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This volume contains the papers of the 'Seventh Groningen Workshop on Hellenistic Poetry: Beyond the Canon' (Groningen 2004). During the workshop a first draft of each of the papers was commented on by an international group of specialists in the field of Hellenistic poetry. A number of previous workshops was devoted largely to the major Hellenistic poets. This recent workshop explores what the poets 'beyond the canon' of Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius Rhodius had to offer and it discussed questions of canonicity in Hellenistic poetry on a more general level. The papers in the present volume deal with a large range of authors and genres: Herondas, Lycophron, Euphorion, Hermesianax, C...
Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity is the first book to examine what early Jewish courtroom narratives can tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice. Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Chaya T. Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in the ancient Jewish tradition.
Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholar...
In Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book III of the Sibylline oracles, Ashley L. Bacchi reclaims the importance of the Sibyl as a female voice of prophecy and reveals new layers of intertextual references that address political, cultural, and religious dialogue in second-century Ptolemaic Egypt. This investigation stands apart from prior examinations by reorienting the discussion around the desirability of the pseudonym to an issue of gender. It questions the impact of identifying the author’s message with a female prophetic figure and challenges the previous identification of paraphrased Greek oracles and their function within the text. Verses previously seen as anomalous are transferred from the role of Greek subterfuge of Jewish identity to offering nuanced support of monotheistic themes.
The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.
This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition', 'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.
After Sappho but before the great Latin poets, the most important short poems in the ancient world were Greek epigrams. Beginning with simple expressions engraved on stone, these poems eventually encompassed nearly every theme we now associate with lyric poetry in English. Many of the finest are on love and would later exert a profound influence on Latin love poets and, through them, on all the poetry of Europe and the West. This volume offers a representative selection of the best Greek epigrams in original verse translation. It showcases the poetry of nine poets (including one woman), with many epigrams from the recently discovered Milan papyrus. Gordon L. Fain provides an accessible general introduction describing the emergence of the epigram in Hellenistic Greece, together with short essays on the life and work of each poet and brief explanatory notes for the poems, making this collection an ideal anthology for a wide audience of readers.
A critical edition of the only extant collection of Latin riddles containing the primary texts and in-depth analysis.
From the gold of the shaft graves of Mycenae to an undecorated Late Roman lekythos, and from facade statuary in Roