Building on the formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. The notes enable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. Key features include: study methods; an introduction to the text; summaries with critical notes; themes and techniques; textual analysis of key passages; author biography; historical and literary background; modern and historical critical approaches; chronology; and glossary of literary terms.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

In recent decades, Latin love poetry has become a significant site for feminist and other literary critics studying conceptions of gender and sexuality in ancient Roman culture.

This new volume, the first to focus specifically on gender dynamics in Latin love poetry, moves beyond the polarized critical positions that argue that this poetry either confirms traditional gender roles or subverts them. Rather, the essays in the collection explore the ways in which Latin erotic texts can have both effects, shifting power back and forth between male and female. If there is one conclusion that emerges, it is that the dynamics of gender in Latin amatory poetry do not map in any single way onto the cultural and historical norms of Roman society. In fact, as several essays show, there is a dialectical relationship between this poetry and Roman cultural practices.

By complicating the views of gender dynamics in Latin love poetry, this exciting new scholarship will stimulate further debates in classical studies and literary criticism with its fresh perspectives.

The Syriac treatise published in the present volume is in many respects a unique text. Though it has been preserved anonymously, there remains little doubt that it belongs to Porphyry of Tyre. Accordingly, it enlarges our knowledge of the views of the most famous disciple of Plotinus. The text is an important witness to Platonist discussions on First Principles and on Plato's concept of Prime Matter in the Timaeus. It contains extensive quotations from Atticus, Severus, and Boethus. This text thus provides us with new textual witnesses to these philosophers, whose legacy remains very poorly attested and little known. Additionally, the treatise is a rare example of a Platonist work preserved in the Syriac language. The Syriac reception of Plato and Platonic teachings has left rather sparse textual traces, and the question of what precisely Syriac Christians knew about Plato and his philosophy remains a debated issue. The treatise provides evidence for the close acquaintance of Syriac scholars with Platonic cosmology and with philosophical commentaries on Plato's Timaeus.

Although the recent 'memory boom' has led to increasing interdisciplinary interest, there is a significant gap relating to the examination of this topic in Classics. In particular, there is need for a systematic exploration of ancient memory and its use as a critical and methodological tool for delving into ancient literature. The present volume provides just such an approach, theorising the use and role of memory in Graeco-Roman thought and literature, and building on the background of memory studies. The volume's contributors apply theoretical models such as memoryscapes, civic and cultural memory, and memory loss to a range of authors, from Homeric epic to Senecan drama, and from historiography to Cicero's recollections of performances. The chapters are divided into four sections according to the main perspective taken. These are: 1) the Mechanics of Memory, 2) Collective memory, 3) Female Memory, and 4) Oblivion. This modern approach to ancient memory will be useful for scholars working across the range of Greek and Roman literature, as well as for students, and a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in the intersection of memory studies and Classics.

Cicero has long been seen to embody the values of the Roman republic. This provocative study of Cicero's use of history reveals that rather than promoting his own values, Cicero uses historical representation to explore the difficulties of finding any ideological coherence in Rome's political or cultural traditions. Matthew Fox looks to the scepticism of Cicero's philosophical education for an understanding of his perspective on Rome's history, and argues that neglect of the sceptical tradition has transformed the doubting, ambiguous Cicero into the confident proponent of Roman values. Through close reading of a range of his theoretical works, Fox uncovers an ironic attitude towards Roman history, and connects that to the use of irony in mainstream Latin historians. He concludes with a study of a little-known treatise on Cicero from the early eighteenth century which sheds considerable light on the history of Cicero's reception.

This original and provocative engagement with Erasmus' work argues that the Dutch humanist discovered in classical Stoicism several principles which he developed into a paradigm-shifting application of Stoicism to Christianity. Ross Dealy offers novel readings of some lesser and well-known Erasmian texts and presents a detailed discussion of the reception of Stoicism in the Renaissance. In a considered interpretation of Erasmus' De taedio Iesu, Dealy clearly shows the two-dimensional Stoic elements in Erasmus' thought from an early time onward. Erasmus' genuinely philosophical disposition is evidenced in an analysis of his edition of Cicero's De officiis. Building on stoicism Erasmus shows that Christ's suffering in Gethsemane was not about the triumph of spirit over flesh but about the simultaneous workings of two opposite but equally essential types of value: on the one side spirit and on the other involuntary and intractable natural instincts.

A crucial question throughout the Middle Ages, the relationship between body and spirit cannot be understood without an interdisciplinary approach - combining literature, philosophy and medicine. Gathering contributions by leading international scholars from these disciplines, the collected volume explores themes such as lovesickness, the five senses, the role of memory and passions, in order to shed new light on the complex nature of the medieval Self.

The verse-by-verse commentary on the Ovidian text includes the reading of more than 300 manuscripts, including the so-called Heinsian manuscripts, and of almost 100 editions, from the two "editiones principes" of 1471 to the present day. The introduction describes the manuscripts used, and a history of the Ovidian editions is also traced. A new text of book VI is presented, accompanied by a slim and lucid critical apparatus. Futher information appears in the commentary and in the appendices, particularly readings of manuscripts and editions. The verbatim commentary offers, with reliable quotes for each term, the critical observations of all the editors and commentators of the Ovidian work throughout the centuries. This aspect of critical edition has been neglected by commentators of Ovid since Heinsius (1659) and Burman (1727). Two appendices ("Readings of manuscripts" and "Readings of editions") are added for the first time for readers of the Ovidian work. The volume closes with a "Select index of textual problems", a large "Index locorum" and an "Index nominum".

