Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

This book offers a series of detailed, challenging interpretations of some of the most important texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus, On the Sublime. Its fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the value of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of ‘ecstasy’) and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, the book questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts it analyses. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience—including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge—in the life of their culture. This also shows that we ourselves still have much to learn from re-engaging with those attempts.

Focusing on written texts, this book provides an introduction to the evidence of bilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean world. Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of ancient life, including literature, philosophy, law, medicine, provincial administration, army, magic and trade, and topics which have been fashionable in sociolinguistics for some time have now begun to attract the attention of scholars working in Graeco-Roman studies. The fifteen chapters in this collection cover theoretical and methodological issues and key aspects of the contact between Latin and Greek and among Latin, Greek, and other languages.

No issue in scholarship on the ancient novel has been discussed as hotly as the origin of the Greek love novel, also known as the ‘ideal’ novel. The present book proposes a new solution to this old problem. It argues that the genre had a personal inventor, Chariton of Aphrodisias, and that he wrote the first love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid‐first century AD. This conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics. A revisitation of the literary‐historical background provides the basis for further analysis: among other things, it considers Chariton's milieu at Aphrodisias (especially the local cult of Aphrodite), the dating of other early novels, and Chariton's potential authorship of the fragmentarily preserved novels Metiochus and Parthenope and Chione. Chariton's status as the inventor of the Greek love novel, suggested by the literary‐historical evidence, finds further support in his poetics. I argue that Narratives about Callirhoe is characterized by an unusual effort of self‐definition, which can be best explained as a consequence of coming to terms with a new form of writing. The book is rounded off by a study of the motif of Rumour in Chariton and its derivation from a surprising model, Virgil's Aeneid. This part also makes a significant contribution to the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

This book is a guide to the first large letter collection that survives from the Greco‐Roman world. The correspondence of Cicero consists of nearly 950 letters and embraces almost every major political figure of the Late Republic. Chapters 1 through 3 of this study describe external constraints affecting the letters that have come down to us. Some were the result of Roman conventions regarding social interaction, while others reflect logistical difficulties of long‐distance communication. Another series of constraints on the way letters were written arose from generic expectations about epistolary form. In addition, an editor helped to shape the published collection by imposing criteria of selection and arrangement that favored certain categories of subject matter and correspondent over others. Chapters 4 through 6 turn from the context of the letters to their content, and discuss three of Cicero's most characteristic epistolary preoccupations. It shows how, in a time of deepening crisis, he and his correspondents drew on a common literary background, on the habit of exchanging advice, and on a rhetoric of leadership in an effort to improve cooperation and to maintain the political culture which they shared.

This book is about Cicero's rhetorical and political strategy as a newcomer in Roman republican politics. It argues that Cicero advertised himself as follower of chosen models of behaviour from the past — his role models or exempla. As an ambitious new man, a homo novus, in a political culture which favoured men descended from famous consuls and generals, Cicero had to devise alternative strategies to reach political office and influence. Through his main means to political power, his oratory, Cicero adopted the traditional claim to political offices through ancestry and adapted it to his own situation. Instead of references to the virtues and achievements of his own ancestors, Cicero presented himself as emulating specific historical figures with the purpose of building up and strengthening his public persona and thereby supporting his claim to political offices and influence. His treatises provided further possibility for promoting himself as a political thinker and brilliant orator. Chapters on the importance of the ancestors in Roman political culture and their role as historical examples for emulation lead up to the central part on Cicero's role models; role models which he utilized to build up and maintain self‐presentations as a leading orator, a prominent consul and statesman, a triumphantly recalled exile and, furthermore, as a role model to his own family, contemporary Romans and posterity.

This volume offers a consideration of the various ways in which Rome's civil wars were perceived, experienced, and represented by Romans and others across a variety of media and historical periods. Why did the Romans subject themselves to civil conflict repeatedly over the long course of their history? Is there something distinctive about the nature and quality of a Roman civil war? How does civil war insinuate itself into the Roman worldview and into what it means to be Roman? What influence does the Roman propensity for civil war have over how other cultures define Rome? The link between discordia and Rome is persistent, and the defining role of, or, to take a longer view, the creative impetus given by civil war's conflict and destruction manifested itself in a variety of areas of Roman experience: politics, ethics, society, literature, to name some of those examined here.

