Classical Studies

The Iliad is a poem whose events revolve around the “anger” of Achilles, and his personal fierceness and pursuit of glory remain, despite different and more complex nuances, the prevailing features of his characterization. This book proposes to investigate how different literary authors and visual artists at different periods responded to Achilles' “erotic life”, an aspect about which the Iliadwas almost completely silent. Achilles' loves expose a crack in the usually self-assured attitude of the hero, demonstrating the limits of epic heroism and the epic vision of the world. As such, these moments of erotic “weakness” became perfect manifestos for reuse in other genres, such as tragedy and the various forms of love poetry, in which themes of love and passion were more customary than in heroic epic.

The endogenous rise of primary states constituted a major organizational revolution, for through emulation or coercion these states served as prototypes for all subsequent large-scale, politically organized societies that have replaced and encompassed all small-scale societies. Primary states emerged before sophisticated writing systems in six generally recognized regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. This book identifies Polynesia as the seventh such region by tracing the emergence of primary states in Hawai`i that, along with the Tongan state, were the only ones described by fully literate eyewitnesses. The Hawaiian state emergence model, constructed here from archaeological and historical evidence, employs comparisons with Tonga and five Polynesian nonstate societies to propose that the Hawaiian state emergence entailed a profound sociopolitical transformation in which leadership of each large Hawaiian island shifted from a relatively powerless symbolic chief to a warrior-king who exercised legitimate political power as head of a centralized government. The key management innovation was the ruler’s ability to assert control indirectly by delegating power among multiple tiers of a hierarchical bureaucracy. Modeled modifications of the old order also included the funding of government operations with taxes diverted from the goods once collected for distribution among commoners, the invention of conquest warfare, and the shift from dual ownership to chiefs’ assertion of property rights superior to those of commoners. According to the hard times hypothesis, a major impetus for the escalation of power politics may have been unrest among chiefs and commoners triggered by faltering agricultural productivity.

This book is dedicated to the political economy of one of the major states of the Hellenistic world, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor. In the third century bc, the Attalid dynasts of Pergamon were relatively minor players in Hellenistic great-power politics. In 188 bc, after Rome's victory over the Seleukid king Antiochos III, the Attalids were granted the lion's share of the former Seleukid territories in western and inner Anatolia; at a stroke, the Attalids were elevated to the status of one of the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean. But this new-found prominence came at a price. Since the vast expanse of Attalid Asia Minor had been won not by conquest, but by gift of the Roman senate, the ideological and bureaucratic structures through which the second-century Attalid rulers administered their kingdom differed sharply from those of the other major Hellenistic dynasties. The late Attalid monarchs were forced to develop a new non-charismatic royal style and ideology. A full reassessment of the character of Attalid Asia Minor is long overdue. This book is chiefly concerned with the political economy of the second-century Attalid kingdom, and in particular the three major themes of money, international relations, and the functioning of the state.

An influential view of ecphrasis (the literary description of art objects) treats it primarily as a way for authors to write about their own texts, and even to insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. The Captor's Image argues for the inadequacy of this view in the case of ancient Rome, and the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range of Latin authors—including Plautus, Terence, Catullus, Horace, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, Statius, and Martial—Dufallo shows that Roman ecphrasis stages an ambivalent receptivity to Greek culture with implications for shifting notions of Roman identity in the Republican and Imperial periods. Individual chapters explore how the simple assumption of a self-asserting ecphrastic text is called into question by comic performance, self-consciously inconsistent narrative, the thematization of civil discord, Greek religious iconography, the contradictory associations of epic imagery, satiric poetry and the satiric novel, and the author's subjection to a patron. Visual material such as wall painting, statuary, and drink ware contextualizes the discussion. The first book-length treatment of artistic ecphrasis at Rome, The Captor's Image resituates a major literary trope deep within its hybrid cultural context, and argues for ecphrasis as a cultural practice through which the Romans sought, over some four hundred years of their history, to redefine Romanness both with and against Greekness.

This book examines the inter-relationship of classical myth and psychoanalysis from the generation before Freud to the present day, engaging with debates about the reception of classical myth by modernity, the importance of psychoanalytic ideas for cultural critique, and its on-going relevance to ways of conceiving the self. The chapters trace the historical roots of terms in everyday usage, such as narcissism and the phallic symbol, and cover a variety of both classical and psychoanalytic texts.

