This volume is dedicated to the logos of Cambyses at the beginning of Book 3 in Herodotus' Histories, one of the few sources on the Persian conquest of Egypt that has not yet been exhaustively explored in its complexity. The contributions of this volume deal with the motivations and narrative strategies behind Herodotus' characterization of the Persian king but also with the geopolitical background of Cambyses' conquest of Egypt as well as the reception of the Cambyses logos by later ancient authors. "Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos" exemplifies how a multidisciplinary approach can contribute significantly to a better understanding of a complex work such as Herodotus' Histories.
Today, virtually all BA programs in English at German universities place a strong focus on Cultural Studies. However, textbooks that introduce first-year students to the subject are rare, and the few existing ones are too complicated or not comprehensive enough. By contrast, this textbook introduces the key theories and concepts of Cultural Studies systematically and thoroughly. It puts particular emphasis on their application, aiming to enable students to do their own analyses of cultural artefacts and practices. The author draws on many examples, mostly taken from American culture, but in each chapter, he applies the ideas introduced to The Hunger Games franchise and the coronavirus pandemic to show how different theories can lead to very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Each chapter ends with exercises that allow students to apply what they have learned.
"Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature is the first monograph devoted to the reception of Herodotus among Imperial Greek writers. Using a broad reception model and focused largely on texts outside of historiography proper, this book analyzes the entanglements of criticism and imitation in select works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Dio of Prusa, Lucian, and Pausanias. It offers a new angle on Herodotus's intellectual afterlife, channeled through evocations both explicit and implicit in literary criticism, the moral essay, public oration, satire and periegetic literature. Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature shifts focus from reputation only - what ancient authors explicitly had to say about Herodotus - toward the kinetic interrelation between Herodotus's reputation and his active reworking across genre and mode. It demonstrates how Herodotus was strategically construed and often implicitly summoned - as fabulist, classicist, moralizer, and evasive intellectual - and how such Herodotean presences played to the wider purposes of Imperial writers. Herodotus became a touchstone for writers concerned with a nimbus of questions that the Histories first helped to articulate. Imperial Greeks found Herodotus useful in puzzling through questions of authorial persona, mimesis, the relationship between aesthetic and ethical criticism, the self, and the contingent definitions of Hellenism under Rome. Ultimately, Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature widens an incomplete reception history and reads bi-focally, examining how attention to the presence of Herodotus in various texts unveils new layers of meaning in those works, while also showing how ancient receptions offer insight into the Histories"--
Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Priestley explores some of the earliest ancient responses to Herodotus' Histories from the early and middle Hellenistic period. Through discussions of contemporary discourse relating to the Persian Wars, geography, literary style, and biography, it nuances our understanding of how ancient readers reacted to and appropriated the Histories.
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who lived in the fifth century BC (c.484 - 425 BC). He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative. The Histories-his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced-is a record of his "inquiry", being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. The Histories, were divided into nine books, named after the nine Muses: the "Muse of History", Clio, representing the first book, then Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania and Calliope for books 2 to 9, respectively.
Herodotus' outstanding achievements as a literary figure, intellectual, historian and ethnographer have in recent years come to be appreciated with much greater depth and subtlety. This Companion offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of current approaches to Herodotus' remarkable work.
