Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Greece

In this luminous book, acclaimed...

Covering material as diverse as curse tablets, coins, tattoos, and legal decrees, Deborah Steiner explores the reception of writing in archaic and classical Greece. She moves beyond questions concerning ancient literacy and the origins of the Greek alphabet to examine representations of writing in the myths and imaginative literature of the period. Maintaining that the Greek alphabet was not seen purely as a means of transcribing and preserving the spoken word, the author investigates parallels between writing and other signifiers, such as omens, tokens, and talismans; the role of...

In laying the groundwork for a fresh and challenging reading of Roman satire, Kirk Freudenburg explores the literary precedents behind the situations and characters created by Horace, one of Rome's earliest and most influential satirists. Critics tend to think that his two books of Satires are but trite sermons of moral reform--which the poems superficially claim to be--and that the reformer speaking to us is the young Horace, a naive Roman imitator of the rustic, self-made Greek philosopher Bion. By examining Horace's debt to popular comedy and to the conventions of Hellenistic moral...

The Poverty of Eros in Plato's Symposium offers an innovative new approach towards Eros and the concept of Eros in the Symposium. Lorelle D. Lamascus argues that Plato's depiction of Eros as the child of Poverty (penia) and Resource (poros) is central to understanding the nature of love. Eros is traditionally seen as self-interested or acquisitive, but this book argues instead that Eros and reason are properly in accord with one another. The moral life and the philosophical life alike depend upon properly trained and directed Eros.

Lamascus demonstrates...

At the Iliad's climax, the great Trojan hero Hektor falls at the hands of Achilles. But who is Hektor? He has resonated with audiences as a tragic hero, great warrior, loyal husband and father, protector of a doomed city. Yet never has a major work sought to discover how these different aspects of Hektor's character accumulate over the course of the narrative to create the devastating effect of his death.
This book documents the experience of Hektor through the Iliad's serial narrative. Drawing on diverse tools from narratology, to cognitive science, but with a special...

Aeschylus (525/4-456/5 B.C.E.) was the first of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Greece, a forerunner of Sophocles and Euripides. His early tragedies were...

Hailed by Tom Holland as a 'fascinating and compendious survey of ancient attitudes to Xerxes' and now available in paperback, Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.

This Persian king, who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with Xerxes - which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the...