Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

This book studies in detail the representations of Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin poetry. It investigates both the literary history of the myths (the Greek roots, the interactions between Roman versions) and their cultural resonance. In addition to close readings of the major treatments of each woman's story (in Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca), the book offers extended thematic explorations of the importance of memory, wildness, and morality in the myths. By extending the net to encompass three women (all from the same ill-fated family), the book gives a clear picture of the complexity and fascinating interconnectedness of myths and texts in Ancient Rome.

This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are conveyed. African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American adaptations engage with the cultural politics of the so-called Western canon, and use their self-consciously literary status variously to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and the place of the Greek ‘originals’, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book is informed by and contributes to postcolonial theory and theories of classical reception. In particular, it develops a new analytic concept, the ‘Black Aegean’, with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonialist discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates through the plays the later debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena.

Prudentius is arguably the greatest Latin poet of late antiquity. This book provides the Latin text, a new English verse translation, and critical reviews on each of his twelve lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, which were published early in the fifth century ad. They reflect the religious concerns of the increasingly Christianized western Roman Empire in the age of the emperor Theodosius and Ambrose of Milan, but they are above all the writings of a private person, and of the ways in which his religious beliefs colour his everyday life. Several of these poems follow the day's course, from pre-dawn to mealtime and nightfall. Others celebrate Christ's miracles, cult of the dead, and the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany. They are rich in biblical themes and narratives, images and symbols. But they are written in the classical metres of Latin poetry, use its vocabulary and metaphors, and exploit its themes as much as those of the Bible. They achieve a remarkable creative tension between the two worlds that determined Prudentius' culture: the beliefs and practices, sacred books and doctrines of Christianity, and the traditions, poetry, and ideas of the Greeks and Romans. A good part of the attractiveness of these poems comes from the interplay in Prudentius' reception of these two worlds.

This book traces the cultural history of Seneca's forced suicide at the command of Nero, situating it in the Roman imagination and tracing its interpretations from the first century to the present day. The earliest historical narratives of the death scene by Tacitus and others were shaped by conventions of Greco-Roman exitus description and Julio-Claudian dynastic history. Seneca's own prolific writings about death—whether anticipating death in his letters, dramatizing it in the tragedies, or offering therapy for loss in the form of consolations—offered the primary lens through which Seneca's contemporaries would view the author's death. Dozens of later interpreters, working in both literary and visual media, from St. Jerome to Heiner Müller and from medieval illuminations to Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David, retold the death scene (and the revival of Seneca's wife Paulina) in ways that forged new and sometimes controversial views on Seneca's legacy and, more broadly, on the experience of mortality and suicide. The book presents a new, historically inclusive, approach to reading this major Roman author.

Written by Derrida scholars, philosophers, and classicists, this book analyses a dialogue with the ancient world in the work of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of Derrida's work it explores the relationship between modern philosophy and Plato, the role ancient concepts of democracy have played in modern political debates, and the place of antiquity in contemporary discussions about Europe, as well as investigating the influence that deconstruction has had on the study of classical literature, ancient philosophy, and early religion. The volume is prefaced by a previously untranslated essay by Derrida, ‘We Other Greeks’.

This book reconsiders several of Augustine's most well-known letter exchanges, including his famously controversial correspondence with Jerome and his efforts to engage his Donatist rivals in a letter exchange. It reads these letters with close attention to conventional epistolary norms and practices, in an effort to identify innovative features of Augustine's epistolary practice. In particular, it notes and analyzes Augustine's adaptation of the traditionally friendly letter exchange to the correction of perceived error in the Christian community. In transforming the practice of letter exchange into a tool of correction, Augustine draws on both the classical philosophical tradition and also scripture. His particular innovation is his insistence that this process of correction can—and often must—be done in the potentially public form of a letter exchange rather than in the privacy of a face-to-face conversation. This is particularly true when the perceived error is one that has the potential to jeopardize the salvation of the entire Christian community. In offering epistolary correction, and requesting reciprocal correction from his correspondents, Augustine treats his practice of letter exchange as a performance of Christian caritas. Indeed, in his view, the friendliest correspondence was that which was concerned solely with preserving the salvation of the participants. In recognizing Augustine's commitment to the corrective correspondence and thus reading his letters with attention to their corrective function, we gain new insights into the complicated dynamics of Augustine's relationships with Jerome, Paulinus of Nola, the Donatists, and Pelagius.

