Listening is a social process. Even apparently trivial acts of listening are expert performances of acquired cognitive and bodily habits. Contemporary scholars acknowledge this fact with the notion that there are "auditory cultures." In the fourth century BCE, Greek philosophers recognized a similar phenomenon in music, which they treated as a privileged site for the cultural manufacture of sensory capabilities, and proof that in a traditional culture perception could be ordered, regular, and reliable. This approachable and elegantly written book tells the story of how music became a vital topic for understanding the senses and their role in the creation of knowledge. Focussing in particular on discussions of music and sensation in Plato and Aristoxenus, Sean Gurd explores a crucial early chapter in the history of hearing and gently raises critical questions about how aesthetic traditionalism and sensory certainty can be joined together in a mutually reinforcing symbiosis.

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first wide-ranging philosophical study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. Because our modern western culture is a particularly visual one, we can overlook the significance of the auditory which was so central to the Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Homer, Heraclitus, Pythagoreans, Sophocles, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece.

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first wide-ranging philosophical study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. Because our modern western culture is a particularly visual one, we can overlook the significance of the auditory which was so central to the Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Homer, Heraclitus, Pythagoreans, Sophocles, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece.

Listening is a social process. Even apparently trivial acts of listening are expert performances of acquired cognitive and bodily habits. Contemporary scholars acknowledge this fact with the notion that there are “auditory cultures.” In the fourth century BCE, Greek philosophers recognized a similar phenomenon in music, which they treated as a privileged site for the cultural manufacture of sensory capabilities, and proof that in a traditional culture perception could be ordered, regular, and reliable. This approachable and elegantly written book tells the story of how music became a vital topic for understanding the senses and their role in the creation of knowledge. Focussing in particular on discussions of music and sensation in Plato and Aristoxenus, Sean Gurd explores a crucial early chapter in the history of hearing and gently raises critical questions about how aesthetic traditionalism and sensory certainty can be joined together in a mutually reinforcing symbiosis.

Euripides wrote two plays called "Hippolytus." In this, the second, he dramatized the tragic failure of perfection. This translation comes in two forms; the first presents a simulacrum of the text as it might have appeared in unprocessed form to a reader sometime shortly after Euripides' death. The second processes the drama into the reduced but much more distinct form of modern print translations.

How should a literary scholar approach a text characterized not by stability but by variation and flux? This book offers a radical new perspective on the limits and the accomplishments of the modern traditions of textual criticism in classics.Sean Alexander Gurd takes as his starting point the case of a single Greek tragedy by Euripides, one of his last. According to ancient accounts, the Iphigenia at Aulis was produced at the city Dionysia, the great festival of Athenian tragedy, sometime after Euripides died (between 407 and 405 BCE). Whether the text performed then was entirely the work of Euripides, and whether the version that appears in the manuscripts reflects either that performance or its defunct author's design, are unknown. But since the mid-eighteenth-century the mysteries and conflicting evidence concerning Iphigenia at Aulis have given rise to an array of different attempts to reconstruct the original, and every generation has seen a version of the play that is radically different from those that came before. Gurd pioneers a literary philology comfortable with this textual multiplicity, capable of reading Iphigenias at Aulis in the plural.Regarding the dossier of successive editions of Iphigenia at Aulis as a symbol for the condition of modern textual reason, Gurd shows lovers of classical literature exactly how contingent the texts they read really are."