|
Showing 1 - 25 of
37 matches in All Departments
Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued
book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman
texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian
writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original
meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations.
Through close philological examination of the words for "sin," in
particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their
uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the
common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed
has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired
a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
It is now recognized that emotions have a history. In this book,
eleven scholars examine a variety of emotions in ancient China and
classical Greece, in their historical and social context. A general
introduction presents the major issues in the analysis of emotions
across cultures and over time in a given tradition. Subsequent
chapters consider how specific emotions evolve and change. For
example, whereas for early Chinese thinkers, worry was a moral
defect, it was later celebrated as a sign that one took
responsibility for things. In ancient Greece, hope did not always
focus on a positive outcome, and in this respect differed from what
we call "hope." Daring not to do, or "undaring," was itself an
emotional value in early China. While Aristotle regarded the
inability to feel anger as servile, the Roman Stoic Seneca rejected
anger entirely. Hatred and revenge were encouraged at one moment in
China and repressed at another. Ancient Greek responses to tragedy
do not map directly onto modern emotional registers, and yet are
similar to classical Chinese and Indian descriptions. There are
differences in the very way emotions are conceived. This book will
speak to anyone interested in the many ways that human beings feel.
The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off
to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and
Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to
come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the
novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres.
These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the
first section discuss "mapping the world in the novels." The second
part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation
between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the
way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as
the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the
fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character
and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient
fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and
cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.
This collection of original essays examines innovations in both the
theory and practice of classical philology. The chapters address
interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways. Some apply
theoretical insights derived from other disciplines, such as
folklore studies, performance theory, feminist criticism, and the
like, to classical texts. Others examine the relationships between
classics and cultural studies, popular literature, film, art
history, and other related disciplines. Others, again, look to the
evolution of theoretical methods within the discipline of classics.
Taken together, the essays offer a spectrum of new approaches in
the classics and their place within the profession.
The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off
to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and
Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to
come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the
novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres.
These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the
first section discuss "mapping the world in the novels." The second
part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation
between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the
way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as
the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the
fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character
and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient
fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and
cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.
Comedy, with its happy endings, attempts to resolve conflicts that
arise in the real world. These conflicts, however, leave their mark
on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies in
characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology, exploits a new and
distinct critical method - ideological criticism - to analyze how
ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in
the society of the classical city-state. Konstan begins by
examining the utopian features of Aristophanes' comedies - for
example, an all-powerful city inhabited by birds, or a world of
limitless wealth presided over by the god of Wealth himself - as
interventions in the political issues of his time. He goes on to
explore the more private world of Menandrean comedy (as well as two
adaptations of Menander by the Roman playwright Terence),
illustrating how problems of social status, citizenship, and gender
are negotiated by means of elaborately contrived plots. Konstan
closes with a chapter examining an imitation of ancient comedy by
Moliere, and the way in which the ideology of emerging capitalism
transforms the premises of the classical genre.
Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi
Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius
Annaeus Seneca offers authoritative, modern English translations of
the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE 65 CE).
The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies presents all of his
dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.
The first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The
Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in
emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of
political tragedy. This second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules
Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of
accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the
translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a
correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and
with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition,
each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator's introduction
offering reflections on the work's context and meaning. Notes are
provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of
classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of
use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the
Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative
literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.
Those who study the nature of beauty are at once plagued by a
singular issue: what does it mean to say something is beautiful? On
the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the
other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely
supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of
disinterested contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is a
contested concept, and both sides feel comfortable appealing to the
authority of Plato, and via him, to the ancient Greeks generally.
So, who is right--if either?
Beauty offers an elegant investigation of ancient Greek notions of
beauty and, in the process, sheds light on modern aesthetics and
how we ought to appreciate the artistic achievements of the
classical world itself. The book begins by reexamining the commonly
held notion that the ancient Greeks possessed no term that can be
unambiguously defined as "beauty" or "beautiful." Author David
Konstan discusses a number of Greek approximations before
positioning the heretofore unexamined term kallos as the key to
bridging the gap between beauty and desire, and tracing its
evolution as applied to physical beauty, art, literature, and more.
Throughout, the discussion is enlivened with thought-provoking
stories taken from Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and others.
The book then examines corresponding terms in ancient Latin
literature to highlight the survival of Greek ideas in the Latin
West. The final chapter will compare the ancient Greek conception
of beauty with modern notions of beauty and aesthetics. In
particular, the book will focus on the reception of classical Greek
art in the Renaissance and how Vasari and his contemporaries
borrowed from Plato the sense that the beauty in art was
transcendental, but left out the erotic dimension of viewing. A
study of the ancient Greek idea of beauty shows that, even if
Greece was the inspiration for modern aesthetic ideals, the Greek
view of the relationship between beauty and desire was surprisingly
consistent--and different from our own. Through this magisterial
narrative, it is possible to identify how the Greeks thought of
beauty, and what it was that attracted them. Their perceptions
still have something important to tell us about art, love,
desire--and beauty."
