Unruly Eloquence

Unruly Eloquence

Author: Robert Bracht Branham

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

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Branham expounds with sophistication and subtlety the essential ingredients of Lucian's satirical humor. He makes frequent reference to its importance for comic theory and literary history.


The Cynics

The Cynics

Author: R. Bracht Branham

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0520921984

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This collection of essays—the first of its kind in English—brings together the work of an international group of scholars examining the entire tradition associated with the ancient Cynics. The essays give a history of the movement as well as a state-of-the-art account of the literary, philosophical and cultural significance of Cynicism from antiquity to the present. Arguably the most original and influential branch of the Socratic tradition, Cynicism has become the focus of renewed scholarly interest in recent years, thanks to the work of Sloterdijk, Foucault, and Bakhtin, among others. The contributors to this volume—classicists, comparatists, and philosophers—draw on a variety of methodologies to explore the ethical, social and cultural practices inspired by the Cynics. The volume also includes an introduction, appendices, and an annotated bibliography, making it a valuable resource for a broad audience.


Unruly Eloquence

Unruly Eloquence

Author: Bracht Branham

Publisher:

Published: 1989-02-05

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9780674734104

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Branham expounds with sophistication and subtlety the essential ingredients of Lucian's satirical humor. He makes frequent reference to its importance for comic theory and literary history.


Ezra's Book

Ezra's Book

Author: Justin Kishbaugh

Publisher: Clemson University Press

Published: 2019-06-21

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1638041393

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On the afternoon of June 23, 2017, the attendees of the twenty-seventh biannual Ezra Pound International Conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, gathered to listen to poets present original work influenced by the life and work of Ezra Pound. With a title playing on the small book of poems Pound produced for fellow poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) while the two were still young, this volume offers a selection of poems from that reading, together with images evoking other conference events and the excursions to sites important to Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams—the “Philadelphia Geniuses” of the conference’s theme. The poems and images herein help to keep the reading and the conference alive, present, and immediate for our readers. The collection includes poems by Charles Bernstein, Eloisa Bressan, Andrei Bronnikov, David Cappella, Silvia Falsaperla, J. Rhett Forman, John Gery, Jeff Grieneisen, Thomas Heffernan, Rodolfo Brandão de Proença Jaruga, Justin Kishbaugh, Mary Maxwell, Biljana D. Obradović, Matthew Porto, Mary de Rachewiltz, Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Michele Reese, and Ron Smith.


Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives

Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives

Author: Blake Leyerle

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001-07-28

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780520921634

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This book provides an original and rewarding context for understanding the prolific fourth-century Christian theologian John Chrysostom and the religious and social world in which he lived. Blake Leyerle analyzes two highly rhetorical treatises by this early church father attacking the phenomenon of "spiritual marriage." Spiritual marriage was an ascetic practice with a long history in which a man and a woman lived together in an intimate relationship without sex. What begins as an analysis of Chrysostom's attack on spiritual marriage becomes a broad investigation into Chrysostom's life and work, the practice of spiritual marriage itself, the role of the theater in late antique city life, and the early history of Christianity. Though thoroughly grounded in the texts themselves and in the cultural history of late antiquity, this study breaks new ground with its focus on issues of rhetoric, sexuality, and power. Leyerle argues that Chrysostom used images and tropes drawn from the theater to persuade religious men and women that spiritual marriage was wrong. In addition to her analysis of the significance of the rhetorical strategies used by Chrysostom, Leyerle gives a thorough discussion of the role of the theater in late antiquity, particularly in Antioch, one of the gems among late antique cities. She also discusses gender in the context of late antique religion, shedding new light on early Christian attitudes toward sexuality. Throughout Leyerle weaves an ongoing conversation with contemporary theory in film and gender studies that gives her study an important analytic dimension.


Vile Eloquence

Vile Eloquence

Author: Joy Connolly

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

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An oratorical performance in Greek and Roman antiquity was much more than a vehicle for legal argument or an expression of political beliefs; it was an opportunity for a speaker to assert his identity through a meticulous process of verbal and bodily self-fashioning. At the same time, however, the artifice and ornament of oratory was perceived as a threat to the integrity and virtue of the elite man. If a man's speech was supposed to be a reliable index of his true character, how could the orator "act" under the necessarily theatrical constraints of the oratorical performance without engaging in the techniques of seductive cunning traditionally associated with female nature? Vile Eloquence explores the multiple identity of rhetoric, at once an essential element of ancient political activity, the core of the educational system, and a suspect discourse with intrinsically feminine aspects.


Truly Beyond Wonders

Truly Beyond Wonders

Author: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-03-04

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0191614122

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In Truly Beyond Wonders Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis investigates texts and material evidence associated with healing pilgrimage in the Roman empire during the second century AD. Her focus is upon one particular pilgrim, the famous orator Aelius Aristides, whose Sacred Tales, his fascinating account of dream visions, gruelling physical treatments, and sacred journeys, has been largely misunderstood and marginalized. Petsalis-Diomidis rehabilitates this text by placing it within the material context of the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon, where the author spent two years in search of healing. The architecture, votive offerings, and ritual rules which governed the behaviour of pilgrims are used to build a picture of the experience of pilgrimage to this sanctuary. Truly Beyond Wonders ranges broadly over discourses of the body and travel and in so doing explores the place of healing pilgrimage and religion in Graeco-Roman society and culture. It is generously illustrated with more than 80 drawinsg and photographs, and four colour plates.


Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity

Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity

Author: Richard Fletcher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1316757323

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What happened when creative biographers took on especially creative subjects (poets, artists and others) in Greek and Roman antiquity? Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures. Work in the last decades has emphasized the likely fictionality of nearly all of the ancient evidence about the lives of poets, as well as of other artists and intellectuals; this book now sets out to show what we might nevertheless still do with the rich surviving testimony for 'creative lives' - and the evidence that those traditions still shape how we narrate modern lives too.


Subversive Virtue

Subversive Virtue

Author: James A. Francis

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780271013046

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Much attention has been devoted in recent years to Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity. But Christianity did not introduce asceticism to the ancient world. An underlying theme of this fascinating study of pagan asceticism is that much of the work on Christian &"holy men&" has ignored earlier manifestations of asceticism in Antiquity and the way Roman society confronted it. Accordingly, James Francis turns to the second century, the &"balmy late afternoon of Rome's classical empire,&" when the conflict between asceticism and authority reached a turning point. Francis begins with the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121&–180), who warned in his Meditations against &"display[ing] oneself as a man keen to impress others with a reputation for asceticism or beneficence.&" The Stoic Aurelius saw ascetic self-discipline as a virtue, but one to be exercised in moderation. Like other Roman aristocrats of his day, he perceived practitioners of ostentatious physical asceticism as a threat to prevailing norms and the established order. Prophecy, sorcery, miracle working, charismatic leadership, expressions of social discontent, and advocacy of alternative values regarding wealth, property, marriage, and sexuality were the issues provoking the controversy. If Aurelius defined the acceptable limits of ascetical practice, then the poet Lucian depicted the threat ascetics were perceived to pose to the social status quo through his biting satire. In an eye-opening analysis of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Francis shows how Roman society reined in its deviant ascetics by &"rehabilitating&" them into pillars of traditional values. Celsus's True Doctrine shows how the views pagans held of their own ascetics influenced their negative view of Christianity. Finally, Francis points out striking parallels between the conflict over pagan asceticism and its Christian counterpart. By treating pagan asceticism seriously in its own right, Francis establishes the context necessary for understanding the great flowering of asceticism in Late Antiquity


Courtesans at Table

Courtesans at Table

Author: Laura McClure

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-25

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317794141

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Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.