Drakōn is the first substantial survey in any language of the Graeco-Roman reflex of the dragon or the supernatural serpent, the drakōn or draco. Yet dragons were all-pervasive in both cultures: almost every major myth cycle of the Greek and Roman worlds featured a dragon-fight at its heart, including the sagas of Heracles, Jason, Perseus, Cadmus, and Odysseus. And Asclepius, the single most beloved and influential of the pagan gods from the late Classical period until Late Antiquity, was often manifest as a giant serpent, and carried a serpent on his staff even in his humanoid aspect. The first half of the book offers comprehensive accounts and analyses of the rich sources, literary and iconographic, for the principal dragons of myth, including the Hydra and the dragons that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides and the golden fleece. The second half turns to matters of cult, and to the initially paradoxical association of dragons and serpents with the most benign of deities, not only those of health and healing, like Asclepius and Hygieia, but also those of wealth and good luck, such as Zeus Meilichios and Agathos Daimon. Consideration is given also to the question of these gods’ vicars on earth, the actual snakes maintained as sacred denizens of their shrines. A final chapter considers the roles of both pagan dragon-slaying narratives and pagan serpent cults in shaping the beginnings of the tradition of the saintly dragon- and serpent-slaying tales we cherish still, the tradition that culminates in our own stories of Saints George and Patrick.

This book, arising out of a conference at University College London in 2009, examines erôs as an emotion in ancient Greek culture. It considers the phenomenology, psychology, and physiology of erôs; its associated language, metaphors, and imagery; the overlap of erôs with other emotions (jealousy, madness, philia, pothos); its role in political society; and the relationship between the human emotion and Eros the god. These topics build on recent advances in understanding of ancient Greek homo- and heterosexual customs and practices, visual and textual erotica, and philosophical approaches to erôs as manageable appetite or passion. However, the principal aim of the volume is to apply to erôs the theoretical insights offered by the rapidly expanding field of emotion studies, both in ancient cultures and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, thus maintaining throughout the focus on erôs as emotion. The volume covers a very broad range of sources and theoretical approaches, both in the chronological and the generic sense: all important thinking about the nature of erôs is considered, spanning the entire period from Hesiod to the Second Sophistic, including the input offered by figurative arts. Generically the volume ranges from Archaic epic and lyric poetry, through tragedy and comedy, to philosophical and technical treatises and more, and includes contributions from many scholars well published in the field of ancient Greek emotions – thus marking an important addition to this field.

This book explores the cultural significance of labelling certain films as ‘epics’, arguing that there is a meaningful relationship between films set in antiquity and the classical epic tradition. The connection between cinematic and literary epic genres is particularly apparent in films which adapt classical epic for the screen, and the book begins with a detailed assessment of movies including Ulysses, Troy, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Jason and the Argonauts, focusing on themes such as heroism and kleos, the depiction of the gods, and narrative structure. It then considers a series of case-studies of Hollywood historical epics which further demonstrate the ways in which cinema receives and engages with the themes of classical epic. The relationship between Gladiator and The Fall of the Roman Empire demonstrates the importance of tradition, while the archetypal epic themes of heroism and spectacle are explored through Spartacus and Ben-Hur. Finally, common tropes surrounding epic are discussed, focusing on the performance of epic in the ancient and modern worlds, and its perceived social role, and the widespread parody of epic, in both literature and cinema. Through this consideration of how epic can manifest itself through different periods and cultures, we learn how cinema makes a powerful claim to be a modern vehicle for a very ancient tradition.

This study examines the semantic field covered by the Greek term polypragmon, its synonyms periergos and philopragmon, and their closest Latin equivalent curiosus. The linking factor between these terms is that of intense engagement with a particular object. This can lead to censure of behaviour on the part of an individual or a community that so interferes in the proper affairs of others as to become meddlesome. Yet the same terms can also be used in order to praise intense scholarly work and devotion to investigation. This latter factor is particularly strong in Greek writers of the Hellenistic period and after and in much Latin writing. A wide range of evidence is considered from the fifth century bc to the end of pagan antiquity.

This project examines how and why time is gendered in Latin love elegy, so that it appears to affect men and women differently. Drawing on recent efforts to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu, the book considers the genre’s brief flowering during the Augustan Principate. Part one argues that imperatives of the new regime, encouraging a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, put temporal pressures on the elite male that shape the amator’s (or “poet-lover’s”) resistance to entering a course of civil service and prompt his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved. Part two of the book examines the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved puella (“girl”) through the lens of “women’s time” (le temps des femmes) and the chora as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s model of feminine subjectivity as defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity allows us to understand better how the beloved’s marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to her amator wishing to defer entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of “women’s time” and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how “women’s time” ultimately thwarts the amator’s often promised generic evolution.