There is a scholarly consensus on the crucial role played by the philosophers of late Antiquity, especially the dominant figure of Plotinus, in reshaping the thought of Plato and Aristotle. It is also well-established that the rise of the Arabic philosophy was fostered by the movement of the Graeco-Arabic transmission. However, the development of coherent theories describing the role of late ancient philosophical thought in the creation of Arabic philosophy has been hampered by poor interaction between the various disciplines involved. "The Libraries of the Neoplatonists," with its twin focus on the textual transmission within the schools of late Antiquity and on the dissemination of philosophical writings in the Syriac-speaking and Arabic-speaking areas, provides a magisterial survey of the Neoplatonic transmission of the Greek heritage to later ages and various linguistic areas.

This study innovatively explores how Malory’s Morte Darthur responds to available literary vernacular Arthurian traditions—the French defined as theoretical in impulse, the English as performative and experimental. Negotiating these influences, Malory transforms constructions of masculine heroism, especially in the presentation of Launcelot, and exposes the tensions and disillusions of the Arthurian project. The Morte poignantly conveys a desire for integrity in narrative and subject-matter, but at the same time tests literary conceptualizations of history, nationalism, gender and selfhood, and considers the failures of social and legal institutionalizations of violence, in a critique of literary form and of social order.

First ever English translation, with facing edition, of an important medieval German Arthurian romance. Composed in the 1480s by the Munich painter and writer Ulrich Fuetrer, Iban is the story of a young knight at King Arthur's court, who pursues adventure abroad, wins a land and its lady as his wife, loses both through his immaturity and negligence, and eventually regains his country and his spouse in a series of adventures that teach him to place the welfare of others above his own desires. A retelling of Hartmann von Aue's Middle High German classic Iwein from circa 1200, itself an adaptation of the Old French writer Chretien de Troyes' earlier Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, Fuetrer's Iban is one of fifteen narratives making up his massive Arthurian anthology, The Book of Adventures, which the author compiled for Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria-Munich. Among the last premodern retellings of the story of the knight Ywain, Ibanoffers modern readers an invaluable window onto how the most beloved Arthurian tales were reinterpreted at the end of the Middle Ages and at the threshold to the early modern period. This book offers an edition of the romance, the first for nearly a quarter of a century, accompanied by a facing translation, the first into a modern language of any part of the Book of Adventures. It also includes an introduction, putting the romance into its wider contexts, and explanatory notes.

Did the Greeks find it amusing, irritating or threatening when they heard another Greek speaking in a different dialect? This book exploits the evidence of ancient Greek comedy in an attempt to answer some of the questions about language attitude which are important for understanding ancient ideas about language and ethnicity. Conclusions are based on a comparative study of the language of dialect speaking characters and other foreigners in Old Comedy, and on an examination of linguistic attitudes in other genres of Greek literature.

Written while Boethius was in prison awaiting execution, The Consolation of Philosophy consists of a dialogue in alternating prose and verse between the author, lamenting his own sorrows, and a majestic woman, who is the incarnation of his guardian Philosophy. The woman develops a modified form of Neoplatonism and Stoicism, demonstrating the unreality of earthly fortunes, then proving that the highest good and the highest happiness are in God, and reconciling the apparent contradictions concerning the existence of everything.

City Government in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor examines the social and administrative transformation of Greek society within the early Roman empire, assessing the extent to which the numerous changes in Greek cities during the imperial period ought to be attributed to Roman influence. The topic is crucial to our understanding of the foundations of Roman imperial power because Greek speakers comprised the empire's second largest population group and played a vital role in its administration, culture, and social life.
This book elucidates the transformation of Greek society in this period from a local point of view, mostly through the study of local sources such as inscriptions and coins. By providing information on public activities, education, family connections, and individual careers, it shows the extent of and geographical variation in Greek provincial reaction to the changes accompanying the establishment of Roman rule. In general, new local administrative and social developments during the period were most heavily influenced by traditional pre-Roman practices, while innovations were few and of limited importance.
Concentrating on the province of Asia, one of the most urbanized Greek-speaking provinces of Rome, this work demonstrates that Greek local administration remained diverse under the Romans, while at the same time local Greek nobility gradually merged with the Roman ruling class into one imperial elite. This conclusion interprets the interference of Roman authorities in local administration as a form of interaction between different segments of the imperial elite, rejecting the old explanation of such interference as a display of Roman control over subjects.

This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement's manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.

