It is not the aim of this book to add to the extensive literature on Alcibiades' life and career. Instead the author focuses on the explosive mix of fear and fascination excited by Alcibiades in his contemporaries and in particular in key literary texts: Thucydides, the mysterious pseudo-Andocides 4, the encomium of Isocrates 16, the final scene of Plato's Symposium. The book is about the acute tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status, and ambition. It looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual 'outside' the city: the tyrant, the athletic victor, the ostracism victim, the scapegoat, the barbarian. Whereas modern discussions of ancient Athens and Athenian civic texts stress collective ideology, this study focuses on the opposing strand in tension with this dominant ideology: the fascination with the powerful individual. The book is thus at once a contribution to the study of civic ideology, and also to that of the individual and of the role of the individual in classical texts - rhetoric, the historiography of Thucydides, the Platonic dialogue. The book also considers the development of the post-classical depiction of Alcibiades, concluding with a study of Plutarch's reaction both to this tradition and to the classical texts.

H.G. Liddell and R. Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (revised and augmented by H.S. Jones in 1940) has been the essential tool of advanced Greek scholars for 150 years; in order to update it a new Supplement has been published (OUP 1996) replacing that of 1968. In this provocative reconsideration both of its lexicographical principles and of individual articles, John Chadwick examines the need for further revision and expansion of the volume through a re-examination of the classical Greek vocabulary. A series of notes are presented, making important and stimulating contributions to the study of classical Greek lexicography, and offering many new interpretations of passages from familiar authors based upon a lexicographical approach. Essential reading for all scholars of classical Greek.

From the stories suggested by the great cave paintings of the Paleolithic period to the thought experiments of modern scientists, From Olympus to Camelot provides a sweeping history of the development of the rich and varied European mythological tradition.

David Leeming, an authority on world mythology, begins with a general introduction to mythology and mythological terms, and then turns to the stories themselves. Discussing well-known figures such as Zeus, Aphrodite, Thor, and Cuchulainn, and less familiar ones such as Perun, Mari, and the Sorcerer of Lescaux, Leeming illustrates and analyzes the enduring human endeavor to make sense of existence through deities and heroes.

Following an initial exploration of the Indo-European sources of European mythology and the connections between the myths of Europe and those of India and Iran, the book proceeds to survey the major beliefs of Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic cultures, as well as the mythologies of non-Indo-European cultures such as the Etruscans and the Finns. Among its contents are introductions to the pantheons of various mythologies, examinations of major mythological works, and retellings of the influential mythical stories. This work also examines European deities, creation myths, and heroes in the context of Christian belief, and considers the translation of traditional stories into the mythologies of modern European political, scientific, philosophical, and economic movements.

European mythology is the core mythology of Western civilization. This wide-ranging volume offers a lively and informative survey, along with a provocative new way of understanding this fundamental aspect of European culture.

The complex matter of Orphism has so far been addressed by scholars through studies focusing on one of its components each time, primarily the Derveni Papyrus and the Gold Tablets while the text of the Orphic Rhapsodies has remained under-examined mostly due to its fragmentary nature and the lack of a reconstruction. This book brings all of the major components of Orphism together in one study, in this way highlighting both parallels and divergences between them, and a wide range of non-Orphic sources referring to Orphic practices, beliefs and texts. For the complete analysis of the Orphic Rhapsodies a reconstruction of the text was necessary, which is included in this book along with a commentary and translation. This work proposes a new definition of Orphism and it can constitute a whole-encompassing and concise guide for scholars and students interested in Orphism. The reconstruction of the Orphic Rhapsodies could also contribute on shifting the understanding of this work to new perspectives as it demonstrates that the Orphic Rhapsodies was a more complex text rather than a single continuous theogonic narrative as has been approached up to this date.

