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.

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.

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.

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.

This work examines the entire corpus of the Sistani Cycle of Epics, both parts included in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and those appearing in separate manuscripts. It argues that the so-called "epic literature" of Iran constitutes a kind of historiography, encapsulating reflections of watershed events of Iran's antiquity. By examining the symbiotic relationship of the texts' content and form, the underpinning discourse of the various stories is revealed to have been shaped by polemics of political legitimacy and religious conflict. This discourse, however, is not abstract. The stories narrate, within their generic constraint, some of the affairs of the Sistani kingdom and its relationship to the Parthian throne, mainly from the first century BCE to the end of the second century CE.

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.

A TIMES BESTSELLER, January 2022 A TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR A BBC HISTORY MAG BOOK OF THE YEAR A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Expressive, bold and quite beautiful' The Lady '[a] delight of a book' Antonia Senior, The Times 'ravishingly lovely' The Times Ireland '[a] lively retelling of British myths' Apollo Magazine Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes. It begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans. These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered: Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall; mountains and lakes such as Snowdon and Loch Etive and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and the story-silted Thames in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth. It Illuminates a collective memory that still informs the identity and political ambition of these places. In Storyland, Jeffs reimagines these myths of homeland, exile and migration, kinship, loyalty, betrayal, love and loss in a landscape brimming with wonder.

Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace's poems, three of which she has a prominent role in. Throughout Horace's Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration, kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the gardens of Horace's literary patron Maecenas, rips apart a lamb with her teeth, starves a Roman child to death, and threatens to unnaturally prolong Horace's life to keep him in a state of perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, casts her as the personification of his iambic poetry, and gives her the surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his second book of Satires. This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of Canidia. It offers translations of each of the three poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive analysis of Canidia's part in each piece that takes into account not only the poems' literary contexts but their magico-religious details.

Against a background which included revolutionary changes in religious belief, extensive enlargement of dramatic styles and the technological innovation of printing, this collection of essays about biblical drama offers innovative approaches to text and performance, while reviewing some well-established critical issues. The Bible in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears in a complex of roles in relation to the drama: as an authority and centre of belief, a place of controversy, an emotional experience and, at times, a weapon. This collection brings into focus the new biblical learning, including the re-editing of biblical texts, as well as classical influences, and it gives a unique view of the relationship between the Bible and the drama at a critical time for both. Contributors are: Stephanie Allen, David Bevington, Philip Butterworth, Sarah Carpenter, Philip Crispin, Clifford Davidson, Elisabeth Dutton, Garrett P. J. Epp, Bob Godfrey, Peter Happe, James McBain, Roberta Mullini, Katie Normington, Margaret Rogerson, Charlotte Steenbrugge, Greg Walker, and Diana Wyatt.

This edition of John Lydgate's Dance of Death offers a detailed comparison of the different text versions, a new scholarly edition and translation of Guy Marchant's 1485 French Danse Macabre text, and an art-historical analysis of its woodcut illustrations. It addresses the cultural context and historical circumstances of Lydgate's poem and its model, the mural of 1424-25 with accompanying French poem in Paris, as well as their precursors, notably the Vado mori poems and the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. It discusses authorship, the personification and vizualisation of Death, and the wider dissemination of the Dance. The edited texts include commentaries, notes, and a glossary.

'What reason has an educated man for going to the theatre, except to see Menander'?Thus the judgement of Aristophanes of Byzantium, and in later antiquity the social comedies of Menander ranked second in popularity only to the epics of Homer. Yet for centuries thereafter the plays were thought to be irretrievably lost, failing to become part of the canon of writers that generations of copyists deemed worthy of transmitting to us. It was only in the 20th century that large sections of the plays began to emerge from the sands of Egypt, enabling modern readers to gauge for themselves the correctness of earlier verdicts. Following on from the author's edition of Menander's Bad-Tempered Man ( dyskolos ) the present volume aims to provide readers with ready access to the playwright's consummate sophistication in dramatic technique through two, albeit incomplete, plays, The Shield ( aspis ) and arbitration ( epitrepontes ). As before, the Greek text is accompanied by a translation aimed at providing a version that is readable, while at the same time remaining close enough to the original to make comparison of the two a feasible proposition. The commentary, in turn, concentrates upon dramatic development, providing the reader with pointers to appreciating the playwright's often subtle techniques of both dramatic development and character portrayal. Stanley Ireland is Reader in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He has written on such diverse topics as Menander, Roman Britain and Ancient Numismatics. He is also editor of Terence's The Mother-in-Law in this series. Greek text with facing-page translation, introduction and commentary.

The apostle Peter gradually became one of the most famous figures of the ancient world. His almost undisputed reputation made the disciple an exquisite anchor by which new practices within and outside the Church could be established, including innovations in fields as diverse as architecture, art, cult, epigraphy, liturgy, poetry and politics. This interdisciplinary volume inquires the way in which the figure of Peter functioned as an anchor for various people from different periods and geographical areas. The concept of Anchoring Innovation is used to investigate the history of the reception of the apostle Peter from the first century up to Charlemagne, revealing as much about Peter as about the context in which this reception took place.

The aim of this volume is to study Silius' poem as an important step in the development of the Roman historical epic tradition. The Punica is analyzed as transitional segment between the beginnings of Roman literature in the Republican age (Naevius and Ennius) and Claudian's panegyrical epic in late antiquity, shedding light on its 'inclusiveness' and its peculiar, internal dialectic between antiquarian taste and problematic actualization. This is an innovative attempt to connect epic poems and authors belonging to different ages, to frame the development of the literary genre, according to its specific aims and interests throughout the centuries.

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.

Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca is the first extensive study of speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (5th century AD). It presents an in-depth analysis of the narrative functions of direct speech and their implications for the presentation of the epic story. The digital appendix to this book (Database of Direct Speech in Greek Epic Poetry) can be consulted online at www.dsgep.ugent.be.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue. The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source material. The first Middle English writer to discuss his methods of translating French into English, Layamon voices ideas about the creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable. This book considers the practice of translation from French into English in medieval England, and how the translators themselves viewed their task. At its core is a corpus of French to English translations containing translator's prologues written between c.1189 and c.1450; this remarkable body of Middle English literary theory provides a useful map by which to chart the movement from a literary culture rooted in Anglo-Norman at the end of the thirteenth century to what, in the fifteenth, is regarded as an established "English" tradition. Considering earlier Romance and Germanic models of translation, wider historical evidence about translation practice, the acquisition of French, the possible role of women translators, and the manuscript tradition of prologues, in addition to offering a broader, pan-European perspective through an examination of Middle Dutch prologues, the book uses translators' prologues as a lens through which to view a period of critical growth and development for English as a literary language. Elizabeth Dearnley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge.