an obscure subject, as we do not possess an extensive and detailed presentation of its whole narrative design. Vasileios Liotsakis tries to satisfy this central desideratum of the Thucydidean scholarship by offering a thorough description of the compositional plan, which, in his opinion, Thucydides put into effect in the last 109 chapters of his work. His study elaborates on the structural parts of the book, their details, and the various techniques through which Thucydides composed his narration in order to reach the internal cohesion of these chapters as well as their close connection to the rest of the History. Liotsakis offers us an original approach not only of Book 8 but also of the whole work, since his observations reshape our overall view of the History.

Featured here is a modern translation of a medieval herbal, with a study showing how this technical treatise on herbs was turned into a literary curiosity in the nineteenth century. The contours of this second edition replicate the first; however, it has been revised and updated throughout to reflect new scholarship and new findings. New information is presented on Oswald Cockayne, the nineteenth-century philologist who first translated the Old English medical texts for the modern world. Here the medieval text is read as an example of technical writing (i.e., intended to convey instructions/information), not as literature. The audience it was originally aimed at would know how to diagnose and treat medical conditions and knew or was learning how to follow its instructions. For that reason, while working on the translation, specialists in relevant fields were asked to shed light on its terse wording, for example, herbalists and physicians. Unlike many current studies, this work discusses the Herbarium and other medical texts in Old English as part of a tradition developed throughout early-medieval Europe associated with monasteries and their libraries. The book is intended for scholars in cross-cultural fields; that is, with roots in one field and branches in several, such as nineteenth-century or medieval studies, for historians of herbalism, medicine, pharmacy, botany, and of the Western Middle Ages, broadly and inclusively defined, and for readers interested in the history of herbalism and medicine.

This fascinating introduction to the comedy of Menander is the work of two classical scholars, both of whom have worked extensively as theatre practitioners. This is the first book to consider the plays of Menander primarily as performance pieces and to uncover the dramatic technique of this widely admired comic writer, whose plays had all but disappeared until the 1950s. Looking at the theatrical context of Menandrian comedy in its widest sense, the book includes discussions of recent productions, the recovery of the texts, the treatment of women and slaves, the nature of Menander's comedy, and where it may have led within the European tradition. This book will be of interest to both students of theatre and classicists.

This volume examines whether dramatic fragments should be approached as parts of a greater whole or as self-contained entities. It comprises contributions by a broad spectrum of international scholars: by young researchers working on fragmentary drama as well as by well-known experts in this field. The volume explores another kind of fragmentation that seems already to have been embraced by the ancient dramatists: quotations extracted from their context and immersed in a new whole, in which they work both as cohesive unities and detachable entities. Sections of poetic works circulated in antiquity not only as parts of a whole, but also independently, i.e. as component fractions, rather like quotations on facebook today. Fragmentation can thus be seen operating on the level of dissociation, but also on the level of cohesion. The volume investigates interpretive possibilities, quotation contexts, production and reception stages of fragmentary texts, looking into the ways dramatic fragments can either increase the depth of fragmentation or strengthen the intensity of cohesion.

There are no clear demarcation lines between magic, astrology, necromancy, medicine, and even sciences in the pre-modern world. Under the umbrella term 'magic,' the contributors to this volume examine a wide range of texts, both literary and religious, both medical and philosophical, in which the topic is discussed from many different perspectives. The fundamental concerns address issue such as how people perceived magic, whether they accepted it and utilized it for their own purposes, and what impact magic might have had on the mental structures of that time. While some papers examine the specific appearance of magicians in literary texts, others analyze the practical application of magic in medical contexts. In addition, this volume includes studies that deal with the rise of the witch craze in the late fifteenth century and then also investigate whether the Weberian notion of disenchantment pertaining to the modern world can be maintained. Magic is, oddly but significantly, still around us and exerts its influence. Focusing on magic in the medieval world thus helps us to shed light on human culture at large.

