Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval

Aulus Gellius originated the modern use of ‘classical’ and ‘humanities’. His Attic Nights, so named because they began as the intellectual pastime of winter evenings spent in a villa outside Athens, are a mine of information on many aspects of antiquity and a repository of much early Latin literature that would otherwise be lost; he took a particular interest in questions of grammar and literary style. The whole work is interspersed with interesting personal observations and vignettes of second-century life that throw light on the Antonine world. This study, the most comprehensive of Gellius in any language, examines his life, his circle of acquaintances, his style, his reading, his scholarly interests, and his place in literary tradition parentage; reference is made to his reception in later antiquity and beyond. It covers many subject areas such as language, literature, law, rhetoric, and medicine; it also examines Gellius's attitudes to women and the relation considered between the literary trends of Latin (the so-called archaizing movement) and Greek (Atticism) in the second century AD. The text, sense, and content of numerous individual passages are considered, and light shed on a wide range of problems in Greek as well as Latin authors.

This book considers Cicero's forensic speeches as acts of advocacy, that is, designed to ensure that the person he represents is acquitted or that the person he is prosecuting is found guilty. It sets the speeches within the context of the court system of the Late Roman Republic and explores the strategies available to Roman advocates to win the votes of jurors. The book deals with issues concerning the general nature of advocacy, the court system in ancient Rome as compared with other ancient and modern systems, the Roman ‘profession’ of advocacy and its etiquette, the place of advocacy in Cicero's career, the ancient theory of rhetoric and argument as applied to courtroom advocacy, and the relationship between the published texts of the speeches as we have them and the speeches actually delivered in court. Other topics covered by the book include legal procedure in Cicero's time, Cicero's Italian clients, Cicero's methods of setting out or alluding to the facts of a case, his use of legal arguments, arguments from character, invective, self-reference, and emotional appeal. Some particular speeches are discussed as case studies covering the period of the height of Cicero's career, from 70 BC, when he became acknowledged as the leading Roman advocate, to 49 BC when Julius Caesar's dictatorship required Cicero to adapt his well-tried forensic techniques to drastically new circumstances. Those speeches contain arguments on a wide range of subject matter, including provincial maladministration, usurpation of citizenship rights, violent dispossession, the religious law relating to the consecration of property, poisoning, bribery, and political offences.

Numerous nations have in one way or another engaged with the cultures of classical Greece and Rome. What impact does the classical past have on ideas of the nation, nationhood, nationality, and what effect does the national space have on classical culture? How has classical culture been imagined in various national traditions, what importance has it had within them, and for whom? This collection of essays by an international team of experts tackles the vexed relationship between Classics and national cultures, presenting essays on many regions, including China, India, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa, as well as Germany, Greece, and Italy. It poses new questions for the study of antiquity and for the history of nations and nationalisms.

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.

Demosthenes’ resolute and courageous defiance of Philip II of Macedonia earned for him a reputation as one of history’s outstanding patriots. He also enjoyed a brilliant and lucrative career as a speechwriter, and is regarded as Greece’s greatest orator, as proved by the rhetorical style of his surviving speeches. Yet he was a sickly child who suffered from several physical and speech impediments, had an interrupted education, and was swindled out of much of his family estate by unscrupulous guardians. His story is certainly one of triumph over adversity. Demosthenes has been lauded as Greece’s greatest patriot and condemned as an opportunist who misjudged situations and contributed directly to the end of Greek freedom. In my biography, I aim to determine which of these two people he was: self-serving cynic or patriot—or both. I discuss Demosthenes’ troubled childhood and youth, the obstacles he faced in his public career, his successes and failures, and even his posthumous influence as a politician and orator. I offer new insights into Demosthenes’ motives and how he shaped his policy to achieve political power, set against the history of Greece and Macedonia. I give extensive quotations in translation from his speeches to sum up their main points and help to illustrate his rhetorical style, which I also discuss.

Concentrating on Demosthenes' texts rather than his politics, this book describes and assesses all his speeches, including those for the lawcourts as well as the addresses to the Ekklesia. Besides the genuine speeches, it also covers those which probably are wrongly ascribed to Demosthenes, such as those written for delivery by Apollodoros. It considers the Epistles, the Prooimia, and the Erotic Speech. The arguments of each speech are analysed. The question whether the texts reproduce accurately what was actually spoken is approached cautiously. There is a short survey of Demosthenes' prose style, with examples quoted in Greek. In the rest of the book quotations are given in the author's own translations, with the Greek words added in footnotes where appropriate.

