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A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity
The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor
in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of
Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the
important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious,
military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of
communities over a millennium-from Homer to the early Christian
saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well
as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book
offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much
Greek and Roman culture. Jason Koenig charts the importance of
mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of
mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest
and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how
mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the
ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine
and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He
also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed
between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of
the picturesque and the sublime. Offering a unique perspective on
the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a
resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.
Exploring the past and rethinking the future of ancient sport
studies What did sporting competition and athletic education in the
ancient world really involve? Why was it so highly valued? How did
ancient athletic practices change over time? This volume answers
these questions by bringing together a collection of important
articles and book extracts by American and European scholars,
covering gymnasium education, festival competition and victory, the
role of athletic activity in conceptions of ancient identity, and
the reception of the ancient athletic heritage in the modern world.
Greek Athletics will appeal to anyone interested in ancient Greek
history and ancient sport in particular. Key features: Offers a
vivid summary of the key features of ancient athletic culture,
together with discussion of recent progress in the field and
possible future developments Includes extensive supporting
material: glossary, chronology, suggestions for further reading and
comprehensive maps Four pieces are translated for the first time
from French and German into English Includes brief editorial
discussions of each article
Throughout the longue duree of Western culture, how have people
represented mountains as landscapes of the imagination and as
places of real experience? In what ways has human understanding of
mountains changed - or stayed the same? Mountain Dialogues from
Antiquity to Modernity opens up a new conversation between ancient
and modern engagements with mountains. It highlights the ongoing
relevance of ancient understandings of mountain environments to the
postclassical and present-day world, while also suggesting ways in
which modern approaches to landscape can generate new questions
about premodern responses. It brings together experts from across
many different disciplines and periods, offering case studies on
topics ranging from classical Greek drama to Renaissance art, and
from early modern natural philosophy to nineteenth-century travel
writing. Throughout, essays engage with key themes of temporality,
knowledge, identity, and experience in the mountain landscape. As a
whole, the volume suggests that modern responses to mountains
participate in rhetorical and experiential patterns that stretch
right back to the ancient Mediterranean. It also makes the case for
collaborative, cross-period research as a route both for
understanding human relations with the natural world in the past,
and informing them in the present.
Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands
out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take
an author-by-author approach that underestimates the
interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The
chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new
readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres,
including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy,
together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process,
they offer new insights into the various ways in which late
Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and
political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the
standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic
and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in
isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to
rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider
landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.
In the writings of Philostratus (ca. 170-ca. 250 CE), the
renaissance of Greek literature in the second century CE reached
its height. His Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Lives of the Sophists,
and Imagines reconceive in different ways Greek religion,
philosophy, and art in and for the world of the Roman Empire. In
this volume, Heroicus and Gymnasticus, two works of equal
creativity and sophistication, together with two brief Discourses
(Dialexeis), complete the Loeb edition of his writings. Heroicus is
a conversation in a vineyard amid ruins of the Protesilaus shrine
(opposite Troy on the Hellespont), between a wise and devout
vinedresser and an initially skeptical Phoenician sailor, about the
beauty, continuing powers, and worship of the Homeric heroes. With
information from his local hero, the vinedresser reveals unknown
stories of the Trojan campaign especially featuring Protesilaus and
Palamedes, and describes complex, miraculous, and violent rituals
in the cults of Achilles. Gymnasticus is the sole surviving ancient
treatise on sports. It reshapes conventional ideas about the
athletic body and expertise of the athletic trainer and also
explores the history of the Olympic Games and other major Greek
athletic festivals, portraying them as distinctive venues for the
display of knowledge.
The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization.
However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries -
private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in
articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an
international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment
of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized
and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and
on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it
presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and
on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the
traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged.
Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres,
and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most
ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman
culture emerges more clearly than ever.
From the first to third century AD Greek athletics flourished as
never before. This book offers exciting readings of those
developments. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, it sheds light
on practices of athletic competition and athletic education in the
Roman Empire. In addition it examines some of the ways in which
athletic activity was represented within different texts and
contexts. Most importantly, the book shows how discussion and
representation of athletics could become entangled with many other
areas of cultural debate, and used as a vehicle for many different
varieties of authorial self-presentation and cultural
self-scrutiny. It also argues for complex connections between
different areas of athletic representation, particularly between
literary and epigraphical texts. It offers re-interpretations of a
number of major authors, especially Lucian, Dio Chrysostom,
Pausanias, Silius Italicus, Galen and Philostratus.