This book meets the need to revise the standard interpretations of an apparently aporetic dialogue, full of eloquent silences and tricky suggestions, as it explores, among many other topics, the dramatis personae, including Plato's self-references behind the scene and the role of Socrates on stage, the question of method and refutation and the way dialectics plays a part in the dialogue. More especifically, it contains a set of papers devoted to perception and Plato's criticism of Heraclitus and Protagoras. A section deals with the problem of the relation between knowledge and thinking, including the the aviary model and the possibility of error. It also emphasizes some positive contributions to the classical Platonic doctrines and his philosophy of education. The reception of the dialogue in antiquity and the medieval age closes the analysis. Representing different hermeneutical traditions, prestigious scholars engage with these issues in divergent ways, as they shed new light on a complex controversial work.

This book explores for the first time the relation between Atticist lexicography and the pronunciation of Greek, an aspect of Atticism that has never been studied thouroughly before. It examines the ideas of the Atticist about what Greek should sound like, drawing on Atticist lexicography as the main source of information on the special pronunciation of the Atticist. The book addresses all scholars with an interest in Atticism, Greek in the Imperial period, and linguistic purism more in general. It sheds new light on an aspect of Atticism that is otherwise poorly attested, and complements the existiting study on later Greek and the impact of Atticism in the history of the Greek language.

This is the first volume dedicated to Aristophanes' comedy Peace that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Greek. It launches a much-needed new series of books each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Six chapters highlight the play's context, themes, staging and legacy including its response to contemporary wartime politics and the possible staging options for flying. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction to the play. Peace was first performed in 421 BC, perhaps only days before the signing of a peace treaty that ended ten years of fighting between Athens and Sparta (the Archidamian War). Aristophanes celebrates this prospect with an imaginative fantasy involving his hero's flight on a gigantic dung-beetle to Olympus, the rescue of the goddess Peace from her imprisonment in a cave, and her return to a Greece weary of ten years of war. Like most of the poet's comedies, this play is heavy on fantasy and imagination, light on formal structure, being an exuberant farce that champions the opponents of War and celebrates the delights of the return to country life with its smells, food and drink, its many pleasures and none of the complications that war brings in its wake.

It is perhaps a truism to note that ancient religion and rhetoric were closely intertwined in Greek and Roman antiquity. Religion is embedded in socio-political, legal and cultural institutions and structures, while also being influenced, or even determined, by them. Rhetoric is used to address the divine, to invoke the gods, to talk about the sacred, to express piety and to articulate, refer to, recite or explain the meaning of hymns, oaths, prayers, oracles and other religious matters and processes. The 13 contributions to this volume explore themes and topics that most succinctly describe the firm interrelation between religion and rhetoric mostly in, but not exclusively focused on, Greek and Roman antiquity, offering new, interdisciplinary insights into a great variety of aspects, from identity construction and performance to legal/political practices and a broad analytical approach to transcultural ritualistic customs. The volume also offers perceptive insights into oriental (i.e. Egyptian magic) texts and Christian literature.

Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Samuel Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire. This debate involved many of the major figures of the era, and at its core questioned what it meant for any given place or building to be thought of as specially holy. Many of the signature moments of the Carolingian Renaissance, in church reform, law, and political theory, depended on rival and bitterly controversial definitions of sacred architecture in the material world.

This book develops an authentic and at the same time revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. David offers a thoroughgoing treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a "dance of the Muses," lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. He also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, which applies a new theory of the Greek tonic accent and considers concretely the role of dance in performance.

A passionate reexamination of the ancient world and the lessons we can draw from antiquity In today's turbulent cultural moment, it is all too common for conservatives to invoke the wisdom of the ancient Greeks in the name of timeless virtues. At the same time, critics have charged that multiculturalists have hopelessly corrupted the study of antiquity itself, and that the teaching of Classics is dead. Trojan Horses is Page duBois's answer to scholars and theorists-such as Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, and William Bennett-who have appropriated antiquity in the service of a conservative political agenda. She challenges cultural conservatives' appeal to the authority of the Classics by revealing their presentation of ancient Greece as simplistic, ahistorical, and irreparably distorted by their politics. In its devastating critique of these pundits, Trojan Horses presents a more complex and more accurate view of ancient Greek politics, sex, and religion. In her incisive examinations of figures such as Daedalus and Artemis, duBois eloquently conveys their complexity and passion, but also unearths actions and beliefs that do not square so easily with today's conservative values. As duBois writes, "Like Bennett, I think we should study the past, but not to find nuggets of eternal wisdom. Rather we can comprehend in our history a fuller range of human possibilities, of beginnings, of error, and of difference." In these chapters, duBois offers readers a view of the ancient Greeks that is more nuanced, more subtle, more layered and in every way more historical than the portrait many of today's scholars strive to display in our classrooms. Sharp, timely, and engaging, Trojan Horses portrays the richness of ancient Greek culture while riding in to rescue the Greeks from the new barbarians.

