What was the role of mousike in Greek life? Broader in its implications than the English "music," mousike, the realm of the Muses, lay at the heart of Greek culture. Yet, despite its centrality, its social and intellectual implications have rarely been investigated. In these new and specially commissioned essays leading experts analyze the political, religious, and ethical significance of musical performance in the classical Athenian city, and open up a new field of investigation in cultural history.

This book is the first major study of the means by which the classical Athenians organised and funded their many festival choruses. It explores the mechanics of the institution by which a minority of rich citizens were required to arrange and pay for a festival chorus, including choruses for tragic and comic drama, and situates this duty within the range of occasions for elite leadership in Athens? elaborate festival calendar. Peter Wilson goes on to show the importance of the khoregia to our understanding of the workings of Athenian democracy itself, and to demonstrate the degree to which...

This Companion contains 31 essays by leading international scholars to provide an overview of the key debates on eighteenth-century Europe.

• Examines the social, intellectual, economic, cultural, and political changes that took place throughout eighteenth-century Europe
  
• Focuses on Europe while placing it within its international context
  
• Considers not just major western European states, but also the often neglected countries of eastern and northern Europe

Performance, Reception, Iconography assembles twenty-three papers from an international group of scholars who engage with, and develop, the seminal work of Oliver Taplin. Oliver Taplin has for over three decades been at the forefront of innovation in the study of Greek literature, and of the Greek theatre, tragic and comic, in particular. The studies in this volume centre on three key areas - the performance of Greek literature, the interactions between literature and the visual realm of iconography, and the reception and appropriation of Greek literature, and of Greek culture more widely, in...