Classical Studies

This book brings together nineteen scholars to rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. Speech was an integral part of decision-making in Republican Rome, and oratory was part of the education of every member of the elite. Yet no complete speech from the period by anyone other than Cicero survives, and as a result the debate on oratory, and political practice more widely, is liable to be distorted by the distinctive features of Cicero’s oratorical practice. With careful attention to a wide range of ancient evidence, this book shines a light on orators other than Cicero, and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the more familiar genres of forensic and political speech. In so doing, it challenges the idea that Cicero is a normative figure, and highlights the variety of career choices and speech strategies open to Roman politicians. The chapters in the book also demonstrate how unpredictable the outcomes of oratory were: politicians could try to control events by cherry-picking their audience and using tried methods of persuasion, but incompetence, bad luck, or hostile listeners were constant threats.

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.

Cratinus, one of the great lost poets of fifth-century Athenian comedy and a canonical author of the classical world, had a formative influence on the comic genre, including Aristophanes himself. In what is the first major monograph in the best part of a century devoted to this author, Emmanuela Bakola offers a modern, comprehensive overview of Cratinus and his position within the genre of Greek comedy using a methodologically innovative approach. Unlike traditional ways of addressing fragmentary drama, this book does not merely reconstruct plays or texts, but by drawing on a range of hermeneutic frameworks, it adopts a thematic approach which allows her to explore Cratinus' poetics. Major issues which this book addresses include the creation of a poetic persona within a performative tradition of vigorous interpoetic rivalry; comedy's interaction with lyric poetry, iambos, and the literary-critical debates reflected by these genres; the play with the boundaries of the comic genre and the interaction with satyr drama and tragedy, especially Aeschylus; the multiple levels of comic plot-construction and characterization; comedy's reflection on its immediate political, social, and intellectual context; stagecraft and dramaturgy; comedy and ritual. Whilst being firmly based on principles of rigorous textual analysis, philology, and papyrology, by taking a broad and diverse outlook this study offers not just an insight into Cratinus, but a way of opening up and enriching our understanding of fifth-century Athenian comedy in a dynamic evolving environment.

This book argues that a distinctive hallmark of Cicero's oratory is a conceptual creativity that one may loosely characterize as philosophical. A range of case studies show how this creativity manifests itself in striking and original views on human beings and being human, politics, society, and culture, and the sphere of the supernatural. After an introduction that defines the outlook of Cicero's philosophical oratory and addresses methodological issues, the volume contains three parts with four chapters each, devoted, respectively, to the anthropology, the sociology, and the theology contained within his speeches. Each of the three parts begins with a substantial introduction that situates Cicero's thought within its wider historical and intellectual context, not least by identifying where and how he departed from the established habits of thought in the late‐republican field of power. The nature of the argument requires close philological study of key terms or concepts including natura, humanitas, tyrannus, and conscientia as well as attention to larger figures of thought, such as agency and accountability, the ethics of happiness, laws vs. justice, the enemy within, civilization vs. barbarity, the problem of theodicy, and life after death. Examples are drawn from the entire corpus of Ciceronian oratory, from the pro Quinctio to the Philippics, with in‐depth analysis of a representative cross‐section of particularly relevant speeches. Overall, the book offers a fundamental reappraisal of a canonical body of texts and should appeal not just to scholars of Cicero and Latin literature, but also Roman historians, and students of the history of rhetoric.

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.

This book addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early 5th century bc. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaissance world.

This book examines the history of the Aegean islands and the changing concepts of insularity in the late archaic and classical period, with particular emphasis on the 5th century and the period of Athenian imperial control over the Aegean world. The predominant presence of islands in the Aegean geographic landscape inevitably created a variety of different and sometimes even conflicting perceptions of insularity. Using the theoretical concept of network, the book examines the religious networks of the insular world of the Aegean (Calauria and Delos) and their later transformation into networks of imperial control for 5th-century Athens. Athenian control over the islands transformed the concept of insularity in Greek thought and even provided powerful imagery for Athenian self-representation, exemplified in the metaphor of the ‘island of Athens’. Imperial Athens may have strengthened some aspects of the concept of insularity, such as ‘weak island’ or ‘safe island’, but beyond imperial politics, there also lay a world of frequent interaction outside the sphere of mainstream political narrative. The book examines the cases of island-networking on a micro-political and economic level, as well the interaction between islands and their mainland dependencies, the peraiai.

This book develops an authentic and revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It brings the interpretation of ancient verse into step with the sorts of analyses customarily enjoyed by works in all the more recent poetical and musical traditions. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. Such an analysis is now possible because of a new theory of the Greek tonic accent, set out in the third chapter, and its application to Greek poetry understood as choreia — the proper name for the art and work of ancient poets in both epic and lyric, described by Plato as a synthesis of dance rhythm and vocal harmony, in disagreement moving toward agreement. The book offers a thorough-going treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a ‘dance of the Muses’, lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. The book also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, applying the new theory of the accent and considering concretely the role of dance in performance.