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Situated in the centre of the Saronic Gulf, the island of Aegina has long been recognized as a powerful force in the cultural, political, economic, and strategic history of fifth-century Greece. The island is well known as the original home of the magnificent Doric architecture and sculpture of the Temple of Aphaia and of many of the patrons of the epinician poets Pindar and Bacchylides; with a thriving maritime economy and an effective navy, Aegina was powerful enough to challenge the security and ambitions of its neighbour Athens, by whom it was reduced to a kleruchy at the start of the Peloponnesian War. Many of the fascinating aspects of the island within the history and culture of fifth-century Greece have, however, been studied separately, rendering a rounded view of the significance of the island, and the significance of the island's choral lyric poetry, difficult. This volume aims to redress the balance by suggesting ways in which the different aspects of the island's make-up can fruitfully be explored together. Eleven chapters by established and younger scholars examine different aspects of the island's nature, and factors which link them: mythological genealogies, economics, cult song, religion, athletics, epinician poetry, inter-state networking, aristocratic politics and culture, art history, and the views of the island offered by classical historiography. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume aims to provide new insights into the diversity and significance of classical Greek history and culture, as well as being suggestive for future research on the cultural and political diversity of classical Greece.

This book is a comprehensive study of the methods of interpreting myths developed by the Greeks, adopted by the Romans, and passed on to Jewish and Christian interpreters of the Bible. Methods of interpretation are closely related to developments in Greek philosophy from the Presocratics to the Neoplatonists. Most Greeks viewed myths as the creation of poets, especially Homer and Hesiod, or else as an ancient revelation corrupted by them. In the first instance, critics sought in the intention of the authors some deeper truth, whether physical or spiritual; in the second, they deemed it necessary to clear away poetic falsehoods in order to recapture an ancient revelation. Early Greek historians attempted to explain myths as exaggerated history; myths could be purified by logos (reason) and rendered believable. Practically all of these early methods could be lumped under the term “allegory”—to intend something different from what one expressed. Occasionally, philosophers veered from a concern for the literal truth of myths. A few thinkers, while acknowledging myths as fictions, defended their value for the examples of good and bad human behavior they offered. These early efforts were invaluable for the development of critical thinking, enabling public criticism of even the most authoritative texts. The Church Fathers took the interpretative methods of their pagan contemporaries and applied them to their reading of the scriptures. Greek methods of myth interpretation passed into the Middle Ages and beyond, serving as a perennial defense against the damaging effects of scriptural literalism and fundamentalism.

Commonly understood as a modern conceptual invention rather than the discovery of a psychic reality, the notion of the unconscious is often criticized by traditional classicists as an anachronistic lens, one that ineluctably subjects ancient experience to modern patterns of thought. The book challenges this ambivalent theoretical disposition toward the psychoanalytic concept by offering an interpretation of the unconscious, explaining why this concept is in fact inseparable from, and crucial for, the study of the ancient text and more generally for the methodology of classical philology. The book thus examines the complicated, often conflicted, relationship between classical studies and psychoanalytic theory. The Ancient Unconscious considers the debate over whether the ancients had an unconscious as an invitation to rethink the relationship between antiquity and modernity. While antiquity does not provide organic provenance for modernity, it is nevertheless the case that despite the cultural and historical distance, the two epochs are firmly connected. The book investigates the meaning of the textual ties created by arbitrary, spontaneous, and unintentional contacts between the past and its future. Understanding the meaning of textuality through contact between times, historical moments that have no priority under the law of chronology, goes hand in hand with the book’s interpretation of the unconscious. Associations and connections between the past and its future—including the present—belong to the sphere of the unconscious. This latter is primarily employed here in order to study the inherent, often hidden links that bind modernity to classical antiquity, modern to ancient experiences.

