Scholarship has tended to assume that Luther was uninterested in the Greek and Latin classics, given his promotion of the German vernacular and his polemic against the reliance upon Aristotle in theology. But as Athens and Wittenberg demonstrates, Luther was shaped by the classical education he had received and integrated it into his writings. He could quote Epicurean poetry to non-Epicurean ends; he could employ Aristotelian logic to prove the limits of philosophy's role in theology. This volume explores how Luther and early Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, continued to draw from the classics in their quest to reform the church. In particular, it examines how early Protestantism made use of the philosophy and poetry from classical antiquity. Contributors include: Joseph Herl, Jane Schatkin Hettrick, E.J. Hutchinson, Jack D. Kilcrease, E. Christian Kopf, John G. Nordling, Piergiacomo Petrioli, Eric G. Phillips, Richard J. Serina, Jr, R. Alden Smith, Carl P.E. Springer, Manfred Svensson, William P. Weaver, and Daniel Zager.

The fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid is the shortest of his epic, and yet it has had an inestimable influence. The tragedy of Dido is replete with allusions to the Medeas of Euripides, Apollonius, and Ennius, as well as to Catullus' Ariadne and the historical Cleopatra of Virgil's Augustan Age. The book has intratextual connections to the poet's own fourth Georgic (as he revisits the topic of apian regeneration and the loss of Eurydice), even as it confronts the reality of Rome's bloody history with Carthage. The present volume offers the first full-scale commentary on the book in over eighty years, together with a new critical text that reflects recent scholarship on significant difficulties.

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018 Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone? Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.

Virgil's Aeneid 5 has long been among the more neglected sections of the poet's epic of Augustan Rome. Book 5 opens the second movement of the poem, the middle section of the Aeneid that sees the Trojans poised between the old world of Phrygia and the new destiny in Italy. The present volume fills a significant gap in Virgilian studies by offering the first full-scale commentary in any language on this key book in the explication of the poet's grand consideration of the meaning of Trojan versus Roman identity. A new critical text (based on first hand examination of the manuscripts) is accompanied by a prose translation and detailed commentary. The notes provide in depth analysis of literary, historical, and lexical matters; the introduction situates Book 5 both in the context of the epic and the larger tradition of heroic poetry.

Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018 Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone? Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.