Classical Studies

The accentuation of many categories of ancient Greek word appears arbitrary, but this book points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word’s synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system. Bringing together comparative evidence for the Indo-European accentuation of the relevant categories with recent insights into the effects that loss of transparency and word frequency have on language change, the book uses the synchronically observable correlations to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek from the Hellenistic period onwards. As well as yielding a better understanding of the history of Greek accentuation, this study produces some more general discoveries. The notion that recessive accentuation is the most globally regular — in the terms of some ‘default’ — accentuation for ancient Greek, current in work on Greek phonology, turns out to have implications for the history of the language since the synchronic patterns point to a process by which words originating in non-recessive morphological categories often became recessive after their morphological analysis was lost. Both this loss of analysis and the subsequent change in accentuation are inhibited under certain conditions relating to a word’s frequency. The study yields new insights into the role of frequency in language change, and into some aspects of Indo-European accentuation.

The source and nature of earliest speech and civilization are puzzles which have intrigued people for many centuries. This study explores ancient Greek views on the source and nature of the world’s first society and first language. Two of the book’s chapters are based on close readings of passages in Homer and Herodotus, while the remaining chapters are broader surveys of a variety of Greek literary texts. Topics covered include the nature of the language used both by men and animals in the idyllic golden age, accounts of humans' ascent to civilised life and their acquisition of language, and exotic creatures and peoples who have only limited linguistic capacities. Discussions of Enlightenment thinkers and modern theories of glottogenesis and language acquisition set Greek assumptions in a wider perspective.

This volume collects essays written by colleagues and friends as a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Latin at the University of Virginia. These essays, like Woodman's own work, cover topics in Latin poetry, oratory, and Greek and Roman historiography. Recurrent themes are the importance of rhetoric and rhetorical training, the skilful use of language and recurrent motifs in narrative, the use and adaptation of topoi, the importance of intertextuality, and the subtle and varied ways in which literary texts can have a contemporary resonance for their own day.

The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine, and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume brings together both well-established and new scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy, and medicine to engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and ‘interdisciplinary’ of genres.

Originating in a conference held at the British Library in 2007 to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in British colonies, this book offers a study of the role played by ancient Greek and Roman sources and voices in the struggle to abolish slavery in Britain and North America. It contains thirteen chapters by an interdisciplinary team of specialists in literature, history, political thought, postcolonial studies, drama and classics from three continents, led by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway University of London. Focussing on Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and South Africa from the late 17th century, the chapters, which are chronologically arranged, examine the arguments created by both critics and defenders of slavery, in media ranging from parliamentary speeches to historiography, nationalist polemic to poetry, fiction, drama, cinema, and the visual arts. In particular, they ask how, why and to what effect these often passionate as well as learned campaigners summoned the ghosts of the ancient Spartans, Homer, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Pliny, Spartacus, and Prometheus to participate in this most significant of debates.

This is the first book-length treatment of supplication, an important social practice in ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Despite the importance of supplication, it has received little attention, and no previous study has explored so many aspects of the practice. This book investigates the varied gestures made by the suppliants, the types of requests they make, the arguments used in defense of their requests, and the role of the supplicandus, who evaluates and decides whether to fulfill the requests. Varied and abundant sources invite comparison between the societies of Greece, especially Athens, and the Roman Republic and Principate and also among literary genres such as epic and tragedy. Additionally, this book formulates an analysis of the ritual in its legal and political contexts.

This book explores a phenomenon known as aniconism — the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century bc to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries ad, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centred on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the centre of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.

Next to older scholarly approaches to sacrifice, a new way of understanding the mechanism of animal sacrifice is presented in this book, based on the intersection of two axes: the one vertical (linking humans to the deity), the other horizontal (that of reality). The horizontal axis consists of many sections, each one representing a particular realm of the offerer's reality. The book emphasizes the vigorous continuity of both Greek and Jewish animal sacrificial worship in the period studied. After presenting the sacrificial multiplicity characterizing Greek religion, the book stresses the sometimes obligatory character which the act of offering a sacrifice had in Greek communities, and so the importance of the objection to sacrifice. As regards to Judaism, the vigour of animal sacrifice in the Jerusalem Temple is stressed. Animal sacrifice was important even to the Diaspora, as an original study of Philo's sacrificial allegorisations proves. The Mishnah is used as a source for attitudes towards sacrifice before and after AD 70. The section dedicated to Christianity emphasizes the different backgrounds of early Christians (e.g., Jewish, Gentile). Evidence for anti-sacrificial attitudes is mainly attested in the 2nd-century Apologetics. However, the book finds anti-sacrificial hints in the earliest layers of Christianity. The book emphasizes on the use of sacrificial metaphors by Christians. Returning to the initial interpretive scheme, the book explains how metaphors transpose meanings from one section of the horizontal axis to the other, and thus help to dissociate sacrificial terms from animal sacrifice. Finally, attempting at answering the question of why Christians abolished animal sacrifice, the book traces the existence of an anti-sacrificial stream of thought emanating from the contact with Jesus.

This book analyses what happens to Sophocles' play as it is adapted and (re)produced around the world, and it focuses specifically on Antigone in performance. The chapters highlight the numerous ways in which social, political, historical, and cultural contexts transform the material; how artists and audiences in diverse societies including Argentina, The Congo, Finland, Haiti, India, Japan, and the United States interact with it; and the variety of issues it has been used to address.

This book draws on theories of space in cultural geography and anthropology to study the representation of space in Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic poem, the Argonautika. In Apollonius’s narrative, the voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece defines a space with mainland Greece as its center, and Greek culture provides the perspective through which the Argonauts’ experiences are principally portrayed. At the same time, the poem shows clearly the limits of Greek mastery of space. Some areas cannot be incorporated into Greek space, and in some episodes space is marked with signs that preserve narratives in which the perspectives of the non-Greek peoples whom the Argonauts encounter are preserved. Thus the poem both affirms the centrality of Hellenism and questions it at the same time; it implies the traditional Greek division of the world into themselves and “barbarians” and simultaneously destabilizes it through the Argonauts’ experiences of others as an interplay of similarity and difference. Ethnic boundaries and cultural identity are thus shown to be uncertain and open to negotiation. This sense of the blurring of boundaries speaks to the experiences of Greeks in the early Ptolemaic period in Alexandria, where they lived among and ruled Egyptians in a multicultural city at a time when the conquests of Alexander had expanded Greek cultural horizons. The poem uses the Argonautic myth to explore the anxieties about identity and the sense of new possibilities arising from this experience of cultural contact.