A body of theory has developed about the role and function of memory in creating and maintaining cultural identity. Yet there has been no consideration of the rich Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of laments for fallen cities in commemorating or resolving communal trauma. This volume offers new insights into the trope of the fallen city in folk-song and a variety of literary genres. These commemorations reveal memories modified by diverse agendas, and contains narrative structures and motifs that show the meaning of memory-making about fallen cities. Opening a new avenue of research into the Mediterranean genre of city lament, this book examines references to, or re-workings of, otherwise lost texts or ways of commemorating fallen cities in the extant texts, and with greater emphasis than usual on the point of view of the victors.

A body of theory has developed about the role and function of memory in creating and maintaining cultural identity. Yet there has been no consideration of the rich Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of laments for fallen cities in commemorating or resolving communal trauma. This volume offers new insights into the trope of the fallen city in folk-song and a variety of literary genres. These commemorations reveal memories modified by diverse agendas, and contains narrative structures and motifs that show the meaning of memory-making about fallen cities. Opening a new avenue of research into the Mediterranean genre of city lament, this book examines references to, or re-workings of, otherwise lost texts or ways of commemorating fallen cities in the extant texts, and with greater emphasis than usual on the point of view of the victors.

*A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe is the first comprehensive English ]language study of the reception of classical antiquity in Eastern and Central Europe. This groundbreaking work offers detailed case studies of thirteen countries that are fully contextualized historically, locally, and regionally. * The first English-language collection of research and scholarship on Greco-Roman heritage in Eastern and Central Europe * Written and edited by an international group of seasoned and up-and-coming scholars with vast subject-matter experience and expertise * Essays from leading scholars in the field provide broad insight into the reception of the classical world within specific cultural and geographical areas * Discusses the reception of many aspects of Greco-Roman heritage, such as prose/philosophy, poetry, material culture * Offers broad and significant insights into the complicated engagement many countries of Eastern and Central Europe have had and continue to have with Greco-Roman antiquity

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relationships between men and women, ideas of masculinity and femininity, the stock characters of dowered wife and of prostitute-all of these are frequently staged in Roman tragedies and comedies. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists from Shakespeare to Sondheim.

Ancient Obscenities inquires into the Greco-Roman handling of explicit representations of the body in its excretory and sexual functions, taking as its point of departure the modern preoccupation with the obscene. The essays in this volume offer new interpretations of materials that have been perceived by generations of modern readers as "obscene": the explicit sexual references of Greek iambic poetry and Juvenal's satires, Aristophanic aischrologia, Priapic poetics, and the scatology of Pompeian graffiti. Other essays venture in an even more provocative fashion into texts that are not immediately associated with the obscene: the Orphic Hymn to Demeter, Herodotus, the supposedly prim scripts of Plautus and the Attic orators. The volume focuses on texts but also includes a chapter devoted to visual representation, and many essays combine evidence from texts and material culture. Of all these texts, artifacts, and practices we ask the same questions: What kinds of cultural and emotional work do sexual and scatological references perform? Can we find a blueprintfor the ancient usage of this material? Additional contributors include Michael Broder, Frances Hickson Hahn, Seth Jeppesen, Barbara Kellum, Donald Lateiner, Sarah Levin-Richardson, Jess Miner, Kirk Ormand, Deborah H. Roberts, Ralph M. Rosen, and Elizabeth Young.