The volume assesses the changing impact on English culture over 500 years of Ariosto’s poem, the Orlando Furioso, first published in Italy in 1516, and subsequently in an expanded version in 1532. Individual chapters address the recurring presence of Ariosto’s poem in English literature, but also the multimedial nature of the transmission of the Furioso into English culture: through the visual arts, theatre, music and spectacle to video games and the internet, as well as through often heated critical debates. The introduction provides an overview of the history of criticism and interpretation of the Furioso in England. Within the four main sections – entitled: Before reading – the image; From the Elizabethans to the Enlightenment; Gothic and Romantic Ariosto; Text and translation in the modern era – individual studies explore key moments in the reception of the poem into English culture: the adaptation and translation of the poem among the Elizabethans; Milton’s detailed appreciation of the work; and the ambivalent attitudes of eighteenth-century writers and critics; the influence of illustrations to the poem; and its transformation into opera for the English stage. Emphasis is also placed on: the dynamic responses of Romantic writers to Ariosto; the crucial work of editors and translators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the stimulating adaptations and rewritings by modern authors. The volume concludes with a comprehensive bibliography.

This book examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in two poets from the reign of Domitian. It offers a comprehensive overview of the Epigrams of Martial and the Siluae of Statius. The praise of power that one finds is not something forced upon these poems. It is also not a mere appendage to these works. Instead, power and poetry as a pair are a fundamental dyad that can and should be traced throughout the two collections. The dyad is present even when the emperor himself is not the topic of discussion. In Martial the portrait of power is constantly shifting. Poetic play takes up the topic of political power and “plays around with it.” The initial relatively sportive attitude darkens over time. Late in the game the poems depict ecstasies of humiliation. After Domitian dies the project tries to get back to the old games, but it cannot. Statius’ Siluae merge the lies one tells to power with the lies of poetry more generally. Poetic mastery and political mastery cannot be dissociated. The glib, glitzy poetry of contemporary life articulates a radical modernism that is self-authorizing and so complicit with a power whose structure it mirrors. The criticism of such poetry is itself a problem. What does it mean to praise praise poetry? To celebrate celebrations? The book opens and closes with a meditation upon the dangers of complicit criticism and the seductions of a discourse of pure art in a world where the art is anything but pure.

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.

This book examines the role of philosophical metaphor and allegory in the Aeneid, focusing on tendentious allusions to Lucretian atomism. It argues that Virgil, drawing upon a popular strain of anti-atomist and anti-Epicurean arguments in Greek philosophy, deploys atomic imagery as a symbol of cosmic and political disorder. The first chapter of this study investigates the development of metaphors and analogies in philosophical texts ranging from Aristotle to Cicero that equate atomism with cosmological caprice and instability. The following three chapters track how Virgil applies this interpretation of Epicurean physics to the Aeneid, in which chaotic atomic imagery is associated with various challenges to the poem’s dominant narrative of divine order and Roman power. For Aeneas, the specter of atomic disorder arises at moments of distress and hesitation, while the association of various non-Trojan characters with atomism characterizes them as agents of violent disorder needing to be contained or vanquished. The final chapter summarizes findings, showing how Virgilian allusion to Lucretian physics often conflates poetic, political, and cosmological narratives, blurring the boundaries between their respective modes of discourse and revealing a general preference for hierarchical, teleological models of order.

This book provides a series of studies of the ways in which the major Augustan poets construct and explore images of the Roman Republic. It stands at the intersection between literature and history, offering an original and important exploration of an under-researched subject. The book’s explorations of the ways in which memories of the Roman Republic function in early imperial literature have illustrated the potential richness of this topic. Crucially, however, the book begins his survey with the age of Tiberius. In doing so, it underlines in the clearest possible way the liminal status of the Augustan period, with its inherent tensions between a rhetoric based on the idea of res publica restituta and the expression of the need for a radical renewal of the Roman political system after decades of civil strife. This volume attempts to examine some of the ways in which the major Roman poets deal with these and related issues, by providing a collection of studies of the various ways in which individual Augustan texts handle the idea of the Roman Republic. It has long been recognised that literary texts can provide us with insights into the realities and ideologies of the age. But in order to exploit fully the potential of this line of enquiry and open up lines of further research into the ways in which the Augustan poets explore the Roman past, much work remains to be done. This volume attempts to open up this vast topic by exploring some of the ways in which Vergil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid, can be seen as constructing and investigating images of the Roman past as a specifically Republican history. The contributors are all experts in the field of Augustan poetry. The book contains an introduction which contextualizes the whole topic in light of recent research. It also contains an epilogue which surveys the book’s contribution to on-going debates about literature, history and memory. In between, the book contains fifteen chapters.

