In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, 'What is a good city?', five questions motivate the book: How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens? How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its future? What is it to dwell in, and experience, a city? How does violence erupt in and to a city, and what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be employed? And finally, what is the relationship between the infrastructure of the city and the political process? Following the introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections: Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Not only will Being Urban further understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today's key questions: What Is A Good City?

"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind." So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria's reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm the prime minister once wondered whether she was "the cleverest woman in England or in Europe." The couple's six precocious children included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female Egyptologist. What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what went on behind the scene, which was even more unusual than anyone could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new perspectives including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable accounts, we see how family life and a family's understanding of itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it is also more than that it is the story of how society transitioned from the high Victorian period into modernity.

In Being Urban, Simon Goldhill and his team of outstanding urbanists explore the meaning of the urban condition, with particular reference to the Middle East. As Goldhill explains in his introduction, 'What is a good city?', five questions motivate the book: How can a city be systematically planned and yet maintain a possibility of flexibility, change, and the wellbeing of citizens? How does the city represent itself to itself, and image its past, its present and its future? What is it to dwell in, and experience, a city? How does violence erupt in and to a city, and what strategies of reconciliation and reconstruction can be employed? And finally, what is the relationship between the infrastructure of the city and the political process? Following the introduction, the twelve chapters are grouped into four sections: Engagement and Space; Infrastructure and Space; Conflict and Structures; and Curating the City. Through each chapter, the contributors reflect on aspects of urban infrastructure and culture, citizenship, belonging and exclusion, politics and conflict, with examples from across the Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Not only will Being Urban further understanding of the topography of citizenship in the Middle East and beyond, it will also contribute to answering one of today's key questions: What Is A Good City?

The Retrospective Muse showcases the celebrated work of Froma Zeitlin. Her instantly recognizable work, that brings together anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and an acute literary sensibility, opened a series of ancient texts and ideas to new forms of understanding. A selection of these luminous essays, on topics still timely today, are brought together for the first time in a volume which shows the full range and flair of her remarkable intellect. Together, these illuminating analyses show why Zeitlin's work on ancient Greek culture has had so enduring an impact on scholars across the world, not just in Classics but across multiple fields. From Homer to the Greek novel, from religion to erotics, from myth and ritual to theatrical performance, she expounds here some of the most important works of ancient writing, and some of modernity's most significant critical questions. Zeitlin's writing still sheds light on the durable aspects of Classics as a discipline—and this book encapsulates her achievement.

We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind. So begins A Very Queer Family Indeed, which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Benson became Archbishop of Canterbury at the height of Queen Victoria's reign, while his wife, Mary, was renowned for her wit and charm the prime minister once wondered whether she was "the cleverest woman in England or in Europe." The couple's six precocious children included E. F. Benson, celebrated creator of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Margaret Benson, the first published female Egyptologist. What interests Simon Goldhill most, however, is what went on behind the scenes, which was even more unusual than anyone could imagine. Inveterate writers, the Benson family spun out novels, essays, and thousands of letters that open stunning new perspectives including what it might mean for an adult to kiss and propose marriage to a twelve-year-old girl, how religion in a family could support or destroy relationships, or how the death of a child could be celebrated. No other family has left such detailed records about their most intimate moments, and in these remarkable accounts, we see how family life and a family's understanding of itself took shape during a time when psychoanalysis, scientific and historical challenges to religion, and new ways of thinking about society were developing. This is the story of the Bensons, but it is also more than that it is the story of how society transitioned from the high Victorian period into modernity.

From the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today.
In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor's role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe.
One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers--not to mention the growing audiences--of ancientGreek theater.

From the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today.
In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor's role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe.
One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers--not to mention the growing audiences--of ancientGreek theater.

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? "Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity" is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, Simon Goldhill examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity.

Looking at Victorian art, Goldhill demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, Goldhill addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction--specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire--he discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being.

