A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris
A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris

Author: Livingstone

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9047400925

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This volume contains the first scholarly commentary on the puzzling work Busiris – part mythological jeu d’esprit, part rhetorical treatise and part self-promoting polemic – by the Greek educator and rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 BC). The commentary reveals Isocrates’ strategies in advertising his own political rhetoric as a middle way between amoral ‘sophistic’ education and the abstruse studies of Plato’s Academy. Introductory chapters situate Busiris within the lively intellectual marketplace of 4th-century Athens, showing how the work parodies Plato’s Republic, and how its revisionist treatment of the monster-king Busiris reflects Athenian fascination with the ‘alien wisdom’ of Egypt. As a whole, the book casts new light both on Isocrates himself, revealed as an agile and witty polemicist, and on the struggle between rhetoric and philosophy from which Hellenism and modern humanities were born.

A Commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis
A Commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis

Author: Yun Lee Too

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-06-05

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0191553433

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How does one construct a role for oneself in the fourth-century democratic city? This commentary on Isocrates' Antidosis , which includes a full translation as well as an extensive introduction, demonstrates that a rhetorician may do so by assuming roles that subvert many of the conventions invoked by the genre - a non-speaker in a rhetorical community, a rhetorician in a world where rhetorical performativity has derogatory connotations, a philosopher following the trial of Socrates. Moreover, Yun Lee Too demonstrates how the narrative of 'self' in the Antidosis is to be understood as a sophisticated amalgam of literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and legal discourses.

The Essential Isocrates
The Essential Isocrates

Author: Jon D. Mikalson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1477325549

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The Essential Isocrates is a comprehensive introduction to Isocrates, one of ancient Greece’s foremost orators. Jon D. Mikalson presents Isocrates largely in his own words, with original English translations of selections of his writings on his life and times and on morality, religion, philosophy, rhetoric, education, political theory, and Greek and Athenian history. In Mikalson’s treatment, Isocrates receives his due not only as a major thinker but as one whose work has resonated across time, influencing even modern education practices and theory. Isocrates wrote extensively about Athens in the fourth century BCE and before, and his speeches, letters, and essays provide a trove of insights concerning the intellectual, political, and social currents of his time. Mikalson details what we know about Isocrates’s long, eventful, and complicated life, and much can be gleaned on the personal level from his own writings, as Isocrates was one of the most introspective authors of the Classical Period. By collecting the most representative and important passages of Isocrates’s writings, arranging them topically, and placing them in historical context, The Essential Isocrates invites general and expert readers alike to engage with one of antiquity’s most compelling men of ideas.

City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity
City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity

Author: Ralph Rosen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 9047409183

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The third in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical antiquity, this volume examines the dichotomy between 'city' and 'country' in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Fourteen papers address a variety of topics on this theme, and include a variety of methodological approaches—archaeological, iconographic, literary and philosophical. The book demonstrates that, despite a common rhetoric of polarity in antiquity that tended to construct city and countryside as very distinct, oppositional categories, there was far less consistency (and far more nuance) about the ideologies felt to inhere in each.

Apollonius of Perga's Conica
Apollonius of Perga's Conica

Author: Michael Fried

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9004350993

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This volume contains a historically sensitive analysis and interpretation of Apollonius of Perga's Conica, one of the greatest works of Hellenistic mathematics. It provides a long overdue alternative to H. G. Zeuthen's Die Lehre von den Kogelschnitten im Altertum.

Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2
Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2

Author: Tobias Reinhardt

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2006-06-29

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0191569070

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An edition, with a new Latin text and full commentary, of Book 2 of Quintilian's Education of the Orator. Education and the conceptualization of technical disciplines are now focal points of research into Graeco-Roman antiquity, and Quintilian's work is central to both areas. Following the treatment of elementary education in Book 1, Quintilian proceeds to the discussion of the second stage of instruction, provided by the teacher of rhetoric. He gives important insights into the way teaching was conducted in a rhetorical school in Rome in the first century AD, and discusses the various elementary rhetorical exercises one by one. The second half of the book is concerned with Quintilian's theoretical conception of rhetoric. Rhetoric is seen as an 'art', a technical discipline grounded in rules and organized like medicine or seafaring, and - less obviously - as a virtue. The section as a whole provides an argument for Quintilian's celebrated claim that the perfect orator is 'a good man, skilled in speaking'.

Virgil, Aeneid 11
Virgil, Aeneid 11

Author: Nicholas Horsfall

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9004349979

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This is the first comprehensive commentary on Aeneid 11. The commentary treats fully matters of linguistic and textual interpretation, metre and prosody, grammar, lexicon and idiom, of Roman behaviour, social and ritual, as well as Virgil’s sources and the literary tradition. New critical approaches and developments in Virgilian studies have been taken into account with economy and fairness. The Latin text is presented with a facing English translation. The commentary is followed by an appendix on Penthesilea and the Epic Cycle and a second appendix which discusses the weaknesses of Aeneid 11. The book concludes with English and Latin indices. In approach and learning, this commentary continues Nicholas Horsfall’s impressive work as a commentator and will advance our understanding of the Aeneid and the poet Virgil.

Ovid, Fasti 1
Ovid, Fasti 1

Author: Steven Green

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 9047414179

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This commentary provides a detailed analysis of the first book of Ovid's Fasti, a complex poem which takes as its central framework the Roman calendar in the late Augustan/early Tiberian period and purports to deal with its religious festivals and their origins. Book 1 covers the month of January, and has proven to be particularly challenging to readers in light of the apparent revision/reworking of the text undertaken by the poet whilst in exile. This commentary - the most extensive yet on any single book of the poem - locates the text of Book 1 firmly in its literary, historical and socio-political contexts and seeks both to incorporate and build on the recent scholarship on the poem. In light of the special nature of Book 1, the commentary is prefaced by two introductory sections, the second of which tackles head-on the problems (and dynamics) of post-exilic reworking of the text.

Odious Praise
Odious Praise

Author: Eric MacPhail

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2022-05-25

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0271092408

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This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values. Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science. Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.

The Oxford Handbook of Plato
The Oxford Handbook of Plato

Author: Gail Fine

Publisher: Oxford Handbooks

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 0190639733

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Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. The updated and original essays in the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato provide in-depth discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues, all serving several functions at once: they survey the current academic landscape; express and develop the authors' own views; and situate those views within a range of alternatives. The result is a useful state-of-the-art reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato differs in two main ways from the first edition. First, six leading scholars of ancient philosophy have contributed entirely new chapters: Hugh Benson on the Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro; James Warren on the Protagoras and Gorgias; Lindsay Judson on the Meno; Luca Castagnoli on the Phaedo; Susan Sauvé Meyer on the Laws; and David Sedley on Plato's theology. This new edition therefore covers both dialogues and topics in more depth than the first edition did. Secondly, most of the original chapters have been revised and updated, some in small, others in large, ways.