The volume represents the seventh in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. It comprises a collection of essays on the significance and working of memory in ancient texts and visual documentation, from contexts both oral (or oral-derived) and literate. The authors discuss a variety of interpretations of 'memory' in Homeric epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, historical inscriptions, oratory, and philosophy, as well as in the replication of ancient artworks, and in Greek vase inscriptions. They present therefore a wide-ranging analysis of memory as a fundamental faculty underlying the production and reception of texts and material documentation in a society that gradually moved from an essentially oral to an essentially literate culture.

Cutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chretien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual addresses the various modes of interaction between ancient Greek lyric poetry and the visual arts as well as more general notions of visuality. It covers diverse poetic genres in a range of contexts radiating outwards from the original performance(s) to encompass their broader cultural settings, the later reception of the poems, and finally also their understanding in modern scholarship. By focusing on the relationship between the visual and the verbal as well as the sensory and the mental, this volume raises a wide range of questions concerning human perception and cultural practices. As this collection of essays shows, Greek lyric poetry played a decisive role in the shaping of both.

In the Alcestis, the title character sacrifices her own life to save that of her husband, Admetus, when he is presented with the opportunity to have someone die in his place. Alcestis compresses within itself both tragedy and its apparent reversal, staging in the process fascinating questions about gender roles, family loyalties, the nature of heroism, and the role of commemoration. Alcestis is Euripides's earliest complete work and his only surviving play from the period preceding the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Currently dominant post-structuralist models of Greek tragedy focus on its 'oppositional' role in the discourse of war and public values. This study challenges not only this politicised model of tragic discourse but also both traditional masculinist and more recent feminist readings of the discourse and performance of gender in this remarkable play. The play survived in the performance repertoire of antiquity into the Roman period. Euripides' version strongly influenced the reception of the myth through the middles ages into the Renaissance, and the story enjoyed a lively afterlife through opera. Alcestis' contested reception in the last two centuries charts our changing understanding of tragedy. Niall Slater's study explores the reception and afterlife of the play, as well as its main themes, the myth before the play, the play's historical and social context and the central developments in modern criticism.

This volume on Greek synchronic etymology offers a set of papers evidencing the cultural significance of etymological commitment in ancient and medieval literature. The four sections illustrate the variety of approaches of the same object, which for Greek writers was much more than a technical way of studying language. Contributions focus on the functions of etymology as they were intended by the authors according to their own aims. (1) "Philosophical issues" addresses the theory of etymology and its explanatory power, especially in Plato and in Neoplatonism. (2) "Linguistic issues" discusses various etymologizing techniques and the status of etymology, which was criticized and openly rejected by some authors. (3) "Poetical practices of etymology" investigates the ubiquitous presence of etymological reflections in learned poetry, whatever the genre, didactic, aetiological or epic. (4) "Etymology and word-plays" addresses the vexed question of the limit between a mere pun and a real etymological explanation, which is more than once difficult to establish. The wide range of genres and authors and the interplay between theoretical reflection and applied practice shows clearly the importance of etymology in Greek thought.

In Legendary Rivals Jaclyn Neel argues for a new interpretation of the foundation myths of Rome. Instead of a negative portrayal of the city's early history, these tales offer a didactic paradigm of the correct way to engage in competition. Accounts from the triumviral period stress the dysfunctional nature of the city's foundation to capture the memory of Rome's civil wars. Republican evidence suggests a different emphasis. Through diachronic analyses of the tales of Romulus and Remus, Amulius and Numitor, Brutus and Collatinus, and Camillus and Manlius Capitolinus, Neel shows that Romans of the Republic and early Principate would have seen these stories as examples of competition that pushed the bounds of propriety.

"On Weather Signs," traditionally ascribed to Theophrastus, contains the most complete list of such signs in antiquity and it was, in this or some very similar form, consulted by Aratus, Vergil (in "Georgics" I), and Pliny the Elder, as well as by many other authors throughout the Byzantine period. This edition is the first to take account of all the manuscripts and the commentary, the first in over a century, is on a far grander scale than earlier ones by Schneider (1818-21) and Wood (1894), listing almost all parallel texts for each sign. The introduction places the work in the context of its genre and for the first time lays out the details of its manuscript tradition.

The Tower of Babel narrative is one of the most memorable accounts of the Bible, and its interpretative potential has produced a vast array of literary adaptations. Undoing Babel is the first extensive examination of the development of the Babel narrative amongst Anglo-Saxon authors from late antiquity to the eleventh century. Tristan Major's illuminating and original insight into Anglo-Latin and Old English works, including the writings of Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Aelfric, and Wulfstan, reveals the cultural ideologies and anxieties that transformed the Babel narrative. In doing so, Major argues that these Babel narratives provide a basis for understanding the world's ethnic and linguistic diversity as well as a theological stimulus to evangelize non-Christian and non-European people. Undoing Babel highlights the depth of literary innovation in this period and disproves any notion of a single Anglo-Saxon reception of biblical sources.