The corpus of the Attic orators has long been recognized as a source for information about the mindset and life of ordinary Athenians. This book contributes to a differentiated understanding of religion in the Athenian public discourse by studying the references to religion and the use made of them in the corpus; it explores how the prominent orators differ in the sets of motifs they employ, in their strategies of persuasion, and thus in the image they convey of themselves. Part I analyses the rhetorical strategies behind the employment of religion in each of Demosthenes' public forensic speeches and links them with their legal, historical, and social background, showing that argumentation based on religion is not used randomly. Part II deals with deliberative and private speeches, in which religion plays a much less prominent role, and orators dispense with denigration and most other open use of religious argumentation; in the assembly the use of religious ideas serves instead as a signal helping to characterize the political situation, whereas in the private speeches it is most prominently the religious form of procedural elements that is exploited. This book presents various factors that could influence the appropriateness of references to religion, showing that careful consideration e.g. of the public relevance of a case is necessary in the interpretation of speeches.

Critics of Herodotus have generally shown unease in the face of the religious passages of the Histories, a sense that he ‘lets himself down’ by delving into matters irrelevant to the proper purpose of history. They have tended consequently to latch on to isolated instances of scepticism in an attempt to vindicate Herodotus from imagined charges of obscurantism. Historians of Greek religion, on the other hand, by their concentration on ritual as the central feature of Greek religious experience, have often neglected the value of literary sources as evidence of religious belief; indeed the term belief has become something of a dirty word. This book not only places Herodotus' religious beliefs at the centre of his conception of history, but by seeing instances of scepticism and of belief in relation to one another redresses the recent emphasis on the centrality of ritual, and paints a picture of Greek religion as a means for the explanation of events.

Early Latin has archaic futures like faxō ‘I shall do’, archaic subjunctives like faxim I may do’, duim ‘I may give’, or attigās ‘you may touch’, and archaic infinitives like impetrāssere ‘to achieve’. These forms are already quite rare in Plautus; a generation later, in Terence, they are almost non-existent. This study focuses on such forms from a synchronic perspective. It examines their meaning, distribution over clause types, register, and productivity. In order to reach reliable conclusions, the book looks at the usage of ‘regular’ futures, subjunctives, and infinitives in the early period. Thus, morphosyntactic phenomena such as the sequence of tenses and the use of subjunctives in prohibitions are examined and compared with classical practice. The work contains diachronic elements as well. Not only does it discuss the reconstruction of elements of the Proto-Italic and Proto-Indo-European verb systems, but it also shows the patterns by which archaic forms were lost in classical and later Latin.

This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature—the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words—and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it makes the claim that debate is best understood in relation to an institutional framework, in which issues of authority and dissent are variously set out and worked through. Intersecting with key recent scholarship, it shows that the Homeric poems establish, and scrutinize, the assembly as an institution which accommodates dissent, in line with an understanding of epic narrative as foundational; that the historians' marginal status as writers in an oral culture manifests itself in their representing debate as a challenge to the utility of public institutions; and that tragedy marks the formal institutionalization of dissent in its adversarial structure with an onus on speaking back, which offers a new way of thinking about tragic politics in terms of the process by which dissent is enacted and managed. This book demonstrates not only the fundamental importance of debate to these genres, but also the ways representations of debate construct an agonistic mentality which intersects with and informs the broader cultural construction of a citizen community.