Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

This book contributes to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more generally the reception of classical traditions. It shows that Milton drew on all of Ovid's works as well as the long tradition of interpretation and reception that began with Ovid himself. It argues that for Renaissance writers Ovid's revision of past authors, especially Virgil, gave them a model for their own transformation of classical works. For Renaissance artists, Ovidian stories and figures provided the raw material out of which they created and reflected on their own art. Throughout his career Milton thinks through and with Ovid, whose stories and figures are central to his exploration of the limits and possibilities of creativity, change, and freedom. A study in practical criticism that examines a specific relation between two very individual and different authors, this book also explores the forms and meaning of creative imitation. Revision was not only central to the two writers' poetic practices but helped shape their visions of the world. Many critics have been concerned with trying to establish how Milton read Ovid. The larger question in this book, however, is why does figuring out how Milton reads Ovid matter? How do our readings of this relation change our understanding of both Milton and Ovid; what also does it tell us about how traditions are changed and remade through time?

This book considers three mythological complexes that enjoyed a unique surge of interest in 20th-century European literature, art, and music. While many works deal with the literary use of myth—a subject of growing interest in recent decades—it is conspicuous that most of them ignore the three myths that are identified with the island of Crete and linked by the figure of the legendary King Minos: Europa and the bull (his parents), the minotaur (his stepson) and the labyrinth, and Daedalus and Icarus (his subjects). The book adduces the ideas of such precursors of modernism as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to explain the revitalization of myth in the early twentieth century. It posits an essential distinction between “primary” and “secondary” myth: that is, myth that has been ironized beyond its original religious meaning and liberated for literary and artistic adaptation. To this end the work analyzes examples drawn from every realm of art—from fiction and poetry and drama to painting, sculpture, opera, and ballet—to explore the particular appeal of the three Cretan myths to the modern consciousness.

From Hesiod’s first-person account of his encounters with the Muses on Mount Helicon to Theocritus’s nymphs, love between goddesses and mortal men provides the ancient Greeks with a way of articulating both the genealogical and cultic connection to their gods and to their past. This book examines the theme of nympholepsy—the experience of being “seized” by a nymph or a goddess—in ancient Greek cult and poetry from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. In poetry, this topos, which is ubiquitous in many of the most well-known ancient Greek sources, focuses on the figure of the goddess or nymph who falls in love with a mortal man and subsequently bears a mortal child. Erotic love leads to motherhood and a genetic connection between mortals and immortals. The theme also finds its way in ritual as stories of encounters between divinities and mortal men give rise to sanctuaries centering on nymphs and nympholepts. Beyond the individual dimension of the nympholeptic experience, these narratives are also integrated within the community through both poetry and shrines. Nympholeptic narratives thus articulate key elements of the bond between mortals and immortals and the connection between myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Both the cave sanctuaries founded by ancient nympholepts and the poets’ narratives of love between goddesses and their mortal lovers function as “a moment’s ornament” by preserving the memory of an encounter with the otherworldly at the intersection between myth and cult.

While interest in the poets of the Flavian period has been steadily growing, the role of women in the epic poems of Silius Italicus and Statius has so far remained understudied. This book offers the studies of the role of motherhood and female foreign otherness in the Punica and the Thebaid. The book argues that the juxtaposition of Roman and foreign women as mothers expands our awareness of the poems' scope in relation to gender and ethnicity. By drawing on the theoretical apparatus of Julia Kristeva on motherhood and otherness, the book shows how the Flavian poets construct an idealized discourse on the empire's own identity that at once crystallizes but also destabilizes the role that women command within the epic genre. The portrayal of female figures in the epics of the first century ce allows us to witness a change of attitudes toward otherness: the periphery now defines the centre, as the poets highlight the notions of otherness and motherhood in the narrative in order to reshape Romanness through representations of the other.

The wealth of metrical forms adopted by classical poetry is one of its characteristic features. Yet metre features only sporadically in contemporary criticism of ancient poetry. This book makes the case that metre was central to the Roman experience of literature, and should be restored to a central position also in interpretation of that poetry. By the time Roman poets came to write hexameters, choliambics, and sapphics, these metres could all claim rich histories, and consequently brought a wealth of associations in their own right to the poems they carried. Powerful effects can be achieved by manipulation of the established characters of their metrical media: by giving the metre of classical Latin poetry its proper weight, critics can restore to that poetry a critical, neglected dimension. In four main chapters on representative metres or metre groups, this book considers how Roman poets exploited the connotations of metrical form: the ‘Catullan’ associations of the Flavian hendecasyllable; the logic that produced the ‘pure’ iambic trimeter; the sapphic stanza between Catullus, Horace, and Statius; and the various strategies attempted by poets to subvert the superlative status of the benchmark metre, the dactylic hexameter. Also considered are sotadeans, priapeans, saturnians, elegiacs, and Horace's epodic structures. Connections between poetic practice and the academic study of metre in antiquity are highlighted, and attention is also given both to Greek perceptions of the metres they bequeathed to Rome, and to the effect on Roman versification of the perception that these forms were irreducibly Greek.

Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, is infamously known for having employed elements more akin to mythological tales than to unvarnished ‘truth’ in translating his historical research into narrative form. While these narratives provide valuable source material, he could not have surmised the hostile reception his work would receive in later generations. This mythical aspect of the Histories led many successors, most notoriously Plutarch, to blame Herodotus for spinning far-fetched lies, and to set him apart as an untrustworthy historian. Echoes of the same criticism resounded in twentieth-century scholarship, which found it difficult to reconcile Herodotus' ambition to write historical stories ‘as they really happened’ with the choices he made in shaping their form. Each chapter in this book seeks to review, re-establish, and rehabilitate the origins, forms, and functions of the Histories' mythological elements. These chapters throw new light on Herodotus' talents as a narrator, underline his versatility in shaping his work, and reveal how he was inspired by and constantly engaged with his intellectual milieu. The Herodotus who emerges is a Herculean figure, dealing with a vast quantity of material, struggling with it as with the Hydra's many-growing heads, and ultimately rising with consummate skill to the organisational and presentational challenges it posed. The volume ultimately concludes that far from being unrelated to the ‘historical’ aspects of Herodotus' text, the ‘mythic’ elements prove vital to his presentation of history.

This book tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies. But between 1500 and 1800, a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the ‘other Virgil’ is made clear.

This book celebrates the bimillennial anniversary of the inception of Ovid’s Fasti by offering a variety of approaches to Ovid’s poem on the Roman religious calendar. The volume does not aim at consensus but provides a collection of differing interpretations and perspectives of Fasti scholars without allowing any single prejudice to prevail. In reconstructing the value-systems which inform the poem, twelve contributors discuss topics such as the calendar, religion, politics, women, mime, myth, theatre, cult, astronomy, astrology, theology, intertextuality, gender, poetic ecphrasis, speech, time, and space. The tension arising from the discrepancy in interpretation and approach in the essays is an apt reflection of the tension arising from the contradictory and elusive nature of the Fasti itself. It will engage all those interested in the relationship between literature and society during the early Roman Principate.

This book explores the intersection of passion and politics in Plutarch's Lives, with special emphasis on how Plutarch represents the influence of erōs (erotic desire) on the careers of his biographical subjects. The book first explains how Plutarch combines Aristotle's notion of friendship with Plato's conception of the soul to describe the ideal marriage, and heterosexual relationships in general, as based on a mutual love of character (philia) supported by an enduring erotic attraction. Then it examines how Plutarch applied his system of moral virtue to his reading of history in order to create historical-ethical reconstructions of past events. In a reading of the Alexander–Caesar, the book argues that Plutarch draws upon Xenophon's Cyropaedia to depict Alexander as a king who exhibits self-restraint in response to basic appetites, especially erotic desire, and that Plutarch applies the same model to Caesar, despite his reputation for sexual extravagance. In the Demetrius–Antony, Plutarch demonstrates the same principle from the opposite perspective, representing both men as unwilling or unable to exercise self-restraint. In the case of Antony, erōs is the primary cause of his political failure and his death. Plutarch's approach to the Agesilaus–Pompey defines a middle ground between absolute self-restraint and erotic license, exploring how the heroes allowed erotic involvement in their personal lives to influence their public actions. The book connects Plutarch's political thought to precedents from Classical authors to show how he uses the narration of his subjects' private erotic affairs to explain their success and failure in war and politics.

Plato's ambiguous relationship with Homer is well known, but his engagement with Hesiod, the ‘second poet’ of ancient Greece, has been less systematically explored. Hesiod, however, is of particular importance to Plato, not least as a reference-point for the didactic tradition quite generally, and the sophists in particular; he is a major source of imagery at crucial moments in Plato's thought. This volume presents fifteen studies addressing this issue, from a wide variety of thematic angles. Some look at Plato's view of Hesiod in general, some at Hesiod's presence in particular dialogues. Together they bring new light, both to the philosophy of Classical Athens, and to the reception of archaic poetry in the 4th century BC.