Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Ancient and Classical

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

Beginning with the resurgence of Crete in the...

Early Skepticism and its founder, Pyrrho of Elis, were introduced to the world in the third century BCE by the poet and philosopher Timon of Phlius. This is the first book-length study in English of the fragments of Timon's works. Of his more than 100 titles, four fragments remain of a catalogue elegy, the Indalmoi, and 133 verses of the Silloi, a hexameter parody in three books in which Timon ridicules philosophers of all periods whom he observes on a trip to Hades. Dee L. Clayman reconstructs the books of the Silloi starting from an outline in Diogenes Laertius...

The origins of the anonymous Late Latin Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre (Historia Apollonii regis Tyri), are disputed, with the narrative commonly being seen as a Christianised folktale of a sub-literary character. Scholars focus mainly on questions of editing the text, seeking its origins (Greek or Latin, pagan or Christian) and exploring its afterlife. This literary and philological commentary discusses aspects of language, style, characterisation, intertextuality, and narrative technique in the earliest existing version of the Story of Apollonius, recension...

Die neuen Funde der Archaologie bereichern unsere Kenntnisse der materiellen und kunstlerischen Kultur Gazas zur Zeit der Spatantike merklich; neues Licht muss aber auch auf literarische Quellen zur Geschichte und Kultur Gazas geworfen werden, insbesondere auf das Werk des christlichen Sophisten und Rhetors Prokopios, welcher im 5. und 6. Jh. n. Chr. tatig war. Dieses Werk (das einen Panegyrikus, sieben Deklamationen, zwei Kunstwerkbeschreibungen und einige Fragmente umfasst) bildet eingrundlegendes Dokument fur die Geschichte der tausendjahrigen Zivilisation von Gaza, seiner Topographie,...

Die bisherigen Ausgaben von Hedicke, Bardon, Muller und Atkinson haben ein solides Fundament sowohl fur die Erarbeitung der Handschriften des Q. Curtius Rufus als auch fur das Textverstandnis im Allgemeinen geschaffen.Die letzte Teubnersche Ausgabe wurde von Hedicke Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts herausgegeben. Den vorigen Herausgebern ist gemeinsam, dass sie ungefahr zehn Handschriften genutzt haben. Die neueren Forschungen von Professor Oakley haben hingegen 150 Handschriften zu Tage gebracht. Die vorliegende Ausgabe ist nun das Ergebnis der erstmaligen Beschaftigung mit allen bekannten...

Christa Frateantonio follows a new line of research in this study of Pausanias' Periegesis, his historical and geographical description of Greece. Her underlying premise is that it is in fact concealed praise (or criticism) of cities, and supports this view by drawing attention to intention "riddles" in the Periegesis. These she expounds in detailed textual analyses, and explains the structures of the work, some of which are unexplained, as the result of rhetorical principles of description, which she considers in their relationship to the cultural context of the...

The present volume undertakes a systematic study of the ancient texts testifying to St Peter's time in Rome. It evaluates inter alia texts by Early Christian Church teachers (Justin Martyr, Dionys of Corinth, Irenaeus of Lyons), the letters by Ignatius of Antioch - classified as unauthentic - and the legends surrounding the Apostle recounting Peter's encounter with Simon Magus and Nero's persecution of the Christians. The analysis includes a detailed examination of the dating of the First Epistle of Clement and the late New Testament writings. The analyses are complemented by a...