Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

The topic of the book is three Christian epic poets of Late Antiquity who, though somewhat neglected in modern times, are notable in many ways, especially in their aim of harnessing the tradition of classical Latin epic to the task of presenting the New Testament to the learned readers, whether they be Christian believers or curious enquirers, perhaps put off by the style of Bible translations. This triad were pioneers in their time but their works would soon become staple ingredients of the medieval curriculum. The book carefully introduces each author, setting them in their own contexts and backgrounds (one was from the fourth, one from the fifth, and one from the sixth century), and examines their work in detail. Particular themes illustrated and discussed are their strategies in rendering, sometimes literally, sometimes not, the Biblical narratives, the ways in which they reflect and exploit the classical epic poets in their design, style and vocabulary, and the particular theological agendas which they may pursue, implicitly or explicitly. The book engages fully and critically with recent studies of Biblical epic and investigates critically and in detail numerous other questions. Full details of all modern studies that relate to these poets and their backgrounds are given in a large bibliography.

This book traces both the personal and scholarly life of Jane Harrison (1850–1928), a scholar whose work on Greek art and the origins of religion broke new ground in English scholarship. After five years at Cambridge, where she was one of the first women students, she spent twenty years in London, lecturing on Greek art and travelling in Europe, studying archaeology in situ and in museums. During this time she lectured and published on Greek art and archaeology, her fluent command of languages equipping her to bring to the English public the latest Continental scholarship. Returning to Newnham College, Cambridge, at the age of fifty, she focussed her interest on Greek religion, breaking with tradition in preferring ‘primitive’ ritual over the classical Olympians and relying on intuition as much as reason. In collaboration with Gilbert Murray and Francis Cornford, a group known as ‘the Cambridge Ritualists’, she applied to Classics the latest discoveries of anthropology and emerging theories from the social sciences. She published numerous articles and books, pre-eminently Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). Her outspoken unorthodoxy and atheism earned her the reputation of being dangerous. It was her genius to set her research — essentially an investigation into the ‘real meaning’ of religion — within the wider context of human life, and her influence was felt far beyond the walls of academe.

The core of this book is an investigation of the treatment of the recognition motif in the Greek novels. It also includes forays into the Roman novels, early Jewish and Christian narratives, and an overview of a sample of early modern European texts, which have been influenced by the ancient novel in their recognition scenes. The ancient novels inherit the recognition motif from epic and drama, and acknowledge their debts by citations or allusions. They also share an ideological mainstay underlying the poetics of recognition in ancient literature: poetic justice, or “goodness wins.” Recognition rewards the deserving couple with the happy ending (this idealistic scenario is not endorsed by the Roman novels). At the same time, the Greek novels also innovate, adding more “natural” ways of recognition (the voice, appearance, the telling of one’s life, instinct, even breathing) to the artificial and conventional ones (tokens or bodily marks) preferred by tradition. This shift of emphasis is related to the idealization of love typical of the genre. Love itself is recognition and should suffice for lovers to recognize each other. Novelists play with this dictate in a variety of ways, romantically endorsing it or challenging it irreverently. Recognitions of family identity likewise negotiate tradition with innovation, bringing the call of blood, or nature’s voice, to bear on the revelation of kinship between family members unknown to each other. The final pages of this book follow the fortunate developments of the motif of blood’s call in later literature.

This collection of ten chapters on Lucretius' poem of the world, Dererumnatura(DRN), attempts to combine within one book and within the individual contributions the three main strands of approaches to this beautiful and difficult text, as reflected in the title of the volume: poetry, philosophy, science. All too often, DRN has been mined by the critics, philosophers, and historians of science for nuggets relevant to their purposes, rather than read as a work of interdisciplinary genius. The range of the chapters is broad in chronology as well as disciplinary approach: from the poem’s relationship with Greek literature and philosophy (Hesiod, Empedocles, Epicurus) to its reception by later Roman readers (Ovid, Lucan) as well as by early modern and modern cosmological scientists and contributors to the creationist debate.

The works of the Bengali poet and playwright Michael MadhusudanDatta (1824-1873) engage with various texts of the Graeco-Roman canonand do so in a manner which is often subversive and almost always surprising from a Western point of view. The book marshals new archival evidence to show that the poet knew Latin and Greek well.It examines how his Bengali works, which also engage (inter alia) with the English, Italian, and indigenous Sanskrit and Bengali literary traditions, respond to Graeco-Roman texts. The book’ discussion of various of Madhusudan’s Bengali works demonstrates that the poet’s reception of the Western classics went against the grain of contemporary British taste, especially in his interest in Roman as well as Greek literature.Madhusudan’s reception of the Graeco-Roman classicsshows intimations of the Indian nationalism which would gain ideological traction soon after his works were published, for example through his development of aVergilian metaphor casting Britain as Aeneas and India as Dido. However, the poet’s turn to Greek and Latin texts also represents a reaction both against popular Bengali culture and against the elite culture of the indigenous Hindu pundits.It is suggested that the Bengali poet stands at the head of a tradition of non-white classical readership. Comparisons are made with Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, and the book as a whole is located in the theoretical context of postcolonial studies, classics reception, and the emerging field of black classicism. Translations of excerpts from previously untranslated Bengali works are included in appendices.