This book introduces students to the chief disciplines, methods and sources employed in 'doing' ancient history, as opposed to 'reading' it. The book:
Encourages readers to engage with historical sources, rather than to be passive recipients of historical tales
Gives readers a sense of the nature of evidence and its use in the reconstruction of the past
Helps them to read a historical narrative with more critical appreciation
Encourages them to consider the differences between their own experience of ancient sources, and the use of these objects within the everyday life of ancient society
A concise bibliographical essay at the end of each chapter refers to introductions, indices, research tools and interpretations, and explains scholarly jargon
Written clearly, concisely and concretely, invoking ancient illustrations and modern parallels as appropriate.

The most passionate, individual, and controversial of the Latin love elegists, Propertius in Book 3 covers a broad range of subject matter and a vast geographical reach. After books focused on his mistress Cynthia, he maintains his elegiac role but expands his range to provide a lover's commentary on life, discussing luxury, nudity, art, the empire, and the dangers of travel for profit and war. This detailed commentary uses the text recently published in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and sets out to build on the richness of the material in the book by providing clear introductions to the genres the poems explore - the Greek elegy of Callimachus, epic, tragedy, hymn and epigram - and to topics such as patronage, philosophy, and the images of love as slavery and as warfare.

Examining Malory's political language, this study offers a revisionary view of Arthur's kingship in the Morte Darthur and the role of the Round Table fellowship. Considering a range of historical and political sources, Lexton suggests that Malory used a specific lexicon to engage with contemporary problems of kingship and rule.

A detailed examination of Proverbs 1-9, an early Jewish poetic work. Stuart Weeks incorporates studies of literature from ancient Egypt and from the Dead Sea scrolls, but his focus is on the background and use of certain key images in the text. Proverbs 1-9 belongs to an important class of biblical literature (wisdom literature), and is less well known as a whole than the related books of Job and Ecclesiastes, partly because it has been viewed until recently as a dull and muddled school-book. However, parts of it have been profoundly influential on the development of both Judaism and Christianity, and occupy a key role in modern feminist theology. Weeks demonstrates that those parts belong to a much broader and more intricate set of ideas than older scholarship allowed.

Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 explores the diverse ways that contemporary world fiction has engaged with ancient Greek myth. Whether as a framing device, or a filter, or via resonances and parallels, Greek myth has proven fruitful for many writers of fiction since the end of the Cold War. This volume examines the varied ways that writers from around the world have turned to classical antiquity to articulate their own contemporary concerns. Featuring contributions by an international group of scholars from a number of disciplines, the volume offers a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach to contemporary literature from around the world. Analysing a range of significant authors and works, not usually brought together in one place, the book introduces readers to some less-familiar fiction, while demonstrating the central place that classical literature can claim in the global literary curriculum of the third millennium. The modern fiction covered is as varied as the acclaimed North American television series The Wire, contemporary Arab fiction, the Japanese novels of Haruki Murakami and the works of New Zealand's foremost Maori writer, Witi Ihimaera.

Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes ("wise ones") produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide the closest analogues for Bede's description of Caedmon's production of Old English poetry. This ground-breaking study displays the transformations created by the growth of vernacular literatures and bilingual intellectual cultures. Gaelic missionaries and educational opportunities helped shape the Northumbrian "Golden Age", its manuscripts, hagiography, and writings of Aldhelm and Bede.