This book combines close literary analysis of Bacchylides' poetry with detailed discussion of the central role poetry played in a variety of differing political contexts throughout Greece in the early 5th century BC. In Bacchylides' praise poetry, it is argued, the poet manipulates a wide range of earlier Greek literature not only to elevate the status of his wealthy patrons, but also to provoke thought about the nature of political power and aristocratic society. New light is also shed on Bacchylides' Dithyrambs, through detailed discussion of the evidence for the kuklios khoros (‘circular chorus’) and its relation to a variety of different religious festivals, especially within democratic Athens. The links created between literary concerns and cultural contexts reinvigorate these underappreciated poems and reveal their central importance for the self-definition of political communities.

The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape was greatly influential on the Roman cultural imagination. The Bay of Naples was a centre outside the city of Rome, a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity. And yet this is also a place of danger: Vesuvius inspires the inhabitants with fear and awe and, in addition to the majestic presence of the mountain, the Phlegraean Fields evoke the story of the gigantomachy, whilst sulphurous lakes invite entry to the Underworld. For the Flavian writers, in particular, Campania becomes a locus for literary activity and geographical disaster. In 79 CE, the eruption of Vesuvius annihilates a great expanse of the region, burying under a mass of ash and lava the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. In the aftermath of such tragedy the writers examined in this volume, Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, continue to live, work, and write about Campania, an alluring region of luxury and peril.

This book studies the social and ethical formation of selected characters in ancient Greek epic and tragedy. Its point of departure is the claim made by Achilles’ tutor Phoenix, who reminds his former pupil, “I made you the man you are” (Homer, Iliad 9.485) as he pleads with him to let go of his anger. Following an introduction that sketches the conceptual background for literary representations of teaching and learning, Chapter 1 considers the pedagogic persona of Cheiron the centaur, the first teacher in the Greek tradition. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the Iliadic Achilles, who achieves maturity by way of successive crises of disillusionment and empathy and who becomes an influential prototype for tragedy. Chapter 4 discusses Telemachus and Odysseus in the Odyssey; Chapter 5, Ajax in his name play; Chapter 6, Neoptolemus in Philoctetes; Chapter 7, Hippolytus in his name play, with an excursus on Ion; and Chapter 8, Achilles and Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Aulis, with a preliminary discussion of Nausicaa in the Odyssey. A coda summarizes results and takes note of the perennial lure (despite its uncertain results) of the educational enterprise for communities, students, and teachers.

Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy is the first collection of essays in English focusing on how fantasy draws deeply on ancient Greek and Roman myth, philosophy, literature, history, art, and cult practice. Presenting 15 all-new essays intended for both scholars and other readers of fantasy, this volume explores many of the most significant examples of the modern genre—including the works of H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, and more—in relation to important ancient texts such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Aristotle’s Poetics, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. These varied studies raise fascinating questions about genre, literary and artistic histories, and the suspension of disbelief required not only of readers of fantasy but also of students of antiquity. Ranging from harpies to hobbits, from Cyclopes to Cthulhu, the comparative study of Classics and fantasy reveals deep similarities between ancient and modern ways of imagining the world. Although antiquity and the present day differ in many ways, at its base, ancient literature resonates deeply with modern fantasy's image of worlds in flux and bodies in motion.

