Allusion, Authority, and Truth
Allusion, Authority, and Truth

Author: Phillip Mitsis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010-10-19

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 311024540X

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Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.

Allusion, Authority, and Truth
Allusion, Authority, and Truth

Author: Phillip Mitsis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 3110245396

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.

The Philosophical Stage
The Philosophical Stage

Author: Joshua Billings

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0691205183

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"In this book, classicist Joshua Billings considers classical Greek drama as intellectual history. Developing an innovative approach to dramatic form as a mode of philosophical thought, Billings recasts early Greek intellectual history as a conversation across types of discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely-shared conceptual questions. He integrates evidence from tragedy, comedy, and satyr play into the development of early Greek philosophy in order to place poetry at the center of Greek thought. He thus offers a substantially new history and map of classical intellectual culture: drama, on his view, appears as our best source for understanding the thought of the fifth century, while at the same time revealing significant tensions and anxieties in the development of philosophy. At the heart of the book is a novel approach to the philosophical qualities of drama. Though dramatists and their works have been considered philosophical in a variety of ways going back to antiquity, scholarly approaches have consistently taken "literature" and "philosophy" as defined categories, tracing more or less direct connections between one and the other. On the contrary, Billings argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" were available as stable categories in the fifth century. Rather he describes the way that drama treats issues that would come to be called philosophical, without relying on assumptions concerning what constitutes philosophical method or literary form. Drama develops a kind of method that allows it to pose and pursue conceptual questions in dramatic form which Billings describes as the "philosophical poetics" of drama"--

Creating the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition
Creating the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition

Author: Laura Viidebaum

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1108875807

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This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Research Handbook on Law and Literature
Research Handbook on Law and Literature

Author: Goodrich, Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2022-03-22

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 1839102268

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In this original and thought-provoking Research Handbook, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, lawyers, judges, and writers offer a range of perspectives on rethinking law by means of literary concepts. Presenting a comprehensive introduction to jurisliterary themes, it destabilises the traditional hierarchy that places law before literature and exposes the literary nature of the legal.

Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World
Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World

Author: Jan N. Bremmer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-07-28

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 3110299550

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The ancient Mysteries have long attracted the interest of scholars, an interest that goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. After a period of interest around the turn of the twentieth century, recent decades have seen an important study of Walter Burkert (1987). Yet his thematic approach makes it hard to see how the actual initiation into the Mysteries took place. To do precisely that is the aim of this book. It gives a ‘thick description’ of the major Mysteries, not only of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, but also those located at the interface of Greece and Anatolia: the Mysteries of Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos as well as those of the Corybants. It then proceeds to look at the Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries, which have become increasingly better understood due to the many discoveries of new texts in the recent times. Having looked at classical Greece we move on to the Roman Empire, where we study not only the lesser Mysteries, which we know especially from Pausanias, but also the new ones of Isis and Mithras. We conclude our book with a discussion of the possible influence of the Mysteries on emerging Christianity. Its detailed references and up-to-date bibliography will make this book indispensable for any scholar interested in the Mysteries and ancient religion, but also for those scholars who work on initiation or esoteric rituals, which were often inspired by the ancient Mysteries.

The New Politics of Olympos
The New Politics of Olympos

Author: Michael Brumbaugh

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190059265

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"This book is a study of the ways in which Kallimachos used hymns praising the Olympian gods to shape a political discourse on kingship emerging in the Hellenistic world. In it, I investigate how the poet crafts compelling new portrayals of the gods that refigure the politics of the divine family. In the new political order he depicts, Kallimachos virtually eliminates the harmful strife traditionally associated with these figures, reframing the gods as good kings and queens within the idiom of contemporary politics. Not only does Kallimachos depict these gods as pro-dynastic exemplars of good governance, but he also engages his audience in discourses on the nature of power, just rule, reciprocity, transgression and punishment, as well as the roles of kings, queens, and poets. In dialogue with a range of literary texts from the Archaic, Classical, and indeed contemporary periods, Kallimachos renegotiates the political dynamics of the Olympian gods who serve as paradigms for his ideology. I argue that this "new politics of Olympos" constitutes Kallimachos' effort to shape the political discourse emerging within and between the courts of Hellenistic superpowers. His hymns for the gods define what is praiseworthy and set the agenda for a conversation about power at the dawning of a new political phenomenon-Hellenistic kingship. I close the book with a brief overview of Kallimachos' political ideology in the Hymns, the rhetorical strategies he employs, and the inter- and intratextual dynamics that draw readers of the poetry book into a larger discussion on power, authority, and just rule. Finally, I offer some speculations on the persuasive effect of praise on a potential Ptolemaic reader for whom the poetry book might serve as an education in and inducement to good kingship"--

The Authoritative Historian
The Authoritative Historian

Author: K. Scarlett Kingsley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-31

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 1009179780

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In this volume an international group of scholars revisits the themes of John Marincola's ground-breaking Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. The nineteen chapters offer a series of case studies that explore how ancient historians' approaches to their projects were informed both by the pull of tradition and by the ambition to innovate. The key themes explored are the relation of historiography to myth and poetry; the narrative authority exemplified by Herodotus, the 'father' of history; the use of 'fictional' literary devices in historiography; narratorial self-presentation; and self-conscious attempts to shape the historiographical tradition in new and bold ways. The volume presents a holistic vision of the development of Greco-Roman historiography and the historian's dynamic position within this practice.

Aristophanes: Cavalry
Aristophanes: Cavalry

Author: Robert Tordoff

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-12-28

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1350065706

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Offering for the first time a student introduction to Aristophanes' most explosive political satire, this volume is an essential guide to the context, themes and later reception of Cavalry. The ancient comedy is a fascinating insight into demagoguery and political rhetoric in classical Athens. These are subjects that resonate with a modern audience more now than ever before. Originally performed in 424 BCE, Cavalry was the first play Aristophanes directed himself and it was awarded first prize. It targets the Athenian demagogue, Cleon, who had risen to prominence since the death of Pericles and to pre-eminence after an audacious victory over Sparta in 425 BCE. In Cavalry, Aristophanes attacks Cleon's popularity with the masses, but also criticises the democracy itself as guilty of gullibility, self-interest and political shortsightedness. As the play shows, the only hope of escape from the crisis is for Athens to find a leader even more popular Cleon. And who better to be more foul-mouthed, depraved and shameless than a sausage-seller, if only because he turns out in the end to have a good heart and a true love of traditional Athenian values?

Metapoetry in Euripides
Metapoetry in Euripides

Author: Isabelle Torrance

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-01-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0191632031

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Metapoetry in Euripides is the first detailed study of the self-conscious literary devices applied within Euripidean drama and how these are interwoven with issues of thematic importance, whether social, theological, or political. In the volume, Torrance argues that Euripides employed a complex system of metapoetic strategies in order to draw the audience's attention to the novelty of his compositions. The metapoetic strategies discussed include intertextual allusions to earlier poetic texts (especially to Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles) which are often developed around unusual and memorable language or imagery, deployment of recognizable trigger words referring to plot construction, novelties or secondary status, and self-conscious references to fiction implied through allusion to writing. Torrance also looks at and compares metapoetic techniques used in tragedy, satyr-drama, and old comedy to demonstrate that the Greek tragedians commonly exploited metapoetic strategies, and that metapoetry is more pervasive in Euripides than in the other tragedians. While Euripides shares some metapoetic techniques with old comedy, these remain implicit in his tragedies (but not in his satyr-dramas).