The essays here, united by their appreciation of the centrality of translation to the interpretation of the medieval past, add to our understanding of how the old is continually made anew The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen an unprecedented level of creative engagement with early medieval literature, ranging from the long-awaited publication of Tolkien's version of Beowulf and the reworking of medieval lyrics by Ireland's foremost poets to the adaptation of Eddic and Skaldic poetry for the screen. This collection brings together scholars and accomplished translators working with Old English, Old Norse and MedievalIrish poetry, to take stock of this extraordinary proliferation of translation activity and to suggest new ways in which to approach these three dynamic literary traditions. The essays in this collection include critical surveysof texts and traditions to the present day, assessments of the practice and impact of individual translators from Jorge Luis Borges to Seamus Heaney, and reflections on the particular challenges of translating poetic forms and vocabulary into different languages and media. Together they present a series of informed and at times provocative perspectives on what it means to "carry across" early medieval poetry in our contemporary cultural climate. Dr Tom Birkett is lecturer in Old English at University College Cork; Dr Kirsty March-Lyons is a scholar of Old English and Latin poetry and co-organiser of the Irish Research Council funded conference and translation project "Eald to New". Contributors: Tom Birkett, Elizabeth Boyle, Hannah Burrows, Gareth Lloyd Evans, Chris Jones, Carolyne Larrington, Hugh Magennis, Kirsty March-Lyons, Lahney Preston-Matto, Inna Matyushina, Rory McTurk, Bernard O'Donoghue, Heather O'Donoghue, Tadhg O Siochain, Bertha Rogers, M.J. Toswell.

This book provides a needed new interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of the late medieval, guild-produced, biblical plays of York and Chester, England, commonly known as mystery plays. It argues that the plays are themselves a "drama of masculinity," that is, dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, mercantile worlds of their performance. It further contends that the plays in their historical performance contexts produced and reinforced masculine communities defined by occupation, thus visibly naturalizing the world of work as masculine. The book offers welcome insight into a significant, canonical genre of dramatic literature that has been studied previously in devotional and civic contexts, but not yet in its role in the cultural history of masculinity.

Quintus Ennius, often considered the father of Roman poetry, is best remembered for his epic poem, the Annals, a history of Rome from Aeneas until his own lifetime. Ennius represents an important bridge between Homer's works in Greek and Vergil's Aeneid. Jay Fisher argues that Ennius does not simply translate Homeric models into Latin, but blends Greek poetic models with Italic diction to produce a poetic hybrid. Fisher's investigation uncovers a poem that blends foreign and familiar cultural elements in order to generate layers of meaning for his Roman audience. Fisher combines modern linguistic methodologies with traditional philology to uncover the influence of the language of Roman ritual, kinship, and military culture on the Annals. Moreover, because these customs are themselves hybrids of earlier Roman, Etruscan, and Greek cultural practices, not to mention the customs of speakers of lesser-known languages such as Oscan and Umbrian, the echoes of cultural interactions generate layers of meaning for Ennius, his ancient audience, and the modern readers of the fragments of the Annals.

Is it possible to be a citizen of the world? Cosmopolitan thought has been at the center of recent debates surrounding human rights, legal obligations, international relations and political responsibility. Most of these debates trace their origins to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth Century or to the teaching of Greek and Roman philosophers. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought. This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse.

Building on recent work in critical animal studies and posthumanism, this book challenges past assumptions that animals were only explored as illustrative of humanity, not as interesting in their own right. The contributors combine close reading of Chaucer's texts with insights drawn from cultural or critical animal studies.

Frontiers of Pleasure calls into question a number of influential modern notions regarding aesthetics by going back to the very beginnings of aesthetic thought in Greece and raising critical issues regarding conceptions of how one responds to the beautiful. Despite a recent rebirth of interest in aesthetics, extensive discussion of this key cluster of topics has been absent. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi argues that although the Greek language had no formal term equivalent to the "aesthetic," the notion was deeply rooted in Greek thought. Her analysis centers on a dominant aspect of beauty--the aural--associated with a highly influential sector of culture that comprised both poetry and instrumental music, the "activity of the Muses," or mousike. The main argument relies on a series of close readings of literary and philosophical texts, from Homer and Plato through Kant, Joyce, and Proust. Through detailed attention to such scenes as Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens and Hermes' playing of his lyre for his brother Apollo, she demonstrates that the most telling moments in the conceptualization of the aesthetic come in the Greeks' debates and struggles over intense models of auditory pleasure. Unlike current tendencies to treat poetry as an early, imperfect mode of meditating upon such issues, Peponi claims that Greek poetry and philosophy employed equally complex, albeit different, ways of articulating notions of aesthetic response. Her approach often leads her to partial or total disagreement with earlier interpretations of some of the most well-known Greek texts of the archaic and classical periods. Frontiers of Pleasure thus suggests an alternative mode of understanding aesthetics in its entirety, freed from some modern preconceptions that have become a hindrance within the field."

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfillment of universal and long forgotten childhood wishes. The Oedipus complex--child, mother, father--suited the nuclear families of the mid-twentieth century. But a century after the arrival of the psychoanalytic Oedipus, it might seem that modern lives are very much changed. Typical family formations and norms of sexual attachment are changing, while the conditions of sexual difference, both biologically and socially, have undergone far-reaching modifications. Today, it is possible to choose and live subjective stories that the first psychoanalytic patients could only dream of. Different troubles and enjoyments are speakable and unspeakable; different selves are rejected, discovered, or sought. Many kinds of hitherto unrepresented or unrepresentable identity have entered into the ordinary surrounding stories through which children and adults find their bearings in the world, while others have become obsolete. Biographical narratives that would previously have seemed unthinkable or incredible--"a likely story!"--have acquired the straightforward plausibility of a likely story.
This book takes two Freudian routes to think about some of the present entanglements of identity. First, it follows Freud in returning to Greek tragedies--Oedipus and others--which may now appear strikingly different in the light of today's issues of family and sexuality. And second, it re-examines Freud's own theories from these newer perspectives, drawing out different strands ofhis stories of how children develop and how people change (or don't). Both kinds of mythology, the classical and the theoretical, may now, in their difference, illuminate some of the forming stories of our contemporary world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and new reproductive technologies.

The a oeEvents after Homera, described by Quintus Smyrnaeus in the third century AD in his Greek epic Posthomerica, are an attempt to bridge the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey, and to combine the various scattered reports of the battle for Troy into a single tale: the fate of Achilles, Ajax, Paris and the Amazon Penthesileia, the intervention of Neoptolemos and the story from the Trojan horse to the destruction of the city. The volume presented here summarizes the results of the first international conference on Quintus Smyrnaeus.

The Satyrica is a thrilling piece of literature and rare example of the Roman novel, credited to Titus Petronius. It is as modern today as in the time when it was written under the Roman emperor Nero. This is the first comprehensive commentary on the whole of Petronius' Satyrica, and an attempt to unify and comprehend, as much as possible, the fragmentary text by looking carefully at the bits and pieces which have survived. The Satyrica's unique nature as a historical document from the ancient world has meant that it has been studied vigorously by social historians; it provides rare insights into the lives of ordinary Roman people, such as the narrative about Trimalchio the Roman businessman, as well as documenting the evolution of Latin into the various Romance languages as we know them today. Petronius puts into the mouth of each of his characters a distinctive and socially defining level of Latin, so that the world of the Satyrica is populated not by characters who speak a kind of Latin which made Latin a dead language, but by flesh and blood people who have made Latin live until today. Schmeling's commentary offers readers a comprehensive analysis of this historically important text through philological, linguistic, historical, and narratological discussions, while highlighting past doubts on Petronius' authorship of the Satyrica.

This classic work not only records developments in the form and style of Greek drama, it also analyses the reasons for these changes. It provides illuminating answers to questions that have confronted generations of students, such as:
* why did Aeschylus introduce the second actor?
* why did Sophocles develop character drawing?
* why are some of Euripides' plots so bad and others so good?
Greek Tragedy is neither a history nor a handbook, but a penetrating work of criticism which all students of literature will find suggestive and stimulating.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203412605

In The Babylonian Disputation Poems Enrique Jimenez studies a group of ancient Babylonian poems that feature discussions between animals and trees. Using intertextual parallels and comparison with similar works in other literatures, he espouses a new classification of the Babylonian disputation poems as parodies. After examining neighboring traditions of literary disputation, he argues that the Babylonian poems influenced them, and that some may have been translated from Akkadian to Aramaic, from Aramaic and Syriac to Arabic. In addition, The Babylonian Disputation Poems provides editions of several previously unpublished Babylonian disputations, such as Palm and Vine and the Series of the Spider. It also offers the first edition of the latest known Babylonian fable, The Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren. "The present book is an exemplary model for editing and commenting upon ancient texts, and almost every approach has been taken into account." -Markham J. Geller, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019)