This book explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Latin poetry, and argues that poets working in such genres composed their “attacks” on targets, and constructed their relationships with audiences, in accordance with a set of common poetic principles, protocols, and tropes. It encourages a synoptic, synchronic view of such poetry, from archaic iambus through Roman satire, and argues that only when we appreciate how an abstracted “poetics of mockery” governs individual poets can we fully understand how such poetry functioned diachronically in its own historical moment. The book examines in particular the strategies deployed by satirical poets to enlist the sympathies of a putative audience and convince them of the legitimacy of their personal attacks. It discusses the tension deliberately created by such poets between self-righteous didactic claims and a persistent desire to undermine them, and concludes that such poetry was felt by ancient audiences to achieve its greatest success as comedy precisely when they were left unable to ascribe to the satirist any consistent moral position. Several early chapters look to Greek myth for paradigms of comic mockery, and argue that these myths can illuminate the ways in which ancient audiences conceptualized specifically poeticized forms of satire. Poets addressed in this part of the book include Archilochus, Hipponax, Horace, Homer, Aristophanes, and Theocritus. Two chapters follow which address the satirical poetics of Callimachus and Juvenal, and a final chapter on the question of how ancient audiences responded the inherently controversial elements of such poetry.

This book describes the Latin astrological poet Marcus Manilius. Manilius, about whose life nothing is known, composed his didactic poem Astronomica in the second decade of the 1st century AD. The work is our earliest extant comprehensive treatment of astrology, a discipline developed in Hellenistic Greece under the influence of Near Eastern practices that had become highly fashionable in Rome during the final years of the Republic. Apparently without much impact in his own lifetime and the rest of antiquity, Manilius was rediscovered in the Renaissance and has received numerous editions over the centuries, including by such influential critics as Joseph Scaliger, Richard Bentley, and A. E. Housman. In recent times, however, his work has been largely neglected by classical scholarship. This book explores the manifold intellectual traditions that have gone into shaping the Astronomica: ancient astronomy and cosmology, the history and practice of astrology, the historical and political situation at the poem's composition, the poetic and generic conventions that inform it, and the philosophical underpinnings of Manilius' world-view. What emerges is a panoroma of the cultural imagination of the Early Empire, a fascinating picture of the ways in which educated Greeks and Romans were accustomed to think and speak about the cosmos and man's place in it.

This book reassesses the late 3rd-century Greek rhetorician Menander of Laodicea (Menander Rhetor). Menander is generally regarded as a specialist in epideictic, as such, he is often considered an exemplary rhetorician of an age which saw the triumph of epideictic eloquence. But detailed examination of the fragments shows that he was an expert on judicial and deliberative oratory whose most influential work was a commentary on Demosthenes. Source-critical analysis of the Demosthenes scholia shows that his commentary can be partially reconstructed. The book presents its reassessment of Menander’s significance in the context of a new reconstruction of the history of later Greek rhetoric, ranging from the theoretical innovations of the 2nd century AD to the comparatively unknown sophists of 5th-century Alexandria. Particular attention is given to the evolving structure of the rhetorical curriculum and to the practices of the rhetorical education, with an emphasis on the practical orientation of training in rhetoric and its predominant focus on techniques of forensic and deliberative oratory. These characteristics of rhetorical teaching raise questions about the nature and functions of rhetoric in this period. It is argued that rhetoric was concerned fundamentally with teaching students how to devise arguments and articulate them in a persuasive way, and that these skills still had a direct application in the subsequent careers of the rhetoricians’ pupils.

According to the theoretical accounts which survive in the rhetorical handbooks of antiquity, allegory is extended metaphor, or an extended series of metaphors; and both allegory and metaphor are linguistic ‘tropes’: their purpose is essentially ornamental. The distance posited here between meaning on the one hand and the form of its expression on the other has come under decisive attack in the work of 20th century theorists, who have argued for the central role of metaphor in the construction of meaning. But how far in fact do the rhetorical handbooks represent the scope and subtlety of ancient thought on the matter? The papers presented here address this question from a variety of theoretical perspectives; they examine the origin and meaning of the term ‘metaphor’, set ancient against modern theories of language, and theory against practice. The inclusion of papers devoted to allegory in the writing and exegesis of antiquity provides, in the first place, another way of testing the adequacy of ancient rhetorical theory; but it also extends the debate into areas of the literary life of antiquity which have been unjustly sidelined or neglected.

This book is the first detailed study of self-conscious aspects of Euripidean drama. This book argues that Euripides employed a complex system of metapoetic devices in order to draw the audience’s attention to the novelty of his compositions, and that these are interwoven with issues of thematic importance, whether social, theological or political. The metapoetic strategies discussed include intertextual allusions to earlier poetic texts, especially to Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, often developed around unusual and memorable language or imagery, deployment of recognizable trigger words referring to plot construction, novelties, or secondary status, and self-conscious references to fiction implied through allusion to writing. Metapoetic techniques in tragedy, satyr-drama and old comedy are compared in the final chapter in order to demonstrate first that the Greek tragedians commonly exploited metapoetic strategies, second that metapoetry is far more pervasive in Euripides than in the other tragedians, and third that, while Euripides shares some metapoetic techniques with old comedy, these remain implicit in his tragedies (but not in his satyr-dramas) as the tragic genre requires. Acknowledging the extensive metapoetic games in the plays of Euripides helps us to understand the nature of Euripidean drama.