Ancient Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Philosophy

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.

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.

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.

The poet Ovid stands at the head of the Western tradition of exiled authors; banished by the emperor Augustus in AD 8 from Rome to the far-off shores of Romania, in his Tristia (‘Sad Things’) and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’), Ovid records his unhappy experience of political, cultural, and linguistic displacement from his homeland. For a huge variety of writers throughout the world in the two millennia after his exile, Ovid has performed the role of archetypal exile, allowing them to articulate a range of experiences of disgrace, dislocation, and alienation, and to explore exile from a number of perspectives, including both the personal and the fictional. The broad cultural impact of Ovid’s exile in Western literature is assessed in the present interdisciplinary volume by bringing together the fruit of the investigations of scholars working across a range of disciplines, including Classics, Modern Languages, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies; the volume should appeal to those working in all of these areas as well as those with a broader interest in exile as a literary and historical phenomenon. The volume’s exploration of the manifold repercussions of Ovidian exile illuminates Ovid’s cross-cultural influence (as contributors explore responses from the ancient world, through the Renaissance, to the modern era), Ovidian authorship (as it analyses how the theme of exile is powerfully interwoven into numerous works by Ovid), and of ‘exilic’ works of art.