Socrates wrote nothing; Plato's accounts of Socrates helped to establish western politics, ethics, and metaphysics. Both have played crucial and dramatically changing roles in western culture. In the last two centuries, the triumph of democracy has led many to side with the Athenians against a Socrates whom they were right to kill. Meanwhile, the Cold War gave us polar images of Plato as both a dangerous totalitarian and an escapist intellectual. This book is framed by accounts of modern responses to the trials of Socrates and the ironies of Socratic inquiry. At its centre are two chapters...

"Pity Transformed" is an examination of how pity was imagined and expressed in classical antiquity. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the pity of the Greeks and Romans differed from modern ideas. Among the topics investigated in this study are the appeal to pity in courts of law and the connection between pity and desert; the relation between pity and love or intimacy; self-pity; the role of pity in war and its relation to human rights and human dignity; divine pity from paganism to Christianity; and why pity was considered an emotion. This book will lead readers to ponder...

Why should Greek tragedy matter now? This book opens a dialogue between the tragic theatre in ancient Athens and the multiple performances of the modern world. In five interconnected chapters, Rush Rehm engages tragedy on its own terms, using our oldest theatre as inspiration for how we might shape the theatre of the future.

Part analysis, part polemic, this book engages the aesthetic, political and ethical challenges of Greek tragedy as a means of confronting what tomorrow's theatre can do.

Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and...

How were the aims of philosophy and the responsibilities of philosophers conceived in ancient Greece and China? How were the learned elite recruited and controlled; how were their speculations and advice influenced by the different types of audiences they faced and the institutions in which they worked? How was a yearning for invulnerability reconciled with a sense of human frailty? In each chapter of this fascinating analysis ancient Greek and Chinese ideas and practices are used as a basis for critical reflections on the predicaments we continue to face today, with a particular focus on...

What sort of people were able to grab the attention of the public in the ancient world? How was celebrity achieved? What methods did people use to achieve it? Robert Garland turns the spotlight on the careers of some of the most successful and colourful self-promoters ever to have lived, including Alcibiades, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, Jesus, Nero and Theodosia, and investigates the secrets of their success. He also looks at ways in which other highly talented individuals turned themselves into celebrities, including sports personalities,...

"Rome and the Literature of Gardens" explores the garden as a powerful locus of transformation and transgression in the "De Re Rustica" of Columella, the "Satires" of Horace, the "Annals" of Tacitus, and the "Confessions" of Saint Augustine. In keeping with the approach of this series, a concluding chapter examines the reincarnation of these expressions in the contemporary plays "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love" by Tom Stoppard. Many books on gardens in ancient Rome concentrate on either technical agricultural manuals, or pastoral poetry, or the physical remains of Roman gardens....

Although rhetoric is a term often associated with lies, this book takes a polemical look at rhetoric as a purveyor of truth. Its purpose is to focus on one aspect of rhetoric, figurative speech, and to demonstrate how the treatment of figures of speech provides a common denominator among western cultures from Cicero to the present. The central idea is that, in the western tradition, figurative speech - using language to do more than name - provides the fundamental way for language to articulate concerns central to each cultural moment. In this study, Sarah Spence identifies the embedded...

The often overlapping discourses of nationalism and imperialism, along with related ideas of social decline, have been central in 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-European views of the world. This book offers four readings of Latin literary texts to show that the templates for these 'modern' discourses were forged in their essentials by the early Roman imperial period. Each chapter follows the relevant rhetorical thread in works of Horace, Tacitus or Juvenal, comparing their strategies with the defining structures of modern nationalist or colonialist discourses. General rhetorical principles...

The often overlapping discourses of nationalism and imperialism, along with related ideas of social decline, have been central in 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-European views of the world. This book offers four readings of Latin literary texts to show that the templates for these 'modern' discourses were forged in their essentials by the early Roman imperial period. Each chapter follows the relevant rhetorical thread in works of Horace, Tacitus or Juvenal, comparing their strategies with the defining structures of modern nationalist or colonialist discourses. General rhetorical principles...