Sacred Words ─ Orality, Literacy and Religion in the Ancient World

The 20 papers in this publication were first presented at the Eighth International Conference on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, held in 2008 in Soeterbeeck, the Netherlands. The main subjects are Greek literature, Greek law, Greek and Roman religious texts, Roman literature, and early Christian literature. Individual paper topics include divine discourse in Homer's Iliad, past and present in Pindar's religious poetry, writing sacred laws in archaic and classical Crete, embedded speech in the Attic leges sacrae, hexametrical incantations as oral and written phenomena, unknowable names and invocations in late antique theurgic ritual, Plautus the theologian, dilemmas of pietas in Roman declamation, Paul's self-images within an oral milieu, and Augustine's Psalm Against the Donatists. Abbreviations and references have been standardized so the proceedings can serve as an enduring reference. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Andre P.M.H. Lardinois (Princeton Ph.D. 1995) is Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His main interests center on Greek lyric poetry and Greek drama. Josine H. Blok is Professor of Ancient History and Classical Culture at Utrecht University and has published widely on the cultural, political and social history of archaic and classical Greece and nineteenth-century classical scholarship.Marc van der Poel is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. He has published on various aspects of the history of rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance, and on Latin literature, especially in the Renaissance.Contributors: Crystal Addey, Mark Alonge, Vanessa Berger, Josine Blok, Be Breij, Christopher Faraone, Franco Ferrari, Michael Gagarin, Sarah Hitch, Fiona Hobden, Vincent Hunink, Akio Ito, Andromache Karanika, Andre Lardinois, Elizabeth Minchin, James Morrison, Maria Pavlou, Marc van der Poel, Ana Rodriguez-Mayorgas, Ruth Scodel, Niall W. Slater, Roslaind Thomas and Evelyn van 't Wout.