Beowulf, the primary epic of the English language, is a powerful heroic poem eloquently expressive of the Anglo-Saxon culture that produced it. In this beautiful book a designer, a poet, and a specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature recreate Beowulf for a modern audience. Interweaving evocative images, a new interpretation in verse, and a running commentary that helps clarify the action and setting of the poem as well as the imagery, the book brings new life to this ancient masterpiece. Randolph Swearer's oblique and allusive images create an archaic, mysterious atmosphere by depicting in forms and shadows the world of Germanic antiquity-Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon art, artifacts, and scenery. At the same time, Raymond Oliver gives Beowulf a world in which to live, filling in the cultural gaps not with a thick matrix of footnotes but with poetry itself. Unlike many translations of Beowulf in existence, Oliver's retelling of the epic uses modern verse forms for poetic effect and includes a wealth of historically authentic descriptions, characterizations, and explanations necessary for modern readers. Marijane Osborn completes the process of restoring context to the poem by supplying a commentary to clarify the historical and geographical dimensions of the story as well as the imagery that accompanies it. All three work together to bring a likeness of an old and elusive tale to today's reader. "The book's design and the commentary on it provide a unique visual complement to Oliver's poem... A strange and moving story, compellingly told and seriously interesting to any serious reader of books."-Fred C. Robinson, from the Introduction

This is a book about two empires-America and Rome-and the forms of time we create when we think about them together. Ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, through novels, journalism, film, and photography, Time and Antiquity in American Empire reconfigures our understanding of how cultural and political life has generated an analogy between Roman antiquity and the imperial US state-both to justify and perpetuate it, and to resist and critique it. The book takes in a wide scope, from theories of historical time and imperial culture, through the twin political pillars of American empire-republicanism and slavery-to the popular genres that have reimagined America's and Rome's sometimes strange orbit: Christian fiction, travel writing, and science fiction. Through this conjunction of literary history, classical reception studies, and the philosophy of history, however, Time and Antiquity in American Empire builds a more fundamental inquiry: about how we imagine both our politics and ourselves within historical time. It outlines a new relationship between text and context, and between history and culture; one built on the oscillating, dialectical logic of the analogy, and on a spatialising of historical temporality through the metaphors of constellations and networks. Offering a fresh reckoning with the historicist protocols of literary study, this book suggests that recognizing the shape of history we step into when we analogize with the past is also a way of thinking about how we have read-and how we might yet read.

This volume is a collection of papers revealing the largely unexplored boundary between linguistic and literary approaches to classical texts. Eleven contributions by various scholars discuss a wide range of linguistic and literary apects of classical texts: the narratee in the prologues of Sophocles' Trachiniae and of Euripides, the chronology in Pindar's Odes, the relation between tense-aspect and Discourse Modes in Thucydides, Xenophon, Vergil and Ovid, the use of aspect in the Law Code of Gortyn, expressions of futurity and the word order of adjectives in Herodotus, and, finally, ancient and modern views on word order. Following an interdisciplinary approach, all contributions aim at bridging the gap between linguistic and literary study of classical texts.

Starting from the authors' discovery that the Persian epic poem V?miq and ?Adhr? by ?Un?ur? (11th century AD) derives from the ancient Greek novel of "M?tiokhos and Parthenop?," the book contains critical editions of the Greek and Persian fragments and testimonia, with English translation and comments. The exciting story of the modern recovery of the two texts is told, and the transformations of the productive theme of "The ardent lover and the virgin" are traced from Greek novel to Persian poem, and through later Persian and Turkish literature. Of particular importance is the authors' attempt to reconstruct the common plot and individual variations, adding a new work to the limited corpus of ancient novels and shedding new light on the genre of Persian epic poetry.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.
None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.
The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

This book provides an engaging, systematic introduction to religion in the Roman empire.* Covers both mainstream Graeco-Roman religion and regional religious traditions, from Egypt to Western Europe* Examines the shared assumptions and underlying dynamics that characterized religious life as a whole* Draws on a wide range of primary material, both textual and visual, from literary works, inscriptions and monuments* Offers insight into the religious world in which contemporary rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both had their origin

Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original.
The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. The author shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid: where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

Clarke takes a new look at how life, consciousness, and death are dealt with in the poems of Homer. Modern assumptions about human identity are cast aside to allow Homer's view of man to emerge. The reader of Greek poetry is encouraged to take a deeper look at words that at first seem simple and easy to translate with the result that new insights are offered on early Greek beliefs about the things that are called in English by the names of body and soul.

