Lucan is the wild maverick among Latin epic poets. Sneered at for over a century for failing to conform to humanist canons of taste and propriety, in recent years his work has been gaining in reputation. This 1992 book is founded on a genuine admiration for Lucan's unique, perverse, and spellbinding masterpiece. Above all, Dr Masters argues, the poem is obsessed with civil war, not only as the subject of the story it tells, but as a metaphor which determines the way that story is told. In these pages, he discusses in detail a number of selected episodes from the poem which illustrate this principle, and on this basis offers challenging perspective on most of the important issues in Lucanian studies such as Lucan's political stance, his attitude to Caesar, his iconoclastic relation to Virgil and the epic tradition and his distortion of history and geography. This book is a major re-evaluation, provocative and persuasive, of a central figure in the history of Latin epic.
This study examines how one of the most popular and glamorous figures of Greek mythology was imagined on the tragic stage of fifth-century Athens. Dr Michelakis argues that dramatists persistently appropriated Achilles to address concerns of their time, from heroism and education to individualism and gender. Whether an aristocrat, a dead warrior or a young man, the tragic Achilles serves as a receptacle for competing definitions of heroism, oscillating between presence and absence, the exceptional and the paradigmatic. Tragedy draws on Achilles to display and pit against one another contrasting views of the mythological self and of its rights and obligations, powers and limitations. The book considers the whole corpus of extant Greek tragedy, with particular attention paid to Aeschylus' Myrmidons and Euripides' Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis.
The Symposia Aristotelica were inaugurated at Oxford in 1957. They are conferences of select groups of Aristotelian scholars from the UK, USA and Europe, and are held every three years. In 1975 the meeting was held in Cambridge and was devoted to Aristotle's psychological treatises, the De anima and the Parva uaturalia. The members of the conference discussed some of the much debated problems of Aristotle's psychology and broached important new topics such as his ideas on imagination. Dr Lloyd and Professor Owen have collected and edited the papers presented to the Symposium and provided an analytical index.
A feature of Roman rhetorical education under the early empire was the dominance of the declamatio - the declamation on a mythological, historical or quasi-legal theme designed in the first place to train students for the law courts and political debating but indulged in for its own sake by amateurs as well as students and teachers of rhetoric. The elder Seneca, father of the philosopher and dramatist, compiled an anthology of the often bizarre utterances of the declaimers. Janet Fairweather's 1981 book is a detailed study of the anthologist's literary criticism. From Seneca's prefactory descriptions of declaimers and passing remarks on their work, she derives evidence for all the stages in the preparation and delivery of declamations; and from the same source, in conjunction with select declamatory extracts, she shows that rhetorical taste in Seneca's time was not so uniform as is commonly supposed.
Demos is a study of a classical city-state. It is the first attempt to provide an integrated account which gives due attention to the countryside as well as the urban areas of a polis. Concentrating on classical Athens, for which the literary and archaeological evidence is richest, Dr Osborne establishes the nature of settlement in the countryside and explores how this relates to the farming of the land, the exploitation of mineral resources, and the nature of political participation in both local and central politics. Further studies reveal the way in which the countryside was structured by religious institutions and cults and by the nature of the family.
This 1983 book provides a serious modern literary treatment of perhaps the best known of all surviving works of ancient Greek fiction. Dr Hunter demonstrates the sophistication of this pastoral romance, a sophistication which he maintains has often been assumed but never properly discussed. Evidence for the identity of the author and the date of composition are also considered.
In Aristotle's view, Anaxagoras stood out from the other Presocratics as a sober man among the incoherent. This book explores the fragmentary evidence both for Anaxagoras' concept of mind - to which Aristotle was particularly referring - and for his subtle, complex and elusive theory of matter and change. It is concerned with two aspects of his writing in particular: its comparatively high ratio of dogmatic assertion to argument, and a pervasive ambiguity or indeterminacy in the presentation of Anaxagoras' philosophical theses. The problems posed by Anaxagoras' work are examined not only by means of philosophical comparison with what survives of other Presocratics, but in the light of the development of the prose book as a vehicle for the communication of ideas in early Greece. A book for the scholar of ancient philosophy.
The study of colour has become familiar territory in anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be misused and misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contempo
Ovid, a poet unashamedly in love in poetry, including his own, has enjoyed a recent renaissance in popularity. Yet there is still a certain tendency amongst critics to withhold from his writing the close, word-by-word, engagement which is its due. The primary aim of The Metamorphosis of Persephone is to celebrate this poet's detailed verbal art. Ovid twice treated the myth of Persephone. Dr Hinds' work is a close reading of the account in Metamorphoses 5. The book is at once a literary historical enquiry into the double transformation of the rape of Persephone, and a critical exploration of the self-conscious delight in language and in writing manifested in and between these twin Ovidian narratives. This attractively written and subtly nuanced literary study, which offers many quiet challenges to established modes of reading Latin narrative poetry, will be of interest both to scholars of Latin and to students of narrative in other languages.
