Language is in large part about the description of events occurring in the world around us. Relationships of different sorts between those events can be expressed by specific verb forms - or by syntactic constructions involving specific verb forms. The present study examines this facet of the Egyptian and Coptic verbal systems in isolation, singling out three types of relationships between events and the linguistic means by which they are expressed. This book comprises three chapters on the grammar of hieroglyphic Egyptian and its linear descendant, Coptic, covering more than 3000 years of language history. The initial chapter studies the verb form called "conjunctive", asserting that the function of the conjunctive is to "con-join" a chain of two or more events into a single - though compound - notion. The second chapter shows how a certain syntactic construction can be used to refer to events that are contiguous - that is, events that succeed one another rapidly in time. The final chapter examines verb forms that refer to events whose occurrence is contingent on the occurrence of other events implied or explicitly mentioned in the context. The three grammatical phenomena are respectively labeled conjunction, contiguity, and contingency. The first work in which the expression of relationships between events is studied in isolation as an important characteristic of the Egyptian and Coptic verbal systems, this study constitutes a significant advancement in our understanding of the ancient language of Egypt. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Egyptology, Coptology, and the Ancient Near East, as well as linguists, Byzantinists, and classicists.

Exploring the place of women in the socioeconomic system formulated in the Mishnah, a book of legal rules with a spiritual basis compiled by Jewish sages in second-century Palestine, this study reveals a fundamental ambiguity in the role of women. Both the property and the peers of men, in some circumstances women were considered to possess no powers, rights, or duties in law, and in others were judged morally, practically, and intellectually fit to own property, conduct business, engage in lawsuits, and manage their own personal affairs. Wegner spells out in detail these variations in status, analyzes them, and isolates the factors that account for differential treatment of different classes of women in the private domain and for differential treatment of men and women in the public domain of mishnaic culture, relating her findings to recent developments in feminist analyses of the status of women in patriarchy.

The letters of Seneca are uniquely engaging among the works that have survived from antiquity. They offer an urgent guide to Stoic self-improvement but also cast light on Roman attitudes towards slavery, gladiatorial combat and suicide. This selection of letters conveys their range and variety, with a particular focus on letters from the earlier part of the collection. As well as a general introduction, it features a brief introductory essay on each letter, which draws out its themes and sets it in context. The commentary explains the more challenging aspects of Seneca's Latin. It also casts light on his engagement with Stoic (and Epicurean) ideas, on the historical context within which the letters were written and on their literary sophistication. This edition will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of Seneca's moral and intellectual development.

It is widely believed that people living in the Middle Ages seldom traveled. But, as Medieval Travel and Travelers reveals, many medieval people - and not only Marco Polo - were on the move for a variety of different reasons. Assuming no previous knowledge of medieval civilizations, this volume allows readers to experience the excitement of men and women who ventured into new lands. By addressing cross-cultural interaction, religion, and travel literature, the collection sheds light on how travel shaped the way we perceive the world, while also connecting history to the contemporary era of globalization. Including a mix of complete sources, excerpts, and images, Medieval Travel and Travelers provides readers with opportunities for further reflection on what medieval people expected to find in foreign locales, while sparking curiosity about undiscovered spaces and cultures.

Aeschylus is the first of the great Greek playwrights, and the four plays in this volume demonstrate the remarkable range of Greek tragedy. Persians is the only surviving tragedy to draw on contemporary history, the Greeks' extraordinary victory over Persia in 480 BC. The Persians' aggression is inhuman in scale, and offends the gods, but while celebrating the Greek triumph, Aeschylus also portrays the shock of the defeated with some compassion. In Seven Against Thebes a royal family is cursed with self-destruction, in a remorseless tragedy that anticipates the grandeur of the later Oresteia. Suppliants portrays the wretched plight of the daughters of Danaus, fleeing from enforced marriage; as refugees they seek protection, and must plead a moral and political case to gain it. And in Prometheus Bound, Prometheus is relentlessly persecuted by Zeus for benefitting mankind in defiance of the god. Christopher Collard's highly readable new translation is accompanied by an introduction that sets the plays in their original context, and together with the notes considers theatrical and poetic issues, as well as details of content and language. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Aeschylus (ca. 525 456 BCE), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens and fought against the Persians at Marathon. He won the tragic prize at the City Dionysia thirteen times between ca. 499 and 458, and in his later years was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once.

Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The first volume of this new Loeb Classical Library edition offers fresh texts and translations by Alan H. Sommerstein of Persians, the only surviving Greek historical drama; "Seven against Thebes," from a trilogy on the conflict between Oedipus sons; "Suppliants," on the successful appeal by the daughters of Danaus to the king and people of Argos for protection against a forced marriage; and "Prometheus Bound" (of disputed authenticity), on the terrible punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to humans in defiance of Zeus.

Oedipus the King is the best-known play we have from the pen of Sophocles and was recognized as a masterpiece in Aristotle's Poetics, which cites the play more often than any other as an example of how to write tragedy. The principal character is the king of a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, who consults Apollo at Delphi and is told that the plague will end only when those who killed the previous king, Laius, are found and punished. He launches an investigation, in the course of which he learns not only that he is himself the killer, but that Laius was his father and Laius' widow, whom he married, his own mother. As a result of this revelation Oedipus changes from being a respected king and conscientious investigator into a polluted and self-blinded outcast. This volume presents a highly-polished English verse translation of Sophocles' powerful play which renders both the beauty of his language and the horror of the events being dramatized. A detailed introduction and notes clearly elucidate how the plot is constructed and the meaning this construction implies, as well as how Sophocles ably concealed the fact that his characters act in ways which differ from what we expect in real life. It also addresses influential misinterpretations, thereby offering an accessible and authoritative introduction to the play that will be of benefit to a wide range of readers.

Cicero's Brutus and Orator constitute his final major statements on the history of Roman oratory and the nature of the ideal orator. In the Brutus he traces the development of political and judicial speech over the span of 150 years, from the early second century to 46 BCE, when both of these treatises were written. In an immensely detailed account of some 200 speakers from the past he dispenses an expert's praise and criticism, provides an unparalleled resource for the study of Roman rhetoric, and engages delicately with the fraught political circumstances of the day, when the dominance of Julius Caesar was assured and the future of Rome's political institutions was thrown into question. The Orator written several months later, describes the form of oratory that Cicero most admired, even though he insists that neither he nor any other orator has been able to achieve it. At the same time, he defends his views against critics - the so-called Atticists - who found Cicero's style overwrought. In this volume, the first English translation of both works in more than eighty years, Robert Kaster provides faithful and eminently readable renderings, along with a detailed introduction that places the works in their historical and cultural context and explains the key stylistic concepts and terminology that Cicero uses in his analyses. Extensive notes accompany the translations, helping readers at every step contend with unfamiliar names, terms, and concepts from Roman culture and history.

The Goddess of Love, Aphrodite- or Venus, or Astarte- she has had many names. She is the goddess of life, fertility and renewal, but she is also the patroness of carnal desire: "a thousand honey secrets thou shalt know" is her promise to the boy Adonis in Shakespeare's poem about the pair. Incredibly, perhaps, he resists this offer- but most of us do not.The enduring role of the goddess in human sex and passion is well known, but how well is she suited for love and sexuality in the modern world?To understand that, we must trace something of her origins, and focus our attention on the way in which more recent writers and artists have imagined her.

Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides' "Medea", "The Children of Heracles", "Andromache", and "Iphigenia among the Taurians", fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles' satyr-drama "The Trackers". New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.

The Saturnalia, Macrobius's encyclopedic celebration of Roman culture written in the early fifth century CE, has been prized since the Renaissance as a treasure trove of otherwise unattested lore. Cast in the form of a dialogue, the Saturnalia treats subjects as diverse as the divinity of the Sun and the quirks of human digestion while showcasing Virgil as the master of all human knowledge from diction and rhetoric to philosophy and religion. The new Latin text is based on a refined understanding of the medieval tradition and improves on Willis's standard edition in nearly 300 places. The accompanying translation-only the second in English and the only one now in print-offers a clear and sprightly rendition of Macrobius's ornate Latin and is supplemented by ample annotation. A full introduction places the work in its cultural context and analyzes its construction, while indexes of names, subjects, and ancient works cited in both text and notes make the work more readily accessible than ever before.