This book comprises a collection of chapters on Latin literature by a number of distinguished classicists, produced in memory of Don Fowler, who died in 1999 at the age of forty-six. The authors of the chapters were all inspired by the desire to commemorate a beloved colleague and friend. The chapters, including that by Don Fowler himself, are much concerned with the reception of the classical world, extending into the realms of modern philosophy, art history, and cultural studies. There are fundamental studies of Horace’s style and Ovid’s exile. The book is unusual in the informality of the style of a number of pieces, and the openness with which the contributors have reminisced about Fowler and reflected on his early death.

Since Foucault's History of Sexuality, historians have traced in ever increasing detail the formation of modern sexual identities in the west. Relatively less attention has been addressed to historians, writers and intellectuals working between 1750 and 1910 who formulated their own plots for the history of sexuality. This book examines the significance of ancient Greek pederasty for the formation of scholarly historicism by German and English thinkers from the middle of the eighteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. Rather than “Greek love” being simply a euphemistic signifier for the secret signified “homosexuality,” this book examines how the pederastic—pedagogic relationship as exemplified in Plato's texts became a site for conceptualising the nature of the relationship between antiquity and modernity itself: precisely what did the Socratic teacher teach his pupil? What was the relationship between elder man and male youth? And how did this relationship inform modern discussions about the relationship between one generation and the next—between ancient and modern worlds? With the development of modern scholarly historicism in philhellenic Germany and Britain, Greek love provided the limit case for such scholarly endeavours invested in understanding how we moderns might be descended from a classical past. What sort of man did reading ancient Greek generate? From the work of Johann Matthias Gesner, the very first professor of philology at Göttingen, arguably the first modern European university, to Benjamin Jowett's Oxford, to the Oscar Wilde trials in London, to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic studies in Vienna, the question about the relevance of ancient Greek desires for modern masculinity has been posed and explored.

Seneca’s Natural Questions is an eight‐book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, many of which had been treated in the earlier Greco‐Roman meteorological tradition; but what notoriously sets Seneca’s writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca’s first century CE Rome to be reconciled with his main meteorological agenda? In grappling with this familiar question, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions argues that Seneca is no blinkered or arid meteorological investigator, but a creative explorer into nature’s workings who offers a highly idiosyncratic blend of physico-moral investigation in and across his eight books. More importantly, however, The Cosmic Viewpoint stresses the literary qualities and complexities that are essential to Seneca’s literary art of science: his technical enquiries initiate a form of engagement with nature which distances the reader from the ordinary involvements and fragmentations of everyday life, instead centring our existence in the cosmic whole. From a figurative standpoint, Seneca’s meteorological theme raises our gaze from a terrestrial level of existence to a higher, more intuitive plane where literal vision gives way to conjecture and intuition: in striving to understand meteorological phenomena, we progress in an elevating direction – a conceptual climb that renders the Natural Questions no mere store of technical learning, but a work that actively promotes a change of perspective in its readership: the cosmic viewpoint.

This is a book about the ways in which various intellectuals in the post-classical Mediterranean imagined the human community as a unified, homogenous whole composed of a diversity of parts. More specifically, this study explores the ways in which authors of the second century ce adopted and adapted a particular ethnic and cultural discourse that had been elaborated by late fifth- and fourth-century bce Athenian intellectuals. At the center of this book is a series of contests over the meaning of lineage and descent and the extent to which the political community is or ought to be coterminous with what we might call a biologically homogenous collectivity. Beginning in the early fourth century and gaining great momentum in the wake of Alexander’s conquest of the East, traditional dichotomies such as Greek and barbarian lost much of their explanatory power. In the second-century ce, by contrast, the empire of the Romans imposed a political space that was imagined by many to be coterminous with the oikoumenê itself. One of the central claims of this study is that the forms of cosmopolitan and ecumenical thought that emerged in both moments did so as responses to the idea that the natio—the kin group—is (or ought to be) the basis for any human collectivity.