Classical Studies

This book is concerned with the relationship between a modern philosophical idea and an ancient historical moment. It explores how the notion of pluralism, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, may be seen to feature in the Classical Greek world and, more specifically, in the thought of three of its most prominent figures: Protagoras, Herodotus, and Sophocles. The book falls into three parts, each of which considers one of these authors in detail and investigates how the core aspects of pluralism — diversity, conflict, and incommensurability — manifest themselves in a particular literary arena. Part One illustrates, through an analysis of two of his fragments and the portrait of him from Plato's Protagoras, that the sophist Protagoras held that perspectives on truth and value could be plural, while retaining a degree of objectivity that distinguishes his position from relativism. Part Two turns attention towards the ways in which historical writing can be understood in pluralist terms. It portrays Thucydides as an exemplar of a monistic historical style in deliberate contrast to Herodotus. It then examines how ideas of diversity and conflict figure in Herodotus' Histories in a variety of methodological and moral contexts. Part Three focuses on conflict in Sophocles. It argues that pluralist messages emerge from four of his tragedies, in which a certain kind of hero and a certain kind of ethical disagreement are present. These features of Ajax, Antigone, Electra, and Philoctetes are related to the Homeric moral patterns from which their meaning in large part derives. The overall aim of the book is to identify a pluralist temper of thought in the age of Sophocles and, in doing so, to offer an enriched understanding of this crucial intellectual period.

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.

In ancient Greece, a common method of search for divine wisdom was to descend into caves or underground chambers. Entering caves persistently appears as a major requirement for prophecy-giving, both in established cults and in the activities of individual seers. Underground sojourns recur in the activities of several early Greek sages and philosophers. Mystery initiations comprise rites located in caves or dark chambers. The sages, seers, and initiates shared a quest for hidden truth, which they attained as revelation or vision. Exploring the reasons for the predilection for caves in the search for ultimate truth, this book juxtaposes ancient testimonies with the results of modern neuroscience. This approach, new in Classical Studies, enables an examination of the consciousness of people who were engaged in the vision quest. It is argued that cave environment creates conditions which force the human mind to deviate from its normal waking state and to enter altered states of consciousness, in many cases leading to the sensation of ineffable revelation of ultimate reality. Altered states of consciousness often occur in people exposed to sensory deprivation. As a result, various mediators between gods and mortals practice prolonged isolation in caves and other closed spaces in their quest of ecstatic illumination. The book demonstrates that multiple cave experiences of the Greeks are culturally patterned responses to the states determined by the neurology of the human brain.

Cicero has long been seen to embody the values of the Roman Republic. This study of Cicero's use of history reveals that rather than promoting his own values, Cicero uses historical representation to explore the difficulties of finding any ideological coherence in Rome's political or cultural traditions. The book looks to the scepticism of Cicero's philosophical education for an understanding of his perspective on Rome's history, and argues that neglect of the sceptical tradition has transformed the doubting, ambiguous Cicero into the confident proponent of a form of Roman identity formed in his own image. The close reading of a range of his theoretical works make up much of the book: De republica, De oratore, Brutus, and De divinatione are treated in detail, and a range of other works are also discussed. The book explores Cicero's ironic attitude towards Roman history, and connects it to the use of irony in mainstream Latin historians, in particular Sallust and Tacitus. It also examines Cicero's approach to the history of rhetoric at Rome. The book concludes with a study of a little-read treatise on Cicero from the early 18th century, by the radical thinker John Toland, which sheds new light on the history of Cicero's reception. Cicero's use of history shows the flexibility of his understanding of Roman identity. The book argues against the image of Cicero as a writer hoping to coerce his readers into identifying himself and his own achievements with the dominant ideologies of Rome.

This book brings together nineteen scholars to rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. Speech was an integral part of decision-making in Republican Rome, and oratory was part of the education of every member of the elite. Yet no complete speech from the period by anyone other than Cicero survives, and as a result the debate on oratory, and political practice more widely, is liable to be distorted by the distinctive features of Cicero’s oratorical practice. With careful attention to a wide range of ancient evidence, this book shines a light on orators other than Cicero, and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the more familiar genres of forensic and political speech. In so doing, it challenges the idea that Cicero is a normative figure, and highlights the variety of career choices and speech strategies open to Roman politicians. The chapters in the book also demonstrate how unpredictable the outcomes of oratory were: politicians could try to control events by cherry-picking their audience and using tried methods of persuasion, but incompetence, bad luck, or hostile listeners were constant threats.

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.

Dynamic Reading examines the reception history of Epicurean philosophy through a series of eleven case studies, which range chronologically from the latter days of the Roman Republic to late twentieth-century France and America. Rather than attempting to separate an original Epicureanism from its later readings and misreadings, this collection studies the philosophy together with its subsequent reception, focusing in particular on the ways in which it has provided terms and conceptual tools for defining how we read and respond to texts, artwork, and the world more generally. Whether it helps us to characterize the “swerviness” of literary influence, the transformative effects of philosophy, or the “events” that shape history, Epicureanism, as these essays demonstrate, has been a dynamic force in the intellectual history of the West.

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.

A study of how ancient Greek philosophers described, interpreted, criticized, and utilized major components and concepts of the religion of the people of their time. The philosophers studied are primarily Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, with secondary emphasis on their predecessors and contemporaries such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Protagoras, and Democritus, and on the early Cynics Diogenes and Bion, the early Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, and Epicurus. The major components of this practised religion are sacrifice, prayer, dedications, religious officials, and divination. The major concepts are piety and impiety, and by a thorough analysis of the philosophical texts a refined definition of Greek piety is offered, dividing it into its two constituent elements of ‘proper respect’ for the gods and ‘religious correctness’. It is found that in the Platonic tradition ‘religious correctness’ alone is treated as a ‘virtue’, and this leads to an investigation of the role of ‘religious correctness’ and its relationship to ‘justice’ in the ethical system of Plato. The book concludes with a demonstration of the benevolence of the gods in the philosophical tradition and links that to the expectation of the benevolence of the gods found in the popular religious tradition.