'Dreams are products of the mind, and do not come from any external source' Artemidorus' The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica) is the richest and most vivid pre-Freudian account of dream interpretation, and the only dream-book to have survived complete from Graeco-Roman times. Written in Greek around AD 200, when dreams were believed by many to offer insight into future events, the work is a compendium of interpretations of dreams on a wide range of subjects relating to the natural, human, and divine worlds. It includes the meanings of dreams about the body, sex, eating and drinking, dress, the weather, animals, the gods, and much else. Artemidorus' technique of dream interpretation stresses the need to know the background of the dreamer, such as occupation, health, status, habits, and age, and the work is a fascinating social history, revealing much about ancient life, culture, and beliefs, and attitudes to the dominant power of Imperial Rome. Martin Hammond's fine translation is accompanied by a lucid introduction and explanatory notes by Peter Thonemann, which assist the reader in understanding this important work, which was an influence on both Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault.

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the acclaimed novel The Mere Wife. A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. This radical new verse translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye toward gender, genre, and history it has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries, transforming the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a thrilling tale in which the two categories often entwine.

The era of Old Comedy (c. 485 c. 380 BCE), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This new Loeb edition, the most extensive selection of the fragments available in English, presents the work of fifty-six poets, including Cratinus and Eupolis, the other members (along with Aristophanes) of the canonical Old Comic triad.

For each poet and play there is an introduction, brief notes, and select bibliography. Also included is a selection of ancient testimonia to Old Comedy, nearly one hundred unattributed fragments (both book and papyri), and descriptions of twenty-five vase-paintings illustrating Old Comic scenes. The texts are based on the monumental edition of Kassel and Austin, updated to reflect the latest scholarship.

Timaeus and Critias is a Socratic dialogue in two parts. A response to an account of an ideal state told by Socrates, it begins with Timaeus's theoretical exposition of the cosmos and his story describing the creation of the universe, from its very beginning to the coming of man. Timaeus introduces the idea of a creator God and speculates on the structure and composition of the physical world. Critias, the second part of Plato's dialogue, comprises an account of the rise and fall of Atlantis, an ancient, mighty and prosperous empire ruled by the descendents of Poseidon, which ultimately sank into the sea.

Callimachus was arguably the most important poet of the Hellenistic age, for two reasons: his engagement with previous theorists of poetry and his wide-ranging poetic experimentation. Of his poetic oeuvre, which exceeded what we now have of Theocritus, Aratus, Posidippus, and Apollonius combined, only his six hymns and around fifty of his epigrams have survived intact. His enormously influential Aetia, the collection of Iambi, the Hecale, and all of his prose output have been reduced to a handful of citations in later Greek lexica and handbooks or papyrus fragments. In recent years excellent commentaries and synthetic studies of the Aetia, the Iambi, and the Hecale have appeared or are about to appear. But there is no modern study in English of the collection of hymns. And while there are excellent commentaries in English on three of the hymns (Apollo, Athena, Demeter), the commentaries on Zeus and on Delos are limited in scope, and there is no commentary at all on the Artemis hymn. Synthetic studies in English for the most part treat only one hymn, not the collection, and tend to focus on Callimachus' intertextual relationships with his predecessors and/or his influence on Roman poetry. Yet recent work is requiring scholars to broaden their perspective and to consider Callimachus' religious, civic, and geo-political contexts much more systematically in attempting to understand the hymns. A further incentive is that apart from the Homeric and Orphic hymns, Callimachus' are the only other hymns that have survived intact; those written in earlier periods are now reduced to fragments. For these reasons a study of the six hymns together is a desideratum. An additional reason is that Callimachus' collection of six hymns is very likely to have been an authorially arranged poetry book, quite possibly the earliest such book that we have intact; therefore, it allows a unique perspective on the evolution of the form. This volume offers a text and commentary of all six hymns for advanced students of classics and classical scholars, as well as interpretive essays on each hymn that integrate what has been the dominant paradigm-intertextuality-into a broader focus on Callimachus' context. Her introduction treats the transmission of the hymns, the potential for and likelihood of the Homeric hymns as models, the hymns as a poetry book, their language and meter (especially in light of recent work done on this topic), performance practices, and their relationship to cult, court, local geographies, and panhellenic sanctuaries. For each hymn Stephens presents the Greek text, a translation, and a brief commentary containing important information or parallels for interpretation.