This book traces the reception history of Catullus in Romantic-era Britain. It was in this turbulent period of British history that Catullus’ whole book of poems was first translated into English, and the poet first achieved widespread canonical status. In between John Nott’s pioneering book-length bilingual edition of Catullus (1795) and George Lamb’s polished verse translation (1821) there was a great deal of Catullan literary activity (translation and allusion). Building upon existing work in Romantic studies, the book shows how the so-called Cockney School was especially receptive to Catullus’ poetry. Chapter 1 focuses first on routes of access to Catullus’ poetry from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, then compares the translations of Nott (1795) and Lamb (1821). Chapter 2—about Catullus’ 64th poem—begins with a comparative analysis of Charles Abraham Elton’s and Frank Sayers’s translations, and ends with a discussion about the reformist use of the poem by members of the Cockney School, including Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Thomas Love Peacock, and Barry Cornwall. The first section of Chapter 3 presents the non-cockney Catullan engagements of Walter Savage Landor, William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron. The second focuses on the Catullus found in the pages of the counter-revolutionary weekly journal The Anti-Jacobin (1797–8). The book closes with two chapters discussing the relationships between Catullus and Leigh Hunt and John Keats, respectively.

This volume investigates an important and widespread strategy in Latin literature which has to date received little sustained discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Itself widely associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature comprises a broad range of phenomena that involve the strategic adoption of a markedly disempowered voice: topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in status-conforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia (artfully and strategically adopting a persona to garner favour, even when this means temporarily forfeiting one’s higher status and discursive privileges); works, such as Ovid’s Heroides with its long-silenced female heroines, and entire genres, such as satire with its irreverent take on the great and the good generically framed as articulated ‘from below’; and even large-scale cultural self-positionings such as expressions of Roman cultural inferiority vis-à-vis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between humble (yet spiritually superior) Christian writers and their grand, canonical, and classical (yet pagan) predecessors. This volume is dedicated to the literary and cultural-political possibilities opened up by assuming and speaking in voices of weakness and inferiority. It demonstrates that re-negotiating alleged weakness constitutes a central activity in Latin literature and plays a crucial role in establishing, perpetuating, and challenging hierarchies and values in a wide range of fields: from poetics and choices of genre to social status and intra- and intercultural relations.

Cratinus, one of the great lost poets of fifth-century Athenian comedy and a canonical author of the classical world, had a formative influence on the comic genre, including Aristophanes himself. In what is the first major monograph in the best part of a century devoted to this author, Emmanuela Bakola offers a modern, comprehensive overview of Cratinus and his position within the genre of Greek comedy using a methodologically innovative approach. Unlike traditional ways of addressing fragmentary drama, this book does not merely reconstruct plays or texts, but by drawing on a range of hermeneutic frameworks, it adopts a thematic approach which allows her to explore Cratinus' poetics. Major issues which this book addresses include the creation of a poetic persona within a performative tradition of vigorous interpoetic rivalry; comedy's interaction with lyric poetry, iambos, and the literary-critical debates reflected by these genres; the play with the boundaries of the comic genre and the interaction with satyr drama and tragedy, especially Aeschylus; the multiple levels of comic plot-construction and characterization; comedy's reflection on its immediate political, social, and intellectual context; stagecraft and dramaturgy; comedy and ritual. Whilst being firmly based on principles of rigorous textual analysis, philology, and papyrology, by taking a broad and diverse outlook this study offers not just an insight into Cratinus, but a way of opening up and enriching our understanding of fifth-century Athenian comedy in a dynamic evolving environment.

This book studies in detail the representations of Pasiphae, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin poetry. It investigates both the literary history of the myths (the Greek roots, the interactions between Roman versions) and their cultural resonance. In addition to close readings of the major treatments of each woman's story (in Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca), the book offers extended thematic explorations of the importance of memory, wildness, and morality in the myths. By extending the net to encompass three women (all from the same ill-fated family), the book gives a clear picture of the complexity and fascinating interconnectedness of myths and texts in Ancient Rome.

