What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English 'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects of Athenian mousike are another central concern, with the figure of the dancing philosopher as an emblem of music's role in intellectual life. The book as a whole provides an integrated cultural analysis of central aspects of Greek mousike, which will be of interest to classical scholars, to cultural historians, and to anyone concerned with understanding the power of music as a cultural phenomenon.

The origins, nature, function and effects of imagination have engrossed writers, theologians, philosophers and practitioners of the arts across the ages; its influence on painting and music continues to be debated. It has been simultaneously feared as a dangerous, uncontrollable force and revered as the supreme visionary power. Cocking's "Imagination" is an exploration of the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book opens with a treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Developments in the Middle Ages are traced, with particular attention to the parallel tradition in Islamic thought of the period and the book pursues the concept through the theories of Dante and the Neo-platonists to the High Renaissance. The manuscript of this book was left unfinished on Professor Cocking's death in 1986 and has been edited by Penelope Murray, who adds an introductory essay. It should be of value as a background to recent interest in the imagination in the Romantic period. This book should be of interest to advanced students and teachers of aesthetics and English Literature.

An exploration of the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The shifting definitions of imagination and its ambiguous relations with memory and reason are synthesised within an historical context.

This is a commentary on selected texts of Plato concerned with poetry: the Ion and relevant sections of the Republic. It is the first commentary to present these texts together in one volume, and the first in English on Republic 2 and 3 and Ion for nearly 100 years. The introduction sets Plato's views in their Greek context and outlines their influence on later aesthetic thought. An important feature of the commentary is its exploration of the ambivalence of Plato's pronouncements through an analysis of his own skill as a writer.

This new edition of Classical Literary Criticism contains the landmarks of ancient literary criticism in accessible and lucid translations. In her Introduction Penelope Murray shows how many of the most fruitful approaches to understanding literature in the Western tradition derive from these canonical texts. Plato is often regarded as the most poetic of the great philosophers, but he mistrusted the god-like power of poets to work on our feelings and famously banished them from his ideal Republic. Aristotle responded by defending the value of art in his Poetics. His analysis of tragedy, with its key concepts of 'mimesis', 'catharsis' and tragic error, has influenced generations of critics from the Renaissance onwards. Horace's Art of Poetry is a vivid practitioner's guide which promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight and decorum, while Longinus' remarkable On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This edition also features a new bibliography and chronology as well as comprehensive notes on each of the texts.