Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the Romans' defeat of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.
Zanker's exciting new interpretations closely compare poetry and art for the light each sheds on the other. He finds, for example, an exuberant expansion of subject matter in the Hellenistic periods in both literature and art, as styles and iconographic traditions reserved for grander concepts in earlier eras were applied to themes, motifs, and subjects that were emphatically less grand.

In his first book of "Satires," written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

Barbara Pavlock unmasks major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"" as surrogates for his narrative persona, highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". Although Ovid ostensibly validates traditional customs and institutions, instability is in fact a defining feature of both the core epic values and his own poetics. ""The Image of the Poet"" explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, the reliability of the narrative voice, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry. The work explores the constructed author and complements recent criticism focusing on the reader in the text. Ovid's simultaneous play to and rebellion against epic tradition makes Narcissus both an idealized elegiac image through allusions to the poet's own mistress in the Amores and an elegiac poet fixated on his own image. Through Narcissus' demise, Ovid reflects the instability of visual images. In ""Orpheus' story of Venus and Adonis"", an undercurrent of desire in Venus' inset tale reveals a problematic self-involvement. The self-referential nature of Orpheus' song then raises questions about his reliability as narrator, a theme that culminates in Ulysses' contest with Ajax. Here Ovid undercuts heroic views about lineage and valor, but also highlights the many clever strategies by which Ulysses elevates himself over his rival, undermining Homer's ""Illiad"" and ""Odyssey"". Ovid questions the authority of the narrator but also provides the means for understanding the problems at the core of his epic. Thus, in his time and ours, the reader ultimately emerges better equipped to assess inherited traditions in literary, social, and political spheres.

What was it about epistolarity that appealed so strongly to the Greek imagination?
The first reference in Greek literature to a letter occurs in our oldest extant Greek poem, Homer's Iliad. But letters can be found lurking in every corner of ancient Greek writing. This book aims to bring the literary letters themselves into clear view for contemporary readers. Many ancient writers included letters in other narrative genres: Euripides brought letters on stage; historians included letters as documents; Greek novelists sprinkled their stories with letters exchanged between separated lovers; and epigrammatists played with the epigram as letter. By the second and third centuries CE, many centuries after Homer's epics, imaginative letters evolved into an established genre in their own right: Aelian and Alciphron excelled in epistolary impersonations, imitating the voices of the lower classes, and collecting their letters in anthologies; Philostratus emerged as a master of epistolary spin, taking one theme and subtly tweaking it in half a dozen letters to different addressees; and anonymous writers competed with one another in their particular form of ghostwriting for the rich and famous.
Arranged chronologically, with introductory sections for each time period, this book studies this wide range of writers, genres and literary levels and suggests that there is more to a letter than just the information it communicates. Epistolary context is just as important as content, as will be rediscovered by Ovid, Richardson, Laclos, and a whole host of later European writers. Patricia A. Rosenmeyer has chosen a highly entertaining selection, which include translation of previously inaccessible oruntranslated works, and deftly opens up a neglected area of study to provide an enjoyable and significant survey for students of Greek epistolography.

Western literature knows the anacreontic poems best in the translations or adaptations of such poets as Ronsard, Herrick and Goethe. This collection of poems, once assumed to be the work of Anacreon himself, was considered unworthy of serious attention after the poems were proved to be late Hellenistic and early Roman imitations by anonymous writers. This full-length treatment of the anacreontic corpus, first published in 1992, explores the complex poetics of imitation which inspired anacreontic composition for so many centuries in antiquity. The author reassesses Anacreon's own oeuvre, and then discusses the system of selective imitation practised by the anacreontic poets. The book explores what light the corpus can shed on ancient literary genres, intertextual influences, and the literary manifestations of symposiastic and erotic ideals in a post-classical society which looks back to an archaic model as its guiding force.A full translation of the anacreontic collection is included as an appendix and all Greek and Latin is translated.

A comprehensive look at fictive letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus, first published in 2001. It includes both embedded epistolary narratives in a variety of genres (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), and works consisting solely of letters, such as the pseudonymous letter collections and the invented letters of the Second Sophistic. The book challenges the notion that Ovid 'invented' the fictional letter form in his Heroides and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition. Epistolary technique always problematizes the boundaries between fictionality and reality. Based on a process of selection and self-censorship, the letter is a construction, not a reflection, of reality. The author bypasses the question of sincerity for a close look at epistolary self-representation, the function of the letter form and the nature of the relationship between writer and reader in a wide range of ancient Greek texts.

Western literature knows the anacreontic poems best in the translations or adaptations of such poets as Ronsard, Herrick and Goethe. This collection of poems, once assumed to be the work of Anacreon himself, was considered unworthy of serious attention after the poems were proved to be late Hellenistic and early Roman imitations by anonymous writers. This full-length treatment of the anacreontic corpus, first published in 1992, explores the complex poetics of imitation which inspired anacreontic composition for so many centuries in antiquity. The author reassesses Anacreon's own oeuvre, and then discusses the system of selective imitation practised by the anacreontic poets. The book explores what light the corpus can shed on ancient literary genres, intertextual influences, and the literary manifestations of symposiastic and erotic ideals in a post-classical society which looks back to an archaic model as its guiding force.A full translation of the anacreontic collection is included as an appendix and all Greek and Latin is translated.

