The Retrospective Muse showcases the celebrated work of Froma Zeitlin. Her instantly recognizable work, that brings together anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and an acute literary sensibility, opened a series of ancient texts and ideas to new forms of understanding. A selection of these luminous essays, on topics still timely today, are brought together for the first time in a volume which shows the full range and flair of her remarkable intellect. Together, these illuminating analyses show why Zeitlin's work on ancient Greek culture has had so enduring an impact on scholars across the world, not just in Classics but across multiple fields. From Homer to the Greek novel, from religion to erotics, from myth and ritual to theatrical performance, she expounds here some of the most important works of ancient writing, and some of modernity's most significant critical questions. Zeitlin's writing still sheds light on the durable aspects of Classics as a discipline—and this book encapsulates her achievement.

Representation of desiring subjects in the novel is one of the most illuminating issues in the area of ancient gender and sexuality, for such narratives subject societal norms to acute critique. This volume brings together fourteen essays originally given as oral presentations at the Fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN IV), held in Lisbon in July 2008. Employing feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, each offers a provocative investigation of sexual subjectivity as presented in the text or texts under discussion. The collection as a whole demonstrates the gradual convergence of formerly distinct norms of gendered behavior under pressure of emerging social realities.The editors of this volume are all well-known scholars in the fields of ancient narrative and/or ancient sexuality. Contributors include leading experts in these fields and emerging scholars whose research suggests directions for future exploration.

Relations between the sexes was a pervasive concern of ancient Greek thought and literature, extending from considerations of masculine and feminine roles in domestic and political spheres to the organization of the cosmos in a pantheon of gods and goddesses. In "Playing the Other" Froma Zeitlin explores the diversity and complexity of these interactions through the most influential literary texts of the archaic and classical periods ranging from epic (Homer) and didactic poetry (Hesiod) to the theatrical productions of tragedy and comedy in fifth-century Athens.
Zeitlin demonstrates the indispensable workings of gender as a major factor in Greek social, religious, and cultural practices and in more abstract ideas about nature and culture, public and private, citizen and outsider, self and other, and mortal and immortal. Focusing on the prominence of female figures in these male authored texts, she enlarges our perspective on critical components of political order and civic identity by including issues of sexuality, the body, modes of male and female maturation, and speculations about parentage, kinship, and reproductive strategies. Along with considerations of genre, poetics, and theatrical mimesis, she points to the powerful mythmaking capacities of Greek culture for creating memorable paradigms and dramatic scenarios that far exceed simple notions of male and female opposition and predictable enforcement of social norms. Consisting of both new and revised essays, "Playing the Other" is a wide-ranging account of a central category of Greek literature by a scholar who pioneered an approach to classics through the perspective of gender.

These critically diverse and innovative essays are aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama. Theatrical productions, which included music and dancing, were civic events in honor of the god Dionysos and were attended by a politically stratified community, whose delegates handled all details from the seating arrangements to the qualifications of choral competitors. The growing complexity of these performances may have provoked the Athenian saying "nothing to do with Dionysos" implying that theater had lost its exclusive focus on its patron. This collection considers how individual plays and groups of dramas pertained to the concerns of the body politic and how these issues were presented in the convention of the stage and as centerpieces of civic ceremonies. The contributors, in addition to the editors, include Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey Henderson, David Konstan, Franois Lissarrague, Oddone Longo, Nicole Loraux, Josiah Ober, Ruth Padel, James Redfield, Niall W. Slater, Barry Strauss, and Jesper Svenbro.

Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest--death, the body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination; the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness itself, or "alterity."

A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamer's sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly over time. Ancient Greece offers abundant evidence for a radically different set of sexual standards and behaviors from ours. Sex in ancient Hellenic culture assumed a variety of social and political meanings, whereas the modern development of a sex-centered model of personality now leads us to view sex as the key to understanding the individual. Drawing on both the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology and the French tradition of les sciences humaines, these essays explore the iconography, politics, ethics, poetry, and medical practices that made sex in ancient Greece not a paradise of liberation but an exotic locale hardly recognizable to visitors from the modern world. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Peter Brown, Anne Carson, Franoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Maud W. Gleason, Ann Ellis Hanson, Franois Lissarrague, Nicole Loraux, Maurice Olender, S.R.F. Price, James Redfield, Giulia Sissa, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.

According to one myth, the first Athenian citizen was born from the earth after the sperm of a rejected lover, the god Hephaistos, dripped off the virgin goddess Athena's leg and onto fertile soil. Henceforth Athenian citizens could claim to be truly indigenous to their city and to have divine origins that bypassed maternity. In these essays, the renowned French Hellenist Nicole Loraux examines the implication of this and other Greek origin myths as she explores how Athenians in the fifth century forged and maintained a collective identity.

These are paperback editions of important works on Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy and archaeology. New introductions bring the works up to date in the light of more recent scholarship. In "The Imagery of Euripides," Shirley Barlow demonstrates, by a close analysis of Euripides' use of language and of imagery in particular, that his imaginative powers differ in kind, not just in quality, from those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that they serve a different purpose in the structure of the plays. This third edition includes a substantial new foreword by the eminent classical scholar Froma I. Zeitlin and substantial new introduction by the author. This classic study should have a place on the shelf of every student of Greek tragedy.

Described as "a powerful, brilliant, and original study" when first published, this second edition of Froma Zeitlin's experiment in decoding the Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in the light of contemporary theory now updates her explorations of the tragic struggle between Eteocles and Polyneices, the doomed sons of Oedipus, with a new preface, a new afterword, and the addition of the relevant Greek texts. The mutual self-destruction of the enemy brothers in this last act of the cursed family is preceded (and determined) by one of Aeschylus' most daring innovations through the pairing of the shields of attackers and defenders in the central scene of the play as an extended dialogue explicitly concerned with visual and verbal symbols. In a preliminary consideration of the relations between language and kinship and between city and family, between self and society, as determining forces in fifth-century drama, the heart of the book is a detailed investigation of this tour de force of semiotic energy. Zeitlin's decipherment of this provocative text yields a heightened appreciation of Aeschylus' compositional artistry and the complexity of his worldview. At the same time, this study points the way to Zeitlin's larger engagement with the special ideological role that the city of Thebes comes to play on the tragic stage as the negative counterpart to the self-representation of Athens.