Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Ancient and Classical

Winner, Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2003

Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which...

Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage.

Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by...

John G. Fitch's new Latin text of Seneca's play, Hercules Furens, is based on a collation of the chief manuscripts, including the Paris manuscript T. In his introduction, Fitch traces the conflicting classical portrayals of Hercules--a figure embodying altruism and aggrandizement, restraint and wildness--and argues that in the play, the untamed side of his nature ultimately turns against him and destroys him.

In introductory notes to individual acts and choral odes, Fitch addresses the play's thematic development and discusses probably influences, including the Greek...

Civic virtue and the type of education that produces publicly minded citizens became a topic of debate in American political discourse of the 1980s, as it once was among the intelligentsia of Classical Athens. Conservatives such as former National Endowment for the Humanities chairman William Bennett and his successor Lynn Cheney held up the Greek philosopher Aristotle as the model of a public-spirited, virtue-centered civic educator. But according to the contributors in this volume, a truer model, both in his own time and for ours, is Isocrates, one of the preeminent intellectual figures...

Based on Elaine Fantham's 2004 Robson lectures, Latin Poets and Italian Gods reconstructs the response of Roman poets in the late republic and Augustan age to the rural cults of central Italy. Study of Roman gods is often limited to the grand equivalents of the Olympian Greek deities such as Jupiter, Mars, and Juno. However, real-life Italians gave a lot of their affection and loyalty to humbler gods with no Greek equivalent: local nymphs who supplied healing waters, the great Tiber river and other lesser rivers, the lusty garden god Priapus, and more.

Latin Poets and...

In ancient Athens, where freedom of speech derived from the power of male citizenship, women's voices were seldom heard in public. Female speech was more often represented in theatrical productions through women characters written and enacted by men. In Spoken Like a Woman, the first book-length study of women's speech in classical drama, Laura McClure explores the discursive practices attributed to women of fifth-century b.c. Greece and to what extent these representations reflected a larger reality. Examining tragedies and comedies by a variety of authors, she illustrates how the...

..". welcome and timely. It is written in crisp, idiomatic, conversational English, not hobbled by slavish imitation of Lucian's Greek syntax."--The Key Reporter

Though Lucian's (A.D. c. 115-200) tendency to debunk everything might well have made him depressing reading, his lighthearted fantasy and wit have always had the opposite effect. His contribution to European literature may be seen in his influence on Rabelais, Erasmus, More, Swift, Voltaire, and Fielding. These sketches present him primarly as a humorous writer, making Lucian's special charm accessible to an age which...

• Provides an accessible introduction to the ancient epic
• Offers interpretive analyses of poems within a comprehensive historical context
• Includes a detailed timeline, suggestions for further readings, and an appendix of the Olympian gods and their Akkadian counterparts