With a wide range of examples and stories, "Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity" demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed academia and its role in society more stridently than the personal politics of its institutions: who has access to education? How does who you are change what you study and how you engage with it? How does scholarship reflect the politics of society - how should it? These new essays from one of the best-known scholars of ancient Greece offer a refreshing and provocative contribution to these discussions. What Is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a transformational practice. Topical, engaging, revelatory, this book opens a sharp and personal perspective on how and why the study of antiquity has become such a battlefield in contemporary culture. The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work - can anyone can tell his or her own story with enough self-consciousness, sophistication and care? The second essay, which gives the book its title, takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a fascinating history of change - how Jews were excluded from the discipline for many years but gradually after the Second World war became more easily assimilated into it. This in turn raises difficult questions for the current focus on race and colour as the defining aspects of personal identification, and about how academia reflects or contributes to the broader politics of society. The third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation. It discusses how translation, far from being a mere technique, is a transformational activity that helps make each classicist what they are. Indeed, each generation needs its own translations as each era redefines its relation to antiquity.

Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father. Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her own children.

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation - under Christianity's influence - happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.

In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed academia and its role in society more stridently than the personal politics of its institutions: who has access to education? How does who you are change what you study and how you engage with it? How does scholarship reflect the politics of society - how should it? These new essays from one of the best-known scholars of ancient Greece offer a refreshing and provocative contribution to these discussions. What Is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a transformational practice. Topical, engaging, revelatory, this book opens a sharp and personal perspective on how and why the study of antiquity has become such a battlefield in contemporary culture. The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work - can anyone can tell his or her own story with enough self-consciousness, sophistication and care? The second essay, which gives the book its title, takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a fascinating history of change - how Jews were excluded from the discipline for many years but gradually after the Second World war became more easily assimilated into it. This in turn raises difficult questions for the current focus on race and colour as the defining aspects of personal identification, and about how academia reflects or contributes to the broader politics of society. The third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation. It discusses how translation, far from being a mere technique, is a transformational activity that helps make each classicist what they are. Indeed, each generation needs its own translations as each era redefines its relation to antiquity.

How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.

It was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, and yet the Temple of Jerusalem-cultural memory, symbol, and site-remains one of the most powerful, and most contested, buildings in the world. This glorious structure, imagined and re-imagined, reconsidered and reinterpreted again and again over two millennia, emerges in all its historical, cultural, and religious significance in Simon Goldhill's account. Built by Herod on a scale that is still staggering-on an earth and rock platform 144,000 square meters in area and 32 meters high-and destroyed by the Roman emperor Titus 90 years later, in 70 AD, the Temple has become the world's most potent symbol of the human search for a lost ideal, an image of greatness. Goldhill travels across cultural and temporal boundaries to convey the full extent of the Temple's impact on religious, artistic, and scholarly imaginations. Through biblical stories and ancient texts, rabbinical writings, archaeological records, and modern accounts, he traces the Temple's shifting significance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A complex and engaging history of a singular locus of the imagination-a site of longing for the Jews; a central metaphor of Christian thought; an icon for Muslims: the Dome of the Rock-The Temple of Jerusalem also offers unique insight into where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam differ in interpreting their shared inheritance. It is a story that, from the Crusades onward, has helped form the modern political world.

