Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus,...

This book explores an aspect of how Romans thought about themselves. Its subject is 'divine qualities': qualities like Concord, Faith, Hope, Clemency, Fortune, Freedom, Piety, and Victory, which received public cult in Rome in the Republican period. Anna Clark draws on a wide range of evidence (literature, drama, coins, architecture, inscriptions and graffiti) to show that these qualities were not simply given cult because they were intrinsically important to 'Romans'. They rather became 'Roman' through claims, counter-claims, appropriations and explorations of them by different individuals....

Peter Liddel offers a fresh approach to the old problem of the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. He draws extensively on oratorical and epigraphical evidence from the late fourth century BC to analyse the ways in which ideas about liberty were reconciled with ideas about obligation, and examines how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the Athenian law-courts, assembly, and through the inscriptional mode of publication. Using modern political theory as a springboard, Liddel argues that the ancient Athenians held liberty to consist of the substantial...

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Latin extra-paradigmatic verb forms, that is, verb forms which cannot easily be assigned to any particular tense in the Latin verbal system. In order to see what functions such forms fulfil, one has to compare their usage to that of the regular verb forms. In Part 1, Wolfgang de Melo outlines the usage of regular verb forms, which, surprisingly, has not always been described adequately in the standard grammars. In Part 2, the central part of the book, he compares the usage of the extra-paradigmatic verb forms to that of the regular ones,...

Alcibiades (c. 450-404 BC)--general, statesman, adopted son of Pericles, lover of Socrates, profaner of the Mysteries-- was called by some the saviour of Athens and by others its greatest enemy. This book is a study of the explosive mixture of fear and fascination he excited in his contemporaries and in classical texts. It examines the acute tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status, and ambition.

Can a speaker's words ever be faithfully reported? History, philosophy, ethnography, political theory, linguistics, and literary criticism all involve debates about discourse and presentation. By drawing from Plato's theory of discourse, the lively analysis of speech presentation in this book provides a coherent and original contribution to these debates.

For long stretches of Greek history in the classical period, Diodorus Siculus provides the only surviving continuous narrative of events. This study, the fullest ever undertaken of Diodorus, examines his aims, sources, and methods in detail. The findings of this investigation are then applied in commenting on Book 15, which deals with the crucial years between the King's Peace, concluded in 387/6 BC, and the aftermath of the battle of Mantinea fought in 362 BC.

Greek myth-makers crafted the downfall of Troy and its rulers into an archetypal illustration of ruthless conquest, deceit, crime and punishment, and the variability of human fortunes. This book examines the major episodes in the archetypal myth--the murder of Priam, the rape of Kassandra, the reunion of Helen and Menelaos, and the escape of Alnelas--as witnessed in Archaic Greek epic, fifth-century Athenian drama, and Athenian black- and red-figure vase painting. It focuses in particular on the narrative artistry with which poets and painters balanced these episodes with one another and...

In this volume, Cotton examines Plato's ideas about education and learning. With a particular focus on the experiences a learner must go through in approaching philosophical understanding, the book argues that a reader's experience can be parallel in kind and value to that of the interlocutors we see conversing in the dialogues, in that it can constitute learning.
The study suggests that the corpus of Plato's works presents an arena for the reader to progress through the different stages of learning, providing them with the stimuli appropriate to their philosophical advancement at each...

This study of Euripides' Electra approaches the text through the lens of modern linguistics, marrying it with traditional literary criticism in order to provide new and informative means of analyzing and interpreting what is considered to be one of the playwright's most controversial works. It is the first systematic attempt to apply a variety of modern linguistic theories, including conversation analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics (on gender and politeness), paroemiology, and discourse studies, to a single Greek tragedy.
The volume focuses specifically on issues of...