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can best re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The tragedies collected here were originally available as single volumes. This new collection retains the informative introductions and explanatory notes of the original editions, with Greek line numbers and a single combined glossary added for easy reference.
This volume collects for the first time three of Sophocles most moving tragedies, all set in mythical Thebes: Oedipus the King, perhaps the most powerful of all Greek tragedies; Oedipus at Colonus, a story that reveals the reversals and paradoxes that define moral life; and Antigone, a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destiny.

Retraction Notice: Postscript (March, 2021): The Publisher notifies the readers that Chapter 2 of this volume (Dirk Obbink, "Ten Poems of Sappho: Provenance, Authenticity, and Text of the New Sappho Papyri") has been retracted. For more information please view the statement by the editors in the Retraction Notice in the front matter of this volume and on page 9 of the Introduction. The reasons for this retraction include the serious doubts that have been raised in the years following the publication of this edited volume about the provenance of the newest Sappho papyri (P. Sapph. Obbink and P GC. inv.105). In The Newest Sappho Anton Bierl and Andre Lardinois have edited 21 papers of world-renowned Sappho scholars dealing with the new papyrus fragments of Sappho that were published in 2014. This set of papyrus fragments, the greatest find of Sappho fragments since the beginning of the 20th century, provides significant new readings and additions to five previously known songs of Sappho (frs. 5, 9, 16, 17 and 18), as well as the remains of four previously unknown songs, including the new Brothers Song and the Kypris Song. The contributors discuss the content of these poems as well as the consequence they have for our understanding of Sappho's life and work.

In the two Books of De divinatione Cicero considers beliefs concerning fate and the possibility of prediction: in the first book he puts the (principally Stoic) case for them in the mouth of his brother Quintus; in the second, speaking in his own person, he argues against them. In this new translation of, and commentary on, Book One--the first in English for over 80 years--David Wardle guides the reader through the course of Cicero's argument, giving particular attention to the traditional Roman and the philosophical conception of divination.

"Clock time", with all its benefits and anxieties, is often viewed as a "modern" phenomenon, but ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures also had tools for marking and measuring time within the day and wrestled with challenges of daily time management. This book brings together for the first time perspectives on the interplay between short-term timekeeping technologies and their social contexts in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Its contributions denaturalize modern-day concepts of clocks, hours, and temporal frameworks; describe some of the timekeeping solutions used in antiquity; and illuminate the diverse factors that affected how individuals and communities structured their time.

Jan van Ruusbroec (1293-1381), the most influential medieval Dutch author, is generally acknowledged to be one of the key figures in the tradition of Christian mysticism. This book concentrates on the medieval dimensions of Ruusbroec's authorship. Warnar offers a comprehensive analysis of Ruusbroec's oeuvre within the social, religious and literary frameworks of the fourteenth century Low Countries. Ruusbroec emerges as an author who was fully engaged in contemporary discussions on the contemplative life and mystical theology, as a charismatic guide who attracted a growing number of disciples first from the Low Countries but soon from all over Western Europe, and as the architect of a vernacular oeuvre of international interest from the Middle Ages to modern times.

Scholars have been seeking to understand Sophocles' Antigone for over two millennia. The origins of this long tradition of the play's interpretation are now represented mainly by a series of notes that have survived in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The book offers an English introduction and an authoritative critical text, which is accompanied by a detailed apparatus criticus.

The essays in this volume address central problems in the development of Roman imperialism in the third and second century BC. Published in honour of the distinguished Oxford academic Peter Derow, they follow some of his main interests: the author Polybius, the characteristics of Roman power and imperial ambition, and the mechanisms used by Rome in creating and sustaining an empire in the east. Written by a distinguished group of international historians, all of whom were taught by Derow, the volume constitutes a new and distinctive contribution to the history of this centrally important period, as well as a major advance in the study of Polybius as a writer. In addition, the volume looks at the way Rome absorbed religions from the east, and at Hellenistic artistic culture. It also sheds new light on the important region of Illyria on the Adriatic Coast, which played a key part in Rome's rise to power. Archaeological, epigraphic, and textual evidence are brought together to create a sustained argument for Rome's determined and systematic pursuit of power.

This volume on the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE 17 CE) comprises articles by an international group of fourteen scholars. Their contributions cover a wide range of topics, including a biographical essay, a survey of the major manuscripts and textual traditions, and a comprehensive discussion of Ovid s style. The remaining chapters are devoted to focused studies of each of Ovid s major works, with emphasis given where appropriate to the poet s interest in genre and narrative techniques, his engagement with the poetry that preceded his oeuvre, his response to the political, religious, and social realities of Augustan Rome, and his enduring legacy in the European literary traditions of the first 1300 years after his death. "Brill's Companion to Ovid" combines close analysis of each of Ovid s major works with a comprehensive overview of scholarly trends in the study of Latin poetry and Roman literary culture. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Latin literature alike. Originally published in hardcover.