Composed towards the end of the first century CE, Statius' Thebaid relates the myth of the 'Seven against Thebes': the assault of the seven champions of Argos on the ancient city in a bid to oust Eteocles, son of Oedipus, from his throne in favour of his brother, Polynices. Book 2 presents several key events in the build-up to the Theban war: Eteocles' haunting by the ghost of his grandfather Laius, the ill-omened weddings of Polynices and his ally Tydeus to the princesses of Argos, and Tydeus' failed embassy to Eteocles, leading to his famed victory over a Theban ambush. This volume represents the first full-length scholarly commentary in English on Book 2 of the twelve-book Latin epic, greatly expanding on and updating Mulder's 1954 Latin language commentary. An extensive introduction covers the poem's historical, textual, and literary contexts, with particular attention to Statius' adaptation of prior literary tradition and especially the epics of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. The Latin text, accompanied by a clear translation and apparatus criticus, is newly edited to take advantage of the recent detailed editorial work on the poem by Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards and is supplemented by a comprehensive and incisive line-by-line commentary which addresses a range of textual, linguistic, and literary topics. The result is a keenly focused yet accessible critical edition that will be of interest both to specialist scholars of Latin poetry and to advanced graduate students studying Flavian epic.

Representations of feeling in medieval literature are varied and complex. This new collection of essays demonstrates that the history of emotions and affect theory are similarly insufficient for investigating the intersection of body and mind that late Middle English literatures evoke. While medieval studies has generated a rich scholarly literature on 'affective piety', this collection charts an intersectional new investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious contexts. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, and from practices of witnessing to the adoration of objects, essays in this volume analyze the coexistence of emotion and affect in late medieval representations of feeling.

An examination of the growth of civic power in the turbulent arena of late medieval London. In the late fourteenth century, London's government, through mismanagement and negligence, experienced a series of crises. Relationships with the crown were tested; competing factions sought to wrest power from the hands of the once all-powerful victualling guilds; revolt in the streets in 1381 targeted the institutions of royal as well as civic power; and, between 1392 and 1397, King Richard removed the liberties of the city and appointed his own wardensto govern in place of the mayor of London. This book examines the strategies employed by the generation of London aldermen who governed after 1397 to regain control of their city. By examining a range of interdisciplinary sources, including manuscript and printed books, administrative records, accounts of civic ritual and epitaphs, the author shows how, by carefully constructing the idea of a civic community united by shared political concerns and spiritual ambitions, a small number of men virtually monopolised power in the capital. More generally, this is an exploration of the mentalities of those who sought civic power in the late Middle Ages and provokes the question: whygovern, and for whom? DAVID HARRY is Lecturer in History at the University of Chester.

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as 'public interiorities') without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Res Publica and the Roman Republic tells the story of an idea - res publica - and shows us what it meant and was made to mean in the particular historical context of the late Roman Republic. Since the term was politically ubiquitous, often used emotively, and as a consequence is hard to define, the temptation to take res publica as a universally understood and relatively uncontroversial given is rarely resisted. A close look at how res publica was perceived and manipulated, however, brings into focus not just the political crises of the late Republic but also the various attempts to clean up these crises through dubiously legal (and often outright illegal) emergency measures. Although this book is at root a philological study of a political concept, it aims to make a historical point about a politically turbulent period by addressing three key questions: What did it mean for Republican politicians to appeal to the res publica? What did the increasing tendency to do so reveal about the dangerous fragmentation of political legitimacy? How did these pressures transform res publica as a concept? Through a detailed examination of res publica as it appears in the ancient historians, orators, poets, commentaries and letters, inscriptions, and historical episodes of the late Republic and early Principate, this book demonstrates how the rhetoric surrounding res publica mirrored the changes in the Roman political landscape towards the end of the Republic.