How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make
their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a
wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine,
architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and
philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the
literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that
these different fields had in common, while also showing how
individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of
self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance
of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also
examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite
direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the
limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification
with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir
Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority
and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian culture.
Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long
and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both
Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an
account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from
Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other
writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also
deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, eccentric
types of eating and drinking in Greco-Roman and early Christian
prose narrative texts, focusing especially on the Letters of
Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, especially Apuleius, the
Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It
argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to
matter: these works communicated distinctive ideas about how to
talk and how to think, distinctive models of the relationship
between past and present, distinctive and often destabilising
visions of identity and holiness.
There is a rich body of encyclopaedic writing which survives from
the two millennia before the Enlightenment. This book sheds new
light on that material. It traces the development of traditions of
knowledge ordering which stretched back to Pliny and Varro and
others in the classical world. It works with a broad concept of
encyclopaedism, resisting the idea that there was any clear
pre-modern genre of the 'encyclopaedia', and showing instead how
the rhetoric and techniques of comprehensive compilation left their
mark on a surprising range of texts. In the process it draws
attention to both remarkable similarities and striking differences
between conventions of encyclopaedic compilation in different
periods, with a focus primarily on European/Mediterranean culture.
The book covers classical, medieval (including Byzantine and
Arabic) and Renaissance culture in turn, and combines chapters
which survey whole periods with others focused closely on
individual texts as case studies.
The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization.
However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries -
private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in
articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an
international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment
of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized
and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and
on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it
presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and
on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the
traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged.
Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres,
and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most
ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman
culture emerges more clearly than ever.
Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long
and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both
Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an
account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from
Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other
writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also
deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, eccentric
types of eating and drinking in Greco-Roman and early Christian
prose narrative texts, focusing especially on the Letters of
Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, especially Apuleius, the
Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It
argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to
matter: these works communicated distinctive ideas about how to
talk and how to think, distinctive models of the relationship
between past and present, distinctive and often destabilising
visions of identity and holiness.
The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world
had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges,
however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was
also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide
expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This
fascinating 2007 collection of essays considers the dialogue
between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on,
developing and critiquing a range of modern cultural theories
(including those of Michel Foucault and Edward Said). How was
knowledge shaped into textual forms, and how did those forms encode
relationships between emperor and subjects, theory and practice,
Roman and Greek, centre and periphery? Ordering Knowledge in the
Roman Empire will be required reading for those concerned with the
intellectual and cultural history of the Roman Empire, and its
lasting legacy in the medieval world and beyond.
The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world
had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges,
however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was
also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide
expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This
groundbreaking collection of essays considers the dialogue between
technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing
and critiquing a range of modern cultural theories (including those
of Michel Foucault and Edward Said). How was knowledge shaped into
textual forms, and how did those forms encode relationships between
emperor and subjects, theory and practice, Roman and Greek, centre
and periphery? Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire will be
required reading for those concerned with the intellectual and
cultural history of the Roman Empire, and its lasting legacy in the
medieval world and beyond.
From the first to third century AD Greek athletics flourished as
never before. This book offers exciting readings of those
developments. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, it sheds light
on practices of athletic competition and athletic education in the
Roman Empire. In addition it examines some of the ways in which
athletic activity was represented within different texts and
contexts. Most importantly, the book shows how discussion and
representation of athletics could become entangled with many other
areas of cultural debate, and used as a vehicle for many different
varieties of authorial self-presentation and cultural
self-scrutiny. It also argues for complex connections between
different areas of athletic representation, particularly between
literary and epigraphical texts. It offers re-interpretations of a
number of major authors, especially Lucian, Dio Chrysostom,
Pausanias, Silius Italicus, Galen and Philostratus.
In this book Jason Konig offers for the first time an accessible
yet comprehensive account of the multi-faceted Greek literature of
the Roman Empire, focusing especially on the first three centuries
AD. He covers in turn the Greek novels of this period, the
satirical writing of Lucian, rhetoric, philosophy, scientific and
miscellanistic writing, geography and history, biography and
poetry, providing a vivid introduction to key texts, with extensive
quotation in translation. The challenges and pleasures these texts
offer to their readers have come to be newly appreciated in the
classical scholarship of the last two or three decades. In addition
there has been renewed interest in the role played by novelistic
and rhetorical writing in the Greek culture of the Roman Empire
more broadly, and in the many different ways in which these texts
respond to the world around them. This volume offers a broad
introduction to those exciting developments.
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