A central, much-studied feature of the poetry of 3rd cent. BCE Alexandria is the artistic treatment of the cultural past, the reception of earlier Greek poetry and artwork in the artistic creations of a new, Greco-Egyptian world deracinated both geographically and temporally from the heroes and models of Archaic and Classical Greece. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has devoted a 30+ year professional scholarly career to the study of this reception, one of both imitation and variation, which took place concurrently with the massive collection and categorization of earlier Greek literature in the work...

This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new)...

Social Studies of the sciences have long analyzed and exposed the constructed nature of knowledge. Pioneering studies of knowledge production in laboratories (e.g., Latour/Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981) have identified factors that affect processes that lead to the generation of scientific data and their subsequent interpretation, such as money, training and curriculum, location and infrastructure, biography-based knowledge and talent, and chance. More recent theories of knowledge construction have further identified different forms of knowledge, such as tacit, intuitive, explicit,...

Though stylistics undoubtedly plays a crucial role in the scholarship on Latin poetry – from commentaries to textual criticism, from intertextuality to literary criticism – in recent years, for various reasons, it has not received the attention it deserves. This book, published a generation after Adams and Mayer’s seminal 1999 volume, Aspects of the Language of Latin Poetry, ideally aims to complement and update it on a smaller scale, offering the reader a collection of stimulating papers from international scholars on the style of some of the most significant voices of Latin poetry,...

Scholarship on the rapid dialogue of Attic tragedy mostly focused on form and structure, overlooking language and the relationships between the characters. This book redresses the imbalance by deploying under-explored methodologies from pragmatics and sociolinguistics: Brown and Levinson’s politeness model, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Speech Act Theory, Conversation Analysis. Sophocles’ dialogues, with their unrivalled linguistic precision, prove an invaluable corpus for this analysis. After a methodological survey, the book explores the realizations of politeness super-strategies...

This volume gathers together about two thirds of the articles and essays published between 1983 and 2021 by Philip Hardie, whose work on ancient literature has been of seminal importance in the field. The centre of gravity lies in late Republican and Augustan poetry, in particular Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, with important contributions on wider Augustan culture; on Neronian and Flavian epic; on the Latin poetry of late antiquity; and on the reception of Latin poetry.