In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of
interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not
exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not
fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in
the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures.
It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of
interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology,
remorse, and a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would
emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law,
politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian
concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness
was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it
to earth and make it a human trait.
"Pity Transformed" is an examination of how pity was imagined and
expressed in classical antiquity. It pays particular attention to
the ways in which the pity of the Greeks and Romans differed from
modern ideas. Among the topics investigated in this study are the
appeal to pity in courts of law and the connection between pity and
desert; the relation between pity and love or intimacy; self-pity;
the role of pity in war and its relation to human rights and human
dignity; divine pity from paganism to Christianity; and why pity
was considered an emotion. This book will lead readers to ponder
how the Greeks and Romans were both like and unlike us in this
fundamental area of cultural sensibility.
A new translation of Aristotle's classic work on the natural
sciences.
This book is a history of friendship in Greece and Rome, from the warrior society of the Homeric epics to the time of the Christian Roman Empire. It demonstrates how ancient friendship resembles modern conceptions, and how it evolves in different social contexts. The book sheds new light on such questions as friendship and democracy, the importance of friends in government and in philosophical communities, women's friendships, and the transformation of friendship under the influence of Christian ideas of brotherhood.
This book - the only history of friendship in classical antiquity
that exists in English - examines the nature of friendship in
Greece and Rome from Homer to the Christian Roman Empire of the
fourth century AD. Friendship is conceived of as a voluntary and
loving relationship, but there are major shifts in emphasis from
the bonding among warriors in epic poetry, to the egalitarian ties
characteristic of the Athenian democracy, the status-conscious
connections in Rome and the Hellenistic kingdoms, and the
commitment to a universal love among Christian writers. Friendship
is also examined in relation to erotic love and comradeship, for
its role in politics and economic life, in philosophical and
religious communities, in connection with patronage and the private
counsellors of kings, and in respect to women. Its relation to
modern friendship is also fully discussed.
This book is about love in the classical world - not erotic passion
but the kind of love that binds together intimate members of a
family and very close friends, but which may also extend to include
a wider range of individuals for whom we care deeply. David Konstan
begins the book with a discussion of friendship, focusing
particularly on the Greek notion that in friendship the identities
of two friends all but merge into one. The book then turns to the
question of loyalty, and why loyalty seems not to have achieved the
status of a virtue in classical thought, before considering love in
relation to generosity, favors, and gratitude. There follows a
discussion of grief, which is a symptom of the loss of a loved one.
The book concludes with an examination of love as the basis of
civic solidarity. In each case, love is the gravitational center of
the relations under examination. In this, the book departs from the
more usual analysis of these affective ties in terms of
reciprocity, which in one way or another involves an expectation of
return. Seen this way, such relationships seem to have a selfish or
at least self-centered dimension, as distinct from truly
other-regarding attitudes. While it is true that the ancient
sources sometimes describe these relations, including friendship,
as forms of mutual obligation, there is also a counter strand that
emphasizes genuine altruism, and it is this aspect that the book
seeks to bring out. A close look at how love drew into its orbit
the various relations examined in this book sheds light not only on
some central features of ancient habits of thought but also on our
own contemporary notions of love, altruism, and friendship.
Several decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Roman
thinkers developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of
thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together,
they offer many perspectives that are of philosophical interest in
their own right. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy explores a
range of such Roman philosophical perspectives through thirty-four
newly commissioned essays. Where Roman philosophy has long been
considered a mere extension of Hellenistic systems of thought, this
volume moves beyond the search for sources and parallels and
situates Roman philosophy in its distinctive cultural context. The
Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy emphasizes four features of
Roman philosophy: aspects of translation, social context,
philosophical import, and literary style. The authors adopt an
inclusive approach, treating not just systematic thinkers such as
Cicero and Augustine, but also poets and historians. Topics covered
include ethnicity, cultural identity, literary originality, the
environment, Roman philosophical figures, epistemology, and ethics.
In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of
interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not
exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not
fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in
the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures.
It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of
interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology,
remorse, and a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would
emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law,
politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian
concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness
was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it
to earth and make it a human trait.
In this book, eminent scholars of classical antiquity and ancient
and medieval Judaism and Christianity explore the nature and place
of forgiveness in the pre-modern Western world. They discuss
whether the concept of forgiveness, as it is often understood
today, was absent, or at all events more restricted in scope than
has been commonly supposed, and what related ideas (such as
clemency or reconciliation) may have taken the place of
forgiveness. An introductory chapter reviews the conceptual
territory of forgiveness and illuminates the potential breadth of
the idea, enumerating the important questions a theory of the
subject should explore. The following chapters examine forgiveness
in the contexts of classical Greece and Rome; the Hebrew Bible, the
Talmud, and Moses Maimonides; and the New Testament, the Church
Fathers, and Thomas Aquinas.
The second of two volumes collecting the complete tragedies of
Seneca. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi
Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Complete Works of Lucius
Annaeus Seneca offers authoritative, modern English translations of
the writings of the Stoic philosopher and playwright (4 BCE-65 CE).
The two volumes of The Complete Tragedies presents all of his
dramas, expertly rendered by preeminent scholars and translators.
The first volume contains Medea, The Phoenician Women, Phaedra, The
Trojan Women, and Octavia, the last of which was written in
emulation of Senecan tragedies and serves as a unique example of
political tragedy. This second volume includes Oedipus, Hercules
Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, and Agamemnon. High standards of
accuracy, clarity, and style are maintained throughout the
translations, which render Seneca into verse with as close a
correspondence, line for line, to the original as possible, and
with special attention paid to meter and overall flow. In addition,
each tragedy is prefaced by an original translator's introduction
offering reflections on the work's context and meaning. Notes are
provided for the reader unfamiliar with the culture and history of
classical antiquity. Accordingly, The Complete Tragedies will be of
use to a general audience and professionals alike, from the
Latinless student to scholars and instructors of comparative
literature, classics, philosophy, drama, and more.
Classical Greece was permeated by a spirit of rivalry. Games and
sports, theatrical performances, courtroom trials, recitation of
poetry, canvassing for public office, war itself - all aspects of
life were informed by a competitive ethos. This pioneering book
considers how the Greeks viewed, explained, exploited and
controlled the emotions that entered into such rivalrous
activities, and looks at what the private and public effects were
of such feelings as ambition, desire, pride, passion, envy and
spite. Among the questions the authors address: How was envy
distinguished from emulation? Was rivalry central to democratic
politics? What was the relation between envy and erotic jealousy?
Did the Greeks feel erotic jealousy at all? Did the views of
philosophers correspond to those reflected in the historians,
tragic poets and orators? Were there differences in attitude
towards the rivalrous emotions within ancient Greece, or between
Greece and Rome? Did jealousy, envy and malice have bad effects on
ancient society, or could they be channelled to positive ends by
stimulating effort and innovation?Can the ancient Greek and Roman
views of envy, spite and jealousy contribute anything to our own
understanding of these universally troubling emotions? This is the
first book devoted to the emotions of rivalry in the classical
world taken as a whole. With chapters written by a dozen scholars
in ancient history, literature and philosophy, it contributes
notably to the study of ancient Greece and to the history of the
emotions more generally.
Broken Columns Two Roman Epic Fragments: "The Achilleid" of Publius
Papinius Statius and "The Rape of Proserpine" of Claudius
Claudianus Edited and Translated by David R. Slavitt. Afterword by
David Konstan "With unerring instinct Slavitt has juxtaposed two
witty and ironic post-Ovidian tales of coming of age, Statius's
unfinished "Deeds of Achilles" and Claudian's "Rape of Proserpina."
Those were the mythical days when teenagers were charming and rape
consensual (for Deidamia) or at least (for Proserpina) the path to
queenly power. Epic was never the same after Ovid, whether in
Statius's sentimental comedy of love and war or in Claudian's
darker divine intrigue sacrificing a mother's love to avert an
infernal coup d'etat. Slavitt's versatile idiom makes vivid the
personalities of Statius's drama and updates Claudian's
self-conscious poetics in versions that are both free and true to
the poets' art."--Elaine Fantham, Princeton University "Slavitt
does a real service by putting into English verse for the first
time this century two poems of great grace and charm. . . .
Konstan's afterword itself is a gem. . . . I would urge anyone who
thinks that Statius only wrote gruesome epic and Claudian only dull
panegyric to read this slim and sprightly volume."--"Bryn Mawr
Classical Review" "David Slavitt appears to be fluent not only in
Latin but also in hexameters. His translation seems to flow
effortlessly from his pen. His speech and vocabulary are
contemporary and easy to read. . . . This slim volume is further
enhanced by the brilliant essay by David Konstan that is appended
to it. The essay is reminiscent of the introductions written by R.
