Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval

Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy

Edith Hall

This monograph is a cultural history of the performance, reception and influence of the ancient Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. First produced in the late 5th century BCE ... More

This monograph is a cultural history of the performance, reception and influence of the ancient Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. First produced in the late 5th century BCE in Athens, this play was one of the most influential of all the canonical classical dramas in antiquity until the fourth century CE and in the period between the Renaissance and the early 20th century. It dramatises the escape of the Greek siblings Iphigenia and Orestes, with Orestes' friend Pylades, from the barbarian community of the Taurians on the north coast of the Black Sea, bringing with them an ancient statue of Artemis. The book explores the extent and diversity of the play's cultural impact diachronically. Its first half documents and analyses the reasons for the popularity of the play in antiquity, appearing in Greek and Roman poetry, fiction, philosophy, vase-painting, murals, sarcophagus art, and on coins. The second half discusses the influence of the play since the Renaissance, with particular attention to Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, Frazer's The Golden Bough, Gilbert Murray's Edwardian translation and more recent feminist and postcolonial adaptations. Less

Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

Emily Greenwood

Afro‐Greeks explores dialogues between anglophone Caribbean literature and the complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, from the 1920s to the beginning of the ... More

Afro‐Greeks explores dialogues between anglophone Caribbean literature and the complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome, from the 1920s to the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Classics still bears the negative associations of the colonial educational curriculum that was thrust upon the British West Indies with the Victorian triad of the three Cs (Cricket, Classics, and Christianity). In a study that embraces Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, John Figueroa, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Eric Williams, the author traces a distinctive regional tradition of engaging with Classics in the English‐speaking Caribbean. She argues that, following on from C. L. R. James's revisionist approach to the history of ancient Greece, there has been a practice of reading the Classics for oneself in anglophone Caribbean literature, a practice that has contributed to the larger project of the articulation of the Caribbean self. The writers examined offered a strenuous critique of an exclusive, Western conception of Graeco‐Roman antiquity, often conducting this critique through literary subterfuge, playing on the colonial prejudice that Classics did not belong to them. Afro‐Greeks examines both the terms of this critique, and the way in which these writers have made Classics theirs. Less

Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory

Philomen Probert

The accentuation of many categories of ancient Greek word appears arbitrary, but this book points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word’s synchronic morphological ... More

The accentuation of many categories of ancient Greek word appears arbitrary, but this book points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word’s synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system. Bringing together comparative evidence for the Indo-European accentuation of the relevant categories with recent insights into the effects that loss of transparency and word frequency have on language change, the book uses the synchronically observable correlations to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek from the Hellenistic period onwards. As well as yielding a better understanding of the history of Greek accentuation, this study produces some more general discoveries. The notion that recessive accentuation is the most globally regular — in the terms of some ‘default’ — accentuation for ancient Greek, current in work on Greek phonology, turns out to have implications for the history of the language since the synchronic patterns point to a process by which words originating in non-recessive morphological categories often became recessive after their morphological analysis was lost. Both this loss of analysis and the subsequent change in accentuation are inhibited under certain conditions relating to a word’s frequency. The study yields new insights into the role of frequency in language change, and into some aspects of Indo-European accentuation. Less

Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography

Ruth Morello, A. D. Morrison (eds)

The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, ... More

The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine, and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the letter form over any other, and what effect the publication of volumes of collected letters might have had upon a reader's engagement with epistolary works. This volume brings together both well-established and new scholars currently working in the fields of ancient literature, history, philosophy, and medicine to engage in a shared debate about this most adaptable and ‘interdisciplinary’ of genres. Less

Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage

Erin B. Mee, Helene P. Foley (eds)

This book analyses what happens to Sophocles' play as it is adapted and (re)produced around the world, and it focuses specifically on Antigone in performance. The chapters highlight the ... More

This book analyses what happens to Sophocles' play as it is adapted and (re)produced around the world, and it focuses specifically on Antigone in performance. The chapters highlight the numerous ways in which social, political, historical, and cultural contexts transform the material; how artists and audiences in diverse societies including Argentina, The Congo, Finland, Haiti, India, Japan, and the United States interact with it; and the variety of issues it has been used to address. Less

Apuleius and Drama: The Ass on Stage

Regine May

This book discusses the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a ... More

This book discusses the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. Apuleius uses drama, especially comedy, as a basic underlying texture, and invites his readers to use their knowledge of contemporary drama in interpreting the fate of his protagonist and the often comic or tragic situations in which he finds himself. This book employs a close study of the Latin text and detailed comparison with the corpus of dramatic texts from antiquity, as well as discussion of stock features of ancient drama, especially of comedy, in order to explain some features of the novel which have so far baffled Apuleian scholarship, including the enigmatic ending. All Latin and Greek has been translated into English. Less

Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts

Andrew L. Ford

This book studies Aristotle’s poetic activity in light of an ode he composed commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, his father in law and patron in the 340’s BCE. This remarkable text is ... More

This book studies Aristotle’s poetic activity in light of an ode he composed commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, his father in law and patron in the 340’s BCE. This remarkable text is said to have later embroiled the philosopher in charges of impiety and so is studied both from a literary perspective and as a window onto the poetic practices of the later fourth century. Aristotle’s literary antecedents are studied with an unprecedented fullness that considers the entire range of the literary tradition, including poems by Sappho, Pindar, and Sophocles, and prose texts as well. Particular attention is paid to understanding the ancient report that political opponents of Aristotle charged him with impiety on the grounds that his song was actually a hymn to Hermias that implied the latter had become a god. Aristotle’s song affords a case study in how Greek poetic texts functioned as performance pieces and how they were recorded, circulated, and preserved. The book argues that Greek lyric poems profit from being read as scripts for performances that both shaped and were shaped by the social occasions in which they were performed. Studying the lyric in light of the history of its interpretation leads to a more fine-tuned appreciation for its literary dynamics and provides a window onto the literary culture of the late classical age. Less

The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue

Benjamin Sammons

This study takes a fresh look at a familiar element of the Homeric epics—the poetic catalogue. It aims to uncover the great variety of functions fulfilled by catalogue as a manner of ... More

This study takes a fresh look at a familiar element of the Homeric epics—the poetic catalogue. It aims to uncover the great variety of functions fulfilled by catalogue as a manner of speech within very different contexts, ranging from celebrated examples such as the poet’s famous “Catalogue of Ships,” to others less commonly treated under this rubric, such as catalogues within the speech and rhetoric of Homer’s characters or seemingly unassuming catalogues of objects. It shows that catalogue poetry is no ossified or primitive relic of the old tradition, but a living subgenre of poetry that is deployed by Homer in a creative and original way. The catalogue form may be exploited by the poet or his characters to reflect or distort the themes of the poem as a whole, to impose an interpretation on events of the narrative as they unfold, and possibly to allude to competing poetic traditions or even contemporaneous poems. Throughout, the study focuses on how Homer uses the catalogue form to talk about the epic genre itself: As a compendious and venerable poetic form, it allows the poet to explore the boundaries of the heroic world, the limits of heroic glory, and the ideals and realities of his own traditional role as an epic bard. Less

The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris

Roy Gibson, Alison Sharrock

Steven Green (ed.)

This collection of essays on Ovid's corpus of erotodidactic poetry from an international contingent of Ovidian scholars finds its origins in a major conference held at the University of ... More

This collection of essays on Ovid's corpus of erotodidactic poetry from an international contingent of Ovidian scholars finds its origins in a major conference held at the University of Manchester in 2002. The contributors between them offer a series of perspectives on the issues that have dominated scholarship on the poems in recent decades: questions of genre, intertextuality, narratology, and reception; the socio-historical Augustan context for the poems; and the nature of ‘love’ as it is constructed in the poems. Moreover, the introduction provides a comprehensive history of scholarship on the poems in the last fifty years, in which the current papers are situated. As the first collection of critical essays on Ovid's erotodidactic poetry to appear in English, one final aim of the present volume (and its original conference) is to bring together the important cultural or national traditions – German, Italian, Anglophone (British, Irish, and American) – of scholarship on the Ars and Remedia that have so far existed largely in isolation. Less

Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought

Miriam Leonard

Why was Derrida reading Plato as students stormed the Sorbonne in May '68? Why was Foucault writing about Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus while fighting for the rights of prisoners with ... More

Why was Derrida reading Plato as students stormed the Sorbonne in May '68? Why was Foucault writing about Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus while fighting for the rights of prisoners with Vidal-Naquet? What has Vernant the resistance fighter to do with Vernant theorist of the ancient polis? This book investigates how post-war France turned to ancient Greece to formulate a new interrogation of the political. It investigates why a group of highly influential Parisian thinkers rediscovered ancient Athens to debate the role of political subjectivity and ethical choice in the life of the modern citizen. The book explores the ways in which the writings of the ancient Greeks played a decisive part in shaping the intellectual projects of structuralism and post-structuralism — arguably the most significant currents of thought of the post-war era. The authors investigated, including Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, and Vernant, have had an incalculable influence on the direction of classical studies over the last thirty years, but classicists have yet to give due attention to the crucial role of the ancient world in the development of their philosophy. Less