The Laborer's Two Bodies explores the intellectual, cultural, and political consequences of one of the most fundamental shifts in late medieval English society: the first national labour regulation in the wake of the 1348 plague. Bridging the medieval and early modern periods, this book analyzes a wide range of texts and images produced in this initial period of labour regulation (1349 to 1500), including trial records, ecclesiastical bulls, penitential literature, and chronicle accounts, considering these documents alongside better known texts by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, the Paston Family, Barclay and More (among others). This book demonstrates that the category of labour (as both lived and imagined) became increasingly problematic for writers who struggled to understand the meaning of work in a world where labour was simultaneously understood as punishment, virtue and reward.

Iconoclasm was the name given to the stance of that portion of Eastern Christianity that rejected worshipping God through images (eikones) representing Christ, the Virgin or the saints and was the official doctrine of the Byzantine Empire for most of the period between 726 and 843. It was a period marked by violent passions on either side. This is the first comprehensive account of the extant contemporary texts relating to this phenomenon and their impact on society, politics and identity. By examining the literary circles emerging both during the time of persecution and immediately after the restoration of icons in 843, the volume casts new light on the striking (re)construction of Byzantine society, whose iconophile identity was biasedly redefined by the political parties led by Theodoros Stoudites, Gregorios Dekapolites and Empress Theodora or the patriarchs Methodios, Ignatios and Photios. It thereby offers an innovative paradigm for approaching Byzantine literature.

New examinations of the figure of Charlemagne in Spanish literature and culture. The historical point of departure for this volume is Charlemagne's ill-fated incursion into Spain in 778. After an unsuccessful siege of Zaragoza, the king of the Franks directed his army north and on his passage through the Pyrenees, he turned his wrath on Pamplona, destroying the Basque city and its walls. The Basques subsequently ambushed the rearguard of Charlemagne's army on the heights of Pyrenees, killing numerous officers of the palace, plunderingthe baggage, and then vanishing into the forested hills, leaving the Franks to grieve without the satisfaction of revenge. In Spain, popular narratives eventually diverted their attention away from the Franks to the Spaniards responsible for their slaughter. This volume explores those legendary narratives of the Spaniards who defeated Charlemagne's army and the larger textual and cultural context of his presence in Spain, from before their careful elaboration in Latin and vernacular chronicles into the early modern period. It shares with previous studies a focus on the narration of historical and imaginary events across genres, but is unique in its emphasis on the reception and evolution of the legendary figure of Charlemagne in Spain. Overall, its purpose is to address the diversity and importance of the Carolingian legends in the literary, historical, and imaginative spheres during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the seventeenth century. Matthew Bailey is Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia; Ryan D. Giles is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. Contributors: Frederick A. de Armas, Matthew Bailey, Anibal Biglieri, Ryan D. Giles, Lucy K. Pick, Mercedes Vaquero.

In the past century, scholars have observed a veritable full cast of characters from Roman comedy in the poetry of Catullus. Despite this growing recognition of comedy's allusive presence in Catullus' work, there has never been an extended analysis of how he engaged with this foundational Roman genre. This book sketches a more coherent picture of Catullus' use of Roman comedy and shows that individual points of contact with the theatre in his corpus are part of a larger, more sustained poetic program than has been recognized. Roman comedy, it argues, offered Catullus a common cultural vocabulary, drawn from the public stage and shared with his audience, with which to explore and convey private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry. It also demonstrates that Roman comedy continued to present writers after the second century BCE with a meaningful source of social, cultural, and artistic value.

This book provides an interpretation of Plato's Euthydemus as a unified piece of literature, taking into account both its dramatic and its philosophical aspects. It aims to do justice to a major Platonic work which has so far received comparatively little treatment. Except for the sections of the dialogue in which Socrates presents an argument on the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Euthydemus seems to have been largely ignored. The reason for this is that much of the work's philosophical import lies hidden underneath a veil of riotous comedy. This book shows how a reading of the dialogue as a whole, rather than a limited focus on the Socratic scenes, sheds light on the work's central philosophical questions. It argues the Euthydemus points not only to the differences between Socrates and the sophists, but also to actual and alleged similarities between them. The framing scenes comment precisely on this aspect of the internal dialogue, with Crito still lumping together philosophy and eristic shortly before his discussion with Socrates comes to an end. Hence the question that permeates the Euthydemus is raised afresh at the end of the dialogue: what is properly to be termed philosophy?