In "Love, Sex & Tragedy" Simon Goldhill lifts the veil on our inheritance of classical traditions and offers a witty, engrossing survey of the Greek and Roman roots of everything from our overwhelming mania for "hard bodies" to our political systems. Encompassing Karl Marx, Clark Gable, George W. Bush, Oscar Wilde, and Sigmund Freud, Goldhill takes great delight in tracing both follies and fundamental philosophical questions through the centuries and continents to the birthplace of Western civilization as we know it. Underlying his brisk and learned excursions through history and art is the foundational belief, following Cicero, that learning about the classics makes a critical difference to our self-understanding. Whether we are considering the role of religion in contemporary society, our expectations about the boundaries between public and private life, or even how we spend our free time, recognizing the role of the classics is integral to our comprehension of modern life and our place in it.
"Confident, intelligent and assertive; "Love, Sex & Tragedy"] stands up for 'classics' without apology, without snobbishness and without conservatism."--Oliver Taplin, "Guardian
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"Goldhill . . . takes us through the looking glass into antiquity and shows us some of the sights that he thinks most interesting and informative. . . . Anyone who goes on the journey will be amused, surprised, and enlightened."--Mary K. Lefkowitz, "New York Sun
""A passionate, witty, and broad-ranging exploration of the ancient foundations of our world. . . . There is a widening gap between our perceptions and the ancient sources. Goldhill closes that gap with this lively and multi-layered challenge to assumptions embedded in modern life."--Lizzie Speller, " Observer
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The nineteenth century was a period in which ideas of history and time were challenged as never before. This is the first book to explore how the study of classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed an image of the past which became central to Victorian self-understanding. These specially commissioned, multi-disciplinary essays brilliantly reveal the richness of Victorian thinking about the past and how important these models of antiquity were in the expression of modernity. In an age of progress, cultural anxiety and cultural hope was fuelled by the shock of the old – new discoveries about the deep past, and new ways of thinking about humanity's place in history. The volume provides a rich and readable feast which will be fundamental to all those seeking a greater understanding of the Victorians, as well as of the reception of classics and the Bible.

Modern disciplinary silos tend to separate the fields of classical philology and theology. This collection of essays, however, explores for the first time the deep and significant interactions between them. It demonstrates how from antiquity to the present they have marched hand in hand, informing each other with method, views of the past and structures of argument. The volume rewrites the history of discipline formation, and reveals how close the seminar is to the seminary.

'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, a general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world.

Written by one of the best-known interpreters of classical literature today, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy presents a revolutionary take on the work of this great classical playwright and on how our understanding of tragedy has been shaped by our literary past. Simon Goldhill sheds new light on Sophocles' distinctive brilliance as a dramatist, illuminating such aspects of his work as his manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, and his deployment of the actors and the chorus. Goldhill also investigates how nineteenth-century critics like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wagner developed a specific understanding of tragedy, one that has shaped our current approach to the genre. Finally, Goldhill addresses one of the foundational questions of literary criticism: how historically self-conscious should a reading of Greek tragedy be? The result is an invigorating and exciting new interpretation of the most canonical of Western authors.

Simon Goldhill offers a fresh and exciting perspective on how the Victorians used material culture to express their sense of the past in an age of progress, especially the biblical past and the past of classical antiquity. From Pompeian skulls on a writer's desk, to religious paraphernalia in churches, new photographic images of the Holy Land and the remaking of the cityscape of Jerusalem and Britain, Goldhill explores the remarkable way in which the nineteenth century's sense of history was reinvented through things. The Buried Life of Things shows how new technologies changed how history was discovered and analysed, and how material objects could flare into significance in bitter controversies, and then fade into obscurity and disregard again. This book offers a new route into understanding the Victorians' complex and often bizarre attempts to use their past to express their own modernity.

This 2009 book contains thirteen essays by senior international experts on Greek tragedy looking at Sophocles' dramas. They reassess their crucial role in the creation of the tragic repertoire, in the idea of the tragic canon in antiquity, and in the making and infinite re-creation of the tragic tradition in the Renaissance and beyond. The introduction looks at the paradigm shifts during the twentieth century in the theory and practice of Greek theatre, in order to gain a perspective on the current state of play in Sophoclean studies. The following three sections explore respectively the way that Sophocles' tragedies provoked and educated their original Athenian democratic audience, the language, structure and lasting impact of his Oedipus plays, and the centrality of his oeuvre in the development of the tragic tradition in Aeschylus, Euripides, ancient philosophical theory, fourth-century tragedy and Shakespeare.

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap.
Stratford continues to lure the tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In "Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave," Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bront e parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians--and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls--he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Bronte's hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean, especially now that his fame has faded, that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe--and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare's birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays . . . in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line?
Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.