This book offers the first comprehensive look at the use of imaginary letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus. By imaginary letters, it means letters written in the voice of another, and either inserted into a narrative (epic, historiography, tragedy, the novel), or comprising a free-standing collection (e.g. the Greek love letter collections of the Imperial Roman period). The book challenges the notion that Ovid "invented" the fictional letter form in the Heroides, and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition.

What was it about epistolarity that appealed so strongly to the Greek imagination?
The first reference in Greek literature to a letter occurs in our oldest extant Greek poem, Homer's Iliad. But letters can be found lurking in every corner of ancient Greek writing. This book aims to bring the literary letters themselves into clear view for contemporary readers. Many ancient writers included letters in other narrative genres: Euripides brought letters on stage; historians included letters as documents; Greek novelists sprinkled their stories with letters exchanged between separated lovers; and epigrammatists played with the epigram as letter. By the second and third centuries CE, many centuries after Homer's epics, imaginative letters evolved into an established genre in their own right: Aelian and Alciphron excelled in epistolary impersonations, imitating the voices of the lower classes, and collecting their letters in anthologies; Philostratus emerged as a master of epistolary spin, taking one theme and subtly tweaking it in half a dozen letters to different addressees; and anonymous writers competed with one another in their particular form of ghostwriting for the rich and famous.
Arranged chronologically, with introductory sections for each time period, this book studies this wide range of writers, genres and literary levels and suggests that there is more to a letter than just the information it communicates. Epistolary context is just as important as content, as will be rediscovered by Ovid, Richardson, Laclos, and a whole host of later European writers. Patricia A. Rosenmeyer has chosen a highly entertaining selection, which include translation of previously inaccessible oruntranslated works, and deftly opens up a neglected area of study to provide an enjoyable and significant survey for students of Greek epistolography.

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands today in Egyptian Thebes, with more than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions covering its lower surfaces. Partially damaged by an earthquake, and later re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to "speak" regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, tourists flocked to the colossus of Memnon to hear the miraculous sound, and left behind their marks of devotion (proskynemata): brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon's cry; longer lists by Roman administrators; and more elaborate elegiac verses by both amateur and professional poets. The inscribed names left behind reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. While recent studies of imperial literature acknowledge the colossus, few address the inscriptions themselves. This book is the first critical assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past, and appealed to a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on contemporary attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and the cultural legacy of Homeric epic. Memnon is a ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present, and visitors yearned for a "close encounter" that would connect them with that distant past. The inscriptions thus idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature in their verses at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. These and other subjects are expertly explored in the book, including a fascinating chapter on the colossus's post-classical life when the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic artists and poets in nineteenth-century Europe.

The charismatic Alexander the Great of Macedon (356-323 B.C.E.) was one of the most successful military commanders in history, conquering Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia, central Asia, and the lands beyond as far as Pakistan and India. Alexander has been, over the course of two millennia since his death at the age of thirty-two, the central figure in histories, legends, songs, novels, biographies, and, most recently, films. In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great and his companions, surroundings, and accomplishments, but the critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This volume brings together an intriguing mix of leading scholars in Macedonian and Greek history, Persian culture, film studies, classical literature, and archaeology - including some who were advisors for the film - and includes an afterword by Oliver Stone discussing the challenges he faced in putting Alexander's life on the big screen. The contributors scrutinize Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception, considering such questions as: Can a film about Alexander (and similar figures from history) be both entertaining and historically sound? How do the goals of screenwriters and directors differ from those of historians? How do Alexander's personal relationships - with his mother Olympias, his wife Roxane, his lover Hephaistion, and others - affect modern perceptions of Alexander? Several of the contributors also explore reasons behind the film's tepid response at the box office and subsequent controversies.

This lively translation of "Devins, Dieux et Demons" is the first English-language edition of Jean-Rene Jannot's highly informative examination of Etruscan religion. Jannot tackles this elusive subject within three major constructs--death, ritual, and the nature of the gods--and presents recent discoveries in an accessible format. Jane K. Whitehead's translation updates Jannot's innovative text and introduces readers of all types--students, scholars, and the general audience--to this thorough overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, including the afterlife, funerary customs, and mythology.
Provocative insights and thoughtful discussions contribute to an understanding of the prophetic nature of Etruscan culture. Jannot investigates the elaborate systems of defining space and time that so distinctly characterize this ancient society. "Religion in Ancient Etruria" offers a unique perspective that illuminates the origins of some of our own "modern" religious beliefs.
This updated edition includes more than 100 illustrations that demonstrate early temples, statues, mirrors, tablets, and sculptures.
1998 French edition, Picard