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classical Greek poetry. The Cup of Song explores how Greek poetry relates to the symposion considered as both an actual performance context and an imaginary space pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications. This collection of essays by an international group of leading scholars flashes light on different facets of this symbiotic relation of symposion and poetry across Greek literary history. It covers the entire span of Greek literature into its afterlife, from the Near Eastern origins of the Greek symposion in the eighth century to Horace’s evocations of his archaic models and Lucian’s knowing reworking of classic texts. The Introduction traces the running threads of sympotic poetry from its beginnings to the Hellenistic age, while each of the twelve chapters discusses one aspect of sympotic engagement by key authors in archaic and classical lyric, tragedy, comedy, and Hellenistic epigram, also taking into account the visual evidence of painted pottery. By examining this diverse body of texts from the unifying perspective of their relation to the symposion, with an eye to both the common features and the specificity of individual genres and texts, the volume attempts a characterization of the full spectrum of sympotic poetry.

This book develops an authentic and revolutionary musical analysis of ancient Greek poetry. It brings the interpretation of ancient verse into step with the sorts of analyses customarily enjoyed by works in all the more recent poetical and musical traditions. It departs from the abstract metrical analyses of the past in that it conceives the rhythmic and harmonic elements of poetry as integral to the whole expression, and decisive in the interpretation of its meaning. Such an analysis is now possible because of a new theory of the Greek tonic accent, set out in the third chapter, and its application to Greek poetry understood as choreia — the proper name for the art and work of ancient poets in both epic and lyric, described by Plato as a synthesis of dance rhythm and vocal harmony, in disagreement moving toward agreement. The book offers a thorough-going treatment of Homeric poetics: here some remarkable discoveries in the harmonic movement of epic verse, when combined with some neglected facts about the origin of the hexameter in a ‘dance of the Muses’, lead to essential new thinking about the genesis and the form of Homeric poetry. The book also gives a foretaste of the fruits to be harvested in lyric by a musical analysis, applying the new theory of the accent and considering concretely the role of dance in performance.

Prudentius is arguably the greatest Latin poet of late antiquity. This book provides the Latin text, a new English verse translation, and critical reviews on each of his twelve lyric poems, the Cathemerinon, Poems for the Day, which were published early in the fifth century ad. They reflect the religious concerns of the increasingly Christianized western Roman Empire in the age of the emperor Theodosius and Ambrose of Milan, but they are above all the writings of a private person, and of the ways in which his religious beliefs colour his everyday life. Several of these poems follow the day's course, from pre-dawn to mealtime and nightfall. Others celebrate Christ's miracles, cult of the dead, and the feasts of Christmas and Epiphany. They are rich in biblical themes and narratives, images and symbols. But they are written in the classical metres of Latin poetry, use its vocabulary and metaphors, and exploit its themes as much as those of the Bible. They achieve a remarkable creative tension between the two worlds that determined Prudentius' culture: the beliefs and practices, sacred books and doctrines of Christianity, and the traditions, poetry, and ideas of the Greeks and Romans. A good part of the attractiveness of these poems comes from the interplay in Prudentius' reception of these two worlds.

Book IV of Lucretius' great philosophical poem deals mainly with the psychology of sensation and thought. The heart of this book is a new text, incorporating the latest scholarship on the text of Lucretius, with a clear prose facing translation. The commentary concentrates on the thought of the text (relating it to other philosophers beside Epicurus) and the poetry of the Latin, placing the text in relation to Roman literature in general, and attempting to demonstrate the poetic genius of Lucretius. The introduction deals with the didactic tradition in ancient literature and Lucretius' place in it, the structure of De Rerum Natura, the salient features of the philosophy of Epicurus and the transmission of the text.