What kind of allusion is possible in a poetry derived from a centuries-long oral tradition, and what kind of oral-derived poetry are the Homeric epics? Comparison of Homeric epic with South Slavic heroic song has suggested certain types of answers to these questions, yet the South Slavic paradigm is neither straightforward in itself nor necessarily the only pertinent paradigm: Augustan Latin poetry uses many sophisticated and highly self-conscious techniques of allusion which can, this book contends, be suggestively paralleled in Homeric epic, and some of the same techniques of allusion can be found in Near Eastern poetry of the third and second millennia BC. By attending to these various paradigms, this challenging study argues for a new understanding of Homeric allusion and its place in literary history, broaching the question of whether there can have been historical continuity in a poetics of allusion stretching from the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, via the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Aeneid and Metamorphoses, despite the enormous disparities of time and place and of language and culture, including those represented by the cuneiform tablet, the papyrus roll, and by an oral performance culture. The fundamental methodological problems are explored through a series of interlocking case studies, treating of how the Odyssey conceivably alludes to the Iliad and also to earlier poetry on Odysseus' homecoming, the Iliad to earlier poetry on the Ethiopian hero Memnon, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to earlier poetry on Hades' abduction of Persephone, and early Greek epic to Mesopotamian mythological poetry, pre-eminently the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual volume of original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. The 1998 volume is broad in scope, as ever, featuring four pieces on Aristotle, two on Plato, and one each on Xenophanes, the Atomists, and Plutarch. 'An excellent periodical.' Mary Margaret MacKenzie, Times Literary Supplement 'This ... annual collection ... has become standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy ... Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy continues to reflect the vigour of a challenging but vital sub-discipline within Classical Studies and Philosophy.' Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands, 'Internationally Nationalist', 'Someone Else's Past?', and 'Activist Medievalism', exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.

Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity offers a thematic analysis of the poetry of the late Latin poet Prudentius, focusing in particular on his descriptions of the geographical and cultural landscapes of late antiquity. Cillian O'Hogan sets Prudentius in the context of other late antique authors, including Lactantius, Jerome, Augustine, and Endelechius, and argues that the poet makes use of allusion to Augustan and early imperial Latin authors to present the late Roman landscape as one markedly altered by the arrival of Christianity, though retaining the grandeur of the pagan past. This volume examines his conception of the world as a text, his use of intertextuality to describe literary journeys, his view of the civic function of Christian martyrdom, his conception of heaven, and his attitude towards art and architecture, combining philological and intertextual criticism with approaches drawn from the fields of book history, cultural geography, and theology to paint a fuller and richer picture of the greatest of the Christian Latin poets.

In Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe, Jean-Marie Kauth shows how counter-ecological metaphors sprung from the cosmology of the Copernican Revolution influence us still in unexpected, maladaptive ways, nurturing conceptions of the world that are not only incorrect but enabling of ecocide. She argues that although, of course, no one cause can be responsible for the kinds of environmental degradation we are seeing, grasping these underlying paradigms may help us to alter our thinking and make the radical transformations needed to counter the forward motion of our capitalist, post-industrial society, which continues hurtling toward civilizational suicide. She further argues that although not offered as a simple antidote, and with the potential evils of medieval hierarchy acknowledged, there is merit in re-envisioning the cosmos with the holistic, spherical imagination of the Middle Ages, figured in circles, cycles, epicycles, equants: a whole, enclosed, integrated world. This book offers a new perspective on the power of images and metaphors to shape the way humans see the universe and their own role in it.