In this book Dr Low explores the assumptions and principles which determined the conduct and representation of interstate politics in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. She employs a wide range of ancient evidence, both epigraphic and literary, as well as some contemporary theoretical approaches from the field of International Relations. Taking a thematic rather than a chronological approach, she addresses topics such as the nature of interstate society in the Greek world; the sources, scope and enforcement of 'international law'; the nature of interstate ethics and morality; interventionism and imperialism; and the question of change and stability. She argues that classical Greece's reputation for unrestrained and unsophisticated diplomacy is undeserved, and shows that relations between Greek city-states were shaped by and judged according to a complex network of customs, beliefs and expectations which pervaded all areas of interstate behaviour.
Bucchero is a very common type of fine pottery that was made by the Etruscans when their civilization was at its height, from the seventh to the fourth century BC. This study concentrates on the products of South Etruria, where the earliest and finest bucchero was made, and where the tradition lasts longest. Until recently bucchero has been little studied, and the aim of this book is to present a sequence of pottery from archaeological contexts, so that the development of the ware can be seen as a whole within a chronological framework. Many of the tomb-groups catalogued are published here for the first time. In studying the shapes careful consideration is given to the affinities with Greek and with other Etruscan wares. A full survey of the decorative techniques is included, and the pattern of distribution both within Etruria and further afield is discussed. An important feature of the book is a series of sixty pages of drawings of the profiles of every shape of bucchero pot studied.
As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy (fourth century BC) to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene (fourth century AD), which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences.
This 1999 book is a wide-ranging study of Sophoclean language. From a detailed analysis of sentence-structure in the first chapter, it moves on to discuss in subsequent chapters how language shapes the perception of characters, of myths, of gods and of choruses. All chapters are united by a shared concern: how does Sophoclean language engage readers and spectators? In answering this question, The Language of Sophocles avoids the current emphasis on cultural specificity. Instead, it concentrates on those aspects of Sophoclean language which can engage a large number of different spectators and readers. With this change in emphasis, this study is able to offer various fresh observations about the workings of Sophoclean language. Although the book focuses on the original Greek, translations make it accessible to anybody interested in Greek tragedy.
The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. It has often been thought that Epicurus owed only his physical theory of atomism to the fifth-century BC philosopher Democritus, but this 2002 study finds that there is much in his ethical thought which can be traced to Democritus. It also finds important influences on Epicurus in Democritus' fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to physics.
The economics of imperialism, its political background and institutional frameworks, the material benefits it conferred, the ideologies of ruler and ruled - these are some of the more important aspects of imperialism discussed in this volume. In presenting the evidence for ancient imperialims and suggesting concepts and methods of interpretation these articles, which are the work of the Cambridge University Research Seminar in Ancient History, range from New Kingdom Egypt and Carthage, through the classical Greek world of Athens and Sparta, to Macedonia and Rome. This book will be particularly useful to ancient historians but should also interest historian of other periods as well as students of politics.
This book examines the role and character of Homer's people, laoi, in Homeric story-telling, arguing that Homeric poetry is crucially concerned with the people as a basis for communal life. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are read as sustained meditations on the processes involved in protecting and destroying the people. The investigation draws on a wide range of approaches from formulaic analysis to the study of early performance contexts. From a close reading of the Homeric epics, Homer's people emerge as a community without effective social structures. When this is viewed from the perspective of Homeric performances in the polis, a contrast between Homer's laoi and the founding people of ritual emerges. While the former typically perish, the survival of the latter is secured by the establishment of successful institutions.
The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. It has often been thought that Epicurus owed only his physical theory of atomism to the fifth-century BC philosopher Democritus, but this 2002 study finds that there is much in his ethical thought which can be traced to Democritus. It also finds important influences on Epicurus in Democritus' fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to physics.
This book is an in-depth study of the topic of rape in classical Athens. Its central focus is on violent sexual encounters but it also raises questions about the nature and ingredients of any type of sexual activity in Athens. In particular it concentrates on two related areas: the law of classical Athens, especially as represented by speeches delivered in court, and the plays of Menander. These work at complementary levels in respect of period, subject matter and concerns with social conformity, while at the same time being widely different genres of discourse. It is argued that within the evaluation of heterosexual activity in Athens considerations about the consent of the female party were never the key factor. Rather it was the status of the two parties, in social, marital and political terms which ultimately determined whether or not a sexual act was regarded as acceptable.
How was the poet Homer imagined by ancient Greeks? This book examines stories circulating between the sixth and fourth centuries BC about his birth, place of origin and name; the circumstances of his life - such as the story of his blindness - his relation to other poets, and his heirs. The aim is to explore the ancient reception of the Homeric poems, and to look at it in relation to modern representations of Homer, ancient and modern conceptions of authorship, and the 'Homeric Question'. The book's engaging and accessible style should make it attractive to a wide range of readers, including non-classicists, and all quotations from Greek are provided with an English translation.