C. Jebb in his editions of the plays of Sophocles--a combination of
a scholarly discussion of the underlying myth in the text
interspersed with perceptive literary criticism."--"American Book
Review" There is more to classical literature than just the
classics. Here David Slavitt expands the canon by presenting vivid,
graceful, and amusing translations of two neglected fragmentary
works of Latin literature. The first is Publius Papinius Statius's
first-century epic "Achilleid," an extraordinary fusion of epic and
New Comedy sentiments and humor that may represent the earliest
literary imagining of the charm of adolescence. It relates the
story of the education of Achilles under the centaur Chiron, his
adopting the disguise of a girl during his sojourn at the court of
Lycomedes in Scyros, his love affair with Deidamia, his detection
by Ulysses and Diomedes, and his departure for Troy. The second
work is Claudius Claudianus's unfinished fourth-century epic
version of the rape of Proserpine. The two works together make a
delightful pair. The afterword by David Konstan explores the
traditions in which--and against which--Statius and Claudian
composed their versions of these well-known stories. David R.
Slavitt was educated at Andover and Yale and has published dozens
of books: original poetry, translations, novels, critical works,
and short stories. He worked for seven years as a journalist at
"Newsweek" and continues to do freelance reporting and reviewing.
With Palmer Bovie he coedited the Penn Greek Drama series and the
Complete Roman Drama in Translation. 1997 104 pages 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN 978-0-8122-1630-1 Paper $21.95s 14.50 World Rights Classics,
Literature Short copy: I would urge anyone who thinks that Statius
only wrote gruesome epic and Claudian only dull panegyric to read
this slim and sprightly volume."--"Bryn Mawr Classical Review"
Those who study the nature of beauty are at once plagued by a
singular issue: what does it mean to say something is beautiful? On
the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the
other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is widely
supposed that the proper response to a work of art is one of
disinterested contemplation. At its core, then, beauty is a
contested concept, and both sides feel comfortable appealing to the
authority of Plato, and via him, to the ancient Greeks generally.
So, who is right-if either? Beauty offers an elegant investigation
of ancient Greek notions of beauty and, in the process, sheds light
on modern aesthetics and how we ought to appreciate the artistic
achievements of the classical world itself. The book begins by
reexamining the commonly held notion that the ancient Greeks
possessed no term that can be unambiguously defined as "beauty" or
"beautiful." Author David Konstan discusses a number of Greek
approximations before positioning the heretofore unexamined term
kallos as the key to bridging the gap between beauty and desire,
and tracing its evolution as applied to physical beauty, art,
literature, and more. Throughout, the discussion is enlivened with
thought-provoking stories taken from Homer, Plato, Xenophon,
Plutarch, and others. The book then examines corresponding terms in
ancient Latin literature to highlight the survival of Greek ideas
in the Latin West. The final chapter will compare the ancient Greek
conception of beauty with modern notions of beauty and aesthetics.
In particular, the book will focus on the reception of classical
Greek art in the Renaissance and how Vasari and his contemporaries
borrowed from Plato the sense that the beauty in art was
transcendental, but left out the erotic dimension of viewing. A
study of the ancient Greek idea of beauty shows that, even if
Greece was the inspiration for modern aesthetic ideals, the Greek
view of the relationship between beauty and desire was surprisingly
consistent-and different from our own. Through this magisterial
narrative, it is possible to identify how the Greeks thought of
beauty, and what it was that attracted them. Their perceptions
still have something important to tell us about art, love,
desire-and beauty.
Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued
book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman
texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian
writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original
meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations.
Through close philological examination of the words for "sin," in
particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their
uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the
common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed
has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired
a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
"In the Greek romances," writes David Konstan, "sighs, tears, and
suicide attempts are as characteristic of the male as of the female
in distress; ruses, disguises, and outright violence in defense of
one's chastity are as much the part of the female as of the male."
Exploring how erotic love is represented in ancient amatory
literature, Konstan points to the symmetry in the passion of the
hero and heroine as a unique feature of the Greek novel: they fall
mutually in love, they are of approximately the same age and social
class, and their reciprocal attachment ends in marriage. He shows
how the plots of the novels are perfectly adapted to expressing
this symmetry and how, because of their structure, they differ from
classical epic, elegy, comedy, tragedy, and other genres, including
modern novels ranging from Sidney to Harlequin romances. Using
works like Chaereas and Callirhoe and Daphnis and Chloe, Konstan
examines such issues as pederasty, the role of eros in both marital
and nonmarital love, and the ancient Greek concept of fidelity. He
reveals how the novelistic formula of sexual symmetry reverses the
pattern of all other ancient genres, where erotic desire appears
one-sided and unequal and is often viewed as either a weakness or
an aggressive, conquering power. Konstan's approach draws upon
theories concerning the nature of sexuality in the ancient world,
reflected in the work of Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and John
Winkler. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library
uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available
previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of
Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original
texts of these important books while presenting them in durable
paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy
Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage
found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University
Press since its founding in 1905.
|
|