Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero is a collection of essays by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars that situates Cicero in the context of his use and abuse from antiquity to the present, and is intended to provide readers with several good reasons to return to the study of Cicero's writings with greater interest and respect.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristotle provides a systematic yet accessible account of the reception of Aristotle’s philosophy in Antiquity. To date, there has been no comprehensive attempt to explain this complex phenomenon. This volume fills this lacuna by offering broad coverage of the subject from Hellenistic times to the sixth century AD. It is laid out chronologically and the 23 articles are divided into three sections: I. The Hellenistic Reception of Aristotle; II. The Post-Hellenistic Engagement with Aristotle; III. Aristotle in Late Antiquity. Topics include Aristotle and the Stoa, Andronicus of Rhodes and the construction of the Aristotelian corpus, the return to Aristotle in the first century BC, and the role of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Porphyry in the transmission of Aristotle's philosophy to Late Antiquity.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates – the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially “receptive” nature of Socrates’ influence (by contrast to Plato’s), chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods. Together they reveal the continuity of Socrates’ idiosyncratic, polyvalent, and deep imprint on the history of Western thought, and witness the value of further research in the reception of Socrates.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical Greece, from his death in the fourth century BCE until the Platonist and Aristotelian commentators in the sixth century CE. The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Early Developments in Reception’ (four chapters); ‘Early Imperial Reception’ (nine chapters); and ‘Early Christianity and Late Antique Platonism’ (eighteen chapters). Sectional introductions cover matters of importance that could not easily be covered in dedicated chapters. The book demonstrates the great variety of approaches to and interpretations of Plato among even his most dedicated ancient readers, offering some salutary lessons for his modern readers too.
Brill's Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond offers new insights on the reception and cultural transmission of one of the most controversial and influential texts to have survived from Classical Antiquity. Herodotus’ Histories has been adopted, adapted, imitated, contested, admired and criticized across diverse genres, historical periods, and geographical boundaries. This companion, edited by Jessica Priestley and Vasiliki Zali, examines the reception of Herodotus in a range of cultural contexts, from the fifth century BC to the twentieth century AD. The essays consider key topics such as Herodotus' place in the Western historiographical tradition, translation of and scholarly engagement with the Histories, and the use of the Histories as a model for describing and interpreting cultural and geographical material.
Until the Renaissance the centrality of Roman tragedy in Western society and culture was unchallenged. Studies on Roman Republican tragedy and on Imperial Roman tragedy by the contributors have been directing the gaze of scholarship back to Roman tragedy. This volume has two goals: first, to demonstrate that Republican tragedy had a far more central role in shaping Imperial tragedy than is currently thought, and quite possibly more important than Classical Greek tragedy. Second, the influence of other Roman literary genres on Roman tragedy is greater than has formerly been credited. Studies on von Kleist and Shelley, Eliot and Claus help reconstruct the ancient Roman stage by showing how moderns had thought to change it for contemporary aesthetics.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great offers a considerable range of topics, of interest to students and academics alike, in the long tradition of this subject’s significant impact, across a sometimes surprising and comprehensive variety of areas. Arguably no other historical figure has cast such a long shadow for so long a time. Every civilisation touched by the Macedonian Conqueror, along with many more that he never imagined, has scrambled to “own” some part of his legacy. This volume canvasses a comprehensive array of these receptions, beginning from Alexander’s own era and journeying up to the present, in order to come to grips with the impact left by this influential but elusive figure.
Brill’s Companion to Valerius Flaccus is the first English-language survey on all key aspects of this Flavian poet and his epic Argonautica (1st century CE). A team of international specialists offers both an account of the state of the art and new insights. Topics covered include textual transmission, language, poetic techniques, main themes, characters, relationship to intertexts and reception. This will be a standard point of departure for anyone interested in Valerius Flaccus or Flavian epic more generally. Contributors are: Antony Augoustakis, Michael Barich, Neil Bernstein, Emma Buckley, Cristiano Castelletti, James Clauss, Robert Cowan, Peter Davis, Alain Deremetz, Attila Ferenczi, Marco Fucecchi, Randall Ganiban, Mark Heerink, Alison Keith, Helen Lovatt, Gesine Manuwald, Ruth Parkes, Tim Stover, Ruth Taylor-Briggs, and Andrew Zissos.
This chapter explores the use and adaptation of the Galenic corpus in the hands of late antique medical compilers. It is divided into two main sections dealing with Greek and Latin authors respectively.
Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought offers clear, accessible essays to assist a new generation of readers in their introduction to Strauss’ writings on the ancients, and to deepen the understanding of those who have already benefitted from his work. Strauss rediscovered esoteric writing. His careful explications of works by classical thinkers— of Socratic political philosophy, pre-Socratic philosophers, and of poets tragic and comic—have therefore opened those works up in a way that had been lost for centuries. Yet Strauss’ writings, especially his later works, make considerable demands on any reader. These essays are written by scholars who bring to bear on their reading of Strauss many years of study.
