This book offers a new approach to the study of Homeric epic by combining ancient Greek perceptions of Homer with up-to-date scholarship on traditional poetry. Part I argues that, in the archaic period, the Greeks saw the lliad and Odyssey neither as literary works in the modern sense nor as the products of oral poetry. Instead, they regarded them as belonging to a much wider history of the divine cosmos, whose structures and themes are reflected in the resonant patterns of Homer's traditional language and narrative techniques. Part II illustrates this claim by looking at some central...

Thucydides' work was one of the most exciting creations in the cultural history of Greece in the fifth century BC and it still poses fresh and challenging questions about the writing of history. There is a marked tension in Thucydides' History between his aim to write about contemporary events and his desire that his work should outlast the period in which he composed it. Thucydides and the Shaping of History addresses two important issues: how contemporary was the History when it was written in the fifth century, and how 'contemporary' is it now? This book combines a close analysis of...

Ovid devoted about half of his poetic career to the production of several collections of amatory verse, all composed in elegiac couplets. Indeed, his irrepressible interest in love, sex and elegiac poetry is one of the defining features of his entire output. Here Rebecca Armstrong offers a thematic examination of some important aspects of the Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Starting from an investigation of the narrator's self-creation and presentation of other characters within his amatory verse, she assesses the importance of mythical and contemporary reference, as well as the...

One of the greatest aesthetic attractions in the ancient world was pantomime dancing, a ballet-style entertainment in which a silent, solo dancer incarnated a series of mythological characters to the accompaniment of music and sung narrative. Looking at a multitude of texts and particularly Lucian's "On the Dance," a dialogue written at the height of pantomime's popularity, this innovative cultural study of the genre offers a radical reassessment of its importance in the symbolic economy of imperial and later antiquity. Rather than being trivial or lowbrow, pantomime was thoroughly...

This book offers a survey of the teachings of, and relations between, four leading figures in third-century Platonism: Longinus, Plotinus, Porphyry and lamblichus. It documents and explains the coalescence of Aristotelian and Platonic elements in the Platonic tradition before the 3rd century, considers the effect of the new political environment on these thinkers, and argues that the antagonistic interests of the two older men (Longinus and Plotinus) were combined in the work of the two younger figures (Porphyry and lamblichus) without sacrifice of coherence, rationality or fidelity to...

This is the first study of Menander, one of the most popular of ancient dramatists, who wrote over 100 plays. Although most have been lost, what survives was only rediscovered in the 20th century, and his work has not yet had the scholarly attention it deserves. Seeking to address this gap, Angela Heap introduces her reader to the texts, archaeology and performance of Menander. Using the remarkable finds on the Aeolian island of Lipari as a starting point, she explores the mystery of the loss of the plays, their rediscovery, and key questions surrounding the transmission of these and other...