"Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran" focuses on the content of one of the most important inscriptions of the Ancient Near East: the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century bce), which in essence reports on a suspicious fratricide and subsequent coup d etat. Moreover, the study shows how the inscription s narrative would decisively influence the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions well into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.

Intriguingly, our assessment of the impact of the Bisotun narrative on later literary traditions in...

What do we mean by space in the "Iliad"? The aim of this book is to offer a systematic and comprehensive presentation of the different types and functions of space in the earliest work of Greek literature. By adopting a twofold division between simple and embedded story space, the former pertaining to the actions of characters and the latter to their thoughts, Christos Tsagalis shows how character drawing and authority are deeply influenced by active spatial representation.

Similes and descriptive passages, in which space looms large, are also viewed in a new light as the author...

Historians like Ephorus, Theopompus, or Aristotle's great-nephew Callisthenes, to say nothing of Xenophon, counted among the most acclaimed in antiquity. But with the exception of Xenophon, their complete works have not survived, and thus they are accessible to the modern reader only in the form of fragments, usually quoted by later authors.

The present collection of essays by an international team of scholars focuses on the contribution of these and other fourth-century authors to the development of Greek historiography in terms of form, scope, and methods. Between Thucydides and...

Christians talked, debated, and wrote dialogues in late antiquity and on throughout Byzantium. Some were philosophical, others more literary, theological, or Platonic; Aristotle also came into the picture as time went on. Sometimes the written works claim to be records of actual public debates, and we know that many such debates did take place and continued to do so. Dialoguing in Late Antiquity takes up a challenge laid down by recent scholars who argue that a wall of silence came down in the fifth century AD, after which Christians did not "dialogue."

Averil Cameron now...

It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic's contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may supply justification: Neoanalysis.

This once influential theory held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis, called thus after an Ethiopian prince who allied with Troy against the Greeks, only to be killed by the Greeks' greatest hero, Achilles. The death of that hero himself, at the hands of Paris,...