The passions were a topic of widespread interest in antiquity. This is a study on their role in Roman love elegy (1st c. BCE), a genre rife with passions and jealousy in particular. Jealousy does appear in a number of earlier genres, but never with the centrality and importance it has in elegy. This book offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate the ancient representation of jealousy in its Roman context, as well as its significance for Roman love elegy itself. The narrators portray themselves as poets and as experts of love, championing a view of love that stands in marked contrast to the criticisms that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers had raised. Elegy provides rich evidence of the genesis and development of erotic jealousy: we find suspicions and rumors of infidelity, obsessive attention to visual clues, and accusations and confrontations with the beloved. The Roman elegists depict the susceptibility and reactions to jealousy along gendered lines, with an asymmetric representation of skepticism and belief, violence and restraint. But jealousy has ramifications well beyond the erotic affair. Underlying jealousy are fears about fides or trust and the vulnerability of human relations. These are prominent in love relationships, of course, but the term has broader application in the Roman world, and the poetic narrator often extends his fears about trust into many other dimensions of life, including friendship, religion, and politics. The infidelity rampant in the love affair indicates a more general breakdown of trust in other human relations. All of these features have implications for the genre itself. Many of the distinctive elements of Roman elegy—its first-person narration, obsessive recordkeeping, and role-playing – can be seen to derive from the thematic concern with jealousy. As such, jealousy provides a new way of understanding the distinctive features of Roman love elegy.

This book contains detailed studies of a number of individual passages and episodes (which always turn out to have wider ramifications for the understanding of Herodotus or for the history of the archaic and classical Greek world, or both) as well as considerations of wider themes (perceptions of ethnicity and ideas of ‘tradition’, of historical space and about the origins of history). Topics included are: prophecy, oracle-selling, and resurrection, and also narrative management and the prosaics of death. The Herodotean chronology is revisited. There are also accounts on epiphany, and of why Herodotus did not mention the Hanging Gardens and why he has not been taken as seriously as he should have been by military historians. Finally, the book examines Cleisthenes and Cleomenes, Argos and Corinth, and Athens and its democracy.

This book offers an English version of two series of highly-acclaimed introductory lectures given by the Swiss linguist and classical philologist Jacob Wackernagel (1853–1938) at the University of Basel in 1918/19 on aspects of the morphosyntax of Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages, and published at his students' prompting. The subjects covered — after a long introduction to the study of syntax and the parts of speech — are: number, person, voice, tense, mood, infinitive, supine and gerund, participles, case, gender, nouns and adjectives, pronouns, articles, prepositions, and negation. This is a book about grammar, but a grammar-book which talks and charms, and which makes an adventure of the workings of the classical languages. Ninety years after they were first delivered, Wackernagel's Lectures are still among the best available introductions, in any language, to Greek, Latin, and comparative syntax and to many aspects of the history, pre-history, stylistics, and socio-linguistics of Greek and Latin and their relations with other languages — not to mention other subjects brilliantly introduced, such as the history of grammatical terminology. This new edition supplements the German original by providing: a translation of all quotations and examples (and of Wackernagel's additions and corrections — both those printed at the end of the second Swiss edition and some of those left in his manuscript notes), a large number of detailed footnotes offering background information and suggestions for further reading, and a single bibliography which brings together Wackernagel's references and those in the notes.

Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to the word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning, or at least using inferential procedures to guess at what is actually overtly encoded in the syntax. This book introduces the linguistic concepts, formalism, and analytical techniques necessary for the study of Latin word order. It then presents and analyzes a representative selection of data in sufficient detail to foster both an intuitive grasp of the often rather subtle principles controlling Latin word order and a theoretically grounded understanding of the system that underlies it. Combining the rich empirical documentation of traditional philological approaches with the deeper theoretical insight of modern linguistics, this book aims to reduce the intricate surface patterns of Latin word order to a simple and general cross-categorical system of syntactic structure which translates more or less directly into constituents of pragmatic and semantic meaning.