Diachronic Dialogues considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey.

Diachronic Dialogues considers central aspects of Homer's poetry, such as truth, knowledge, gender, virtue and the heroic code, authorship, memory and song, diction and formula. This book makes the case for performative, rather than essential values in the Illiad and the Odyssey.

This collection of original essays examines innovations in both the theory and practice of classical philology. The chapters address interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways. Some apply theoretical insights derived from other disciplines, such as folklore studies, performance theory, feminist criticism, and the like, to classical texts. Others examine the relationships between classics and cultural studies, popular literature, film, art history, and other related disciplines. Others, again, look to the evolution of theoretical methods within the discipline of classics. Taken together,...

This study represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term religion in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the 17th century. It promotes the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic and highlights the wide variety of meanings evoked by these shifting terms from ancient to modern times.

Iambic Ideas, explores the concept of the 'iambic' as a genre. In a set of detailed studies, the contributors examine, across time, the idea of iambic through a wide variety of cultural settings--Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and late antiquity. What emerges most clearly is that the 'iambic idea' is impossible to define in absolute terms: rather, the form of iambic keeps varying in response to a vast variety of historical contingencies. The variation is evident in such critical terms as the 'iambic tendency' in Sappho, the 'reusing of iambi' for Roman epodes, and even the instances of 'iambic...

Speech in Speech explores the techniques by which Classical Greek texts written primarily for public performance weave in direct quotations (oratio recta) of "other voices"-imagined or real. This "speech in speech" is usually perceived as endowed with a greater vividness and authenticity than indirect quotation, even when the words report what someone might say, or enliven the verbal texture of plays and speeches, and examines the intricate relation of direct quotations to their "originals." As the first synoptic and detailed study of oratio recta in Classical Greek literature, Speech in...

This book investigates the chaotic end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Homeric poetry, with an emphasis on the description of piratical activities described in the Odyssey's "Second Cretan Lie," and on the impact of revolutionary seafaring technology in this watershed period in Mediterranean history.