This book presents an introduction to the key texts and historical, cultural and critical contexts of medieval romance. "Medieval English Romance in Context" is a clear, accessible and concise introduction to medieval English verse romantic texts and their wider contexts. It begins by introducing key issues and events that impacted on romance writing and its reception such as chivalric ideals, the Black Death, wars and 'Englishness' as well as key literary issues such as medieval manuscript production and its transmission. Close readings of key texts - including "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", Breton lays and Chaucer's "The Man of Law's Tale" - highlight generic features and issues like family drama, space and time, and nationhood. The final section introduces key critical interpretations from different perspectives including gender and queer theory, and post-colonialism in medieval studies. A chapter on afterlives and adaptations explores reinterpretations of medieval romance and the Arthurian cycles in a range of popular texts and narratives from Doctor Who to Batman. 'Review, Reading and Research' sections give suggestions for further reading, discussion and research. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Medieval English Romance. "Texts and Contexts" is a series of clear, concise and accessible introductions to key literary fields and concepts. The series provides the literary, critical, historical context for texts and authors in a specific literary area in a way that introduces a range of work in the field and enables further independent study and reading.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy was "but a series of footnotes to Plato." By the same token, one could argue that all of Western civilization is but an extension of the ancient Greek cultural legacy. The Greeks invented tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophy, and democracy. They also made remarkable advances in science, medicine, and mathematics. In the author's view, what ties this wide-ranging intellectual ferment together is a restless search for wisdom.
The author looks at ten outstanding examples of Greek wisdom, offering fresh and engaging portraits of the epic poets (Homer, Hesiod); dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes); historians (Herodotus, Thucydides); and philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) against the background of Greek history. In each case he asks what the author has to tell us-- regardless of genre--about our place in the world and how we should live our lives.
By surveying some of the highest peaks of ancient civilization, the author argues that we gain perspective on the historical terrain that lies below. This book presents an eloquent and convincing case that a study of the Greek classics, as Gustave Flaubert explained, makes us "greater, wiser, purer."

A collection of articles by Richard E. Mitchell presenting all the major historiographical problems scholars encounter in reconstructing the early Republic. Mitchell was one of the first scholars to question the practice of taking the broad outlines of the accounts handed down by Roman historians (writing hundreds of years later) at face value in writing modern accounts of the period.

An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures - now published by Boydell and Brewer - 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 both the British Isles and Europe. Topics in this volume include the political ecology of Havelok the Dane: Thomas Hoccleve and the making of "Chaucer"; and Britain and the Welsh Marches in Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Contributors: Alexis Kellner Becker, Emily Dolmans, Marcel Elias, PhilipKnox, Sebastian Langdell, Jonathan Morton, Marco Nievergelt, George Younge.

An investigation of the non-human world in the Exeter Book riddles, drawing on the exciting new approaches of eco-criticism and eco-theology. Humanity is a dominant presence in the Exeter Book riddle collection. It is frequently shown using, shaping and binding the physical world in which it lives. The riddles depict master and craftsman and use the familiar human worldas a point of orientation within a vast, overwhelming cosmos. But the riddles also offer an eco-centric perspective, one that considers the natural origins of man-made products and the personal plight of useful human resources. This study offers fresh insights into the collection, investigating humanity's interaction with, and attitudes towards, the rest of the created world. Drawing on the principles of eco-criticism and eco-theology, the study considers the cultural and biblical influences on the depiction of nature in the collection, arguing that the texts engage with post-lapsarian issues of exploitation, suffering and mastery. Depictions of marginalised perspectives ofsentient and non-sentient beings, such as trees, ore and oxen, are not just characteristic of the riddle genre, but are actively used to explore the point of view of the natural world and the impact humanity has on its non-human inhabitants. The author not only explores the riddles' resistance to anthropocentrism, but challenges our own tendency to read these enigmas from a human-centred perspective. Corinne Dale gained her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London.