A. A. Long presents fourteen essays on the themes of selfhood and rationality in ancient Greek philosophy. The discussion ranges over seven centuries of innovative thought, starting with Heraclitus' injunction to listen to the cosmic logos, and concluding with Plotinus' criticism of those who make embodiment essential to human identity. For the Greek philosophers the notion of a rational self was bound up with questions about divinity and happiness called eudaimonia, meaning a god-favoured life or a life of likeness to the divine. While these questions are remote from current thought, Long also situates the book's themes in modern discussions of the self and the self's normative relation to other people and the world at large. Ideas and behaviour attributed to Socrates and developed by Plato are at the book's centre. They are preceded by essays that explore general facets of the soul's rationality. Later chapters bring in salient contributions made by Aristotle and Stoic philosophers. All but one of these pieces has been previously published in periodicals or conference volumes, but the author has revised and updated everything. The book is written in a style that makes it accessible to many kinds of reader, not only professors and graduate students but also anyone interested in the history of our identity as rational animals.

The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences c. 205 184 BCE, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and Moliere to modern times. This third volume of a new Loeb edition of all twenty-one of Plautus s extant comedies presents "The Merchant," "The Braggart Soldier," "The Ghost," and "The Persian "with freshly edited texts, lively modern translations, introductions, and ample explanatory notes.

Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, volume II brings together two new editions of the first fragmentarily extant columns of the Derveni Papyrus and seven scholarly articles devoted to their interpretation. The Derveni Papyrus is by far the most important textual discovery of the 20th century regarding early Greek philosophy, religion, exegetical theory and practice, linguistic ideas, and a host of other areas and issues. But the editorial and interpretative history of this extraordinary document has been very checkered. While the interpretation of the better preserved later columns is still highly controversial in many regards, at least the text of those columns has by and large found a scholarly consensus; but the editorial and interpretative situation with the worse preserved first columns is quite different. This volume offers not one but two editions of the first columns, by Richard Janko and by Valeria Piano, given that it is not currently possible to agree upon a single edition; and it explains clearly and in detail the papyrological problems and doubts that lead to these two editions, making it possible for readers (even non-papyrologists) to form their own informed judgment about the most likely readings to be adopted. Furthermore, it contains a number of articles by leading scholars on the Derveni Papyrus, above all offering original solutions to the question of the relation between the earlier and the later columns, but also providing analysis and interpretation of other, related problems.

Arete and the Odyssey's Poetics of Interrogation explores how the enigmatic Phaeacian queen, Arete, is at the heart of an epic-scale "poetics of interrogation" used throughout the Odyssey to negotiate Odysseus' kleos, or epic renown. Arete's interrogation of Odysseus has been especially problematic in scholarship, but diachronic and synchronic analysis of similar interrogations across Indo-European, Orphic, and Greek epigrammatic corpora show that the "stranger's interrogation" is a formula that demands performance and negotiation of status. Within the Odyssey, this interrogation is part of an intraformular network used to generate kleos, and the queen's question initiates the longest and most complex negotiation of Odysseus' status in epic and memory. Arete's role as interrogator not only explains her strange authority and resonance with both Penelope and comparative afterlife figures, but it also establishes a gendered, agonistic tension between she and her husband, Alkinoos, that influences the structure, genre, and narratology of performances across the Phaeacian episode. This book reinterprets the Odyssey's central episode and challenges several assumptions about Nausikaa and Alkinoos' famed hospitality, even demonstrating how the Apologue is organized as a response to competing inquiries into Odysseus' fundamental status in tradition. The Odyssey ultimately navigates away from Odysseus' public reputation and roots his status in private memories, and Arete's carefully arranged interventions signal the larger process by which the Odyssey immortalizes Odysseus in poetry as a nostos hero. The queen and her question invite new applications of oral poetics that shed light on the structure, composition, and reperformance of the Odyssey.