This text is about the reception of Homeric poetry from the fifth through the first century BCE. It shows how it became a classic in the days of the Athenian empire and later.

This edition, commentary and accompanying essays focus on the tenth book of the 'Ilaid', which has been doubted, ignored, and even scorned. The authors use approaches based on oral traditional poetics to illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable.

The contributors to this volume draw upon Homeric scholarship as an inspiration for perusing new ways of looking at texts both within the Homeric tradition and outside it. They treat subjects ranging from Aeschylus' reception of Homeric anger to the representation of mantic performance within early Islamic texts.

The author argues that the victory song is a traditional art form that appealed to a popular audience and served exclusive elite interests through laughter, entertainment, and popular instruction. It applies performance as a method for the ethnographic description and interpretation of entextualised records of verbal art.

Graeme Bird examines a small group of early papyrus manuscripts of Homer's Iliad, known as the Ptolemaic papyri, which, although fragmentary, are the oldest surviving physical evidence of the text of the Iliad, dating from the third to the first centuries BCE.

This is a study of Homeric myth-making in the first and longest dialogue of Penelope and Odysseus ('Odyssey 19'). It makes a case for seeing virtuoso myth-making as an essential part of this conversation, a register of communication important for the interaction between the two speakers.

'Tragedy, Authority, and Trickery' investigates letters in Josephus' texts. It analyses classical, Hellenistic, and Jewish texts' use of letters, comparing those texts to Josephus' narratives.

Studies Homeric performance from archaic to Roman imperial times. This title argues that oracular utterance, dramatic acting, and rhetorical delivery powerfully elucidate the practice of epic rhapsodes. It shows that rhapsodic practice is best understood as an evolving combination of revelation, interpretation, recitation, and dramatic delivery.

This book explores the place of the sophists within the Greek wisdom tradition, and argues against their almost universal exclusion from serious intellectual traditions. By studying the sophists against the backdrop of the archaic Greek institutions of wisdom, it is possible to detect considerable intellectual overlap between them and their predecessors. This book explores the continuity of this tradition, suggesting that the sophists' intellectual balkanization in modern scholarship, particularly their low standing in comparison to the Presocratics, Platonists, and Aristotelians, is a direct...

Anna Bonifazi suggests that the Homeric text we have now would have enabled ancient audiences to enjoy the evocative power of even minimal linguistic elements. The multiple functions served by these elements are associated not only with the variety of narrative contexts in which they occur but also with overarching poetic strategies. The findings relate to two strategies in particular: unfolding the narrative by signaling the upcoming content with au- adverbs and particles, and letting the complexity of Odysseus' identity resonate through the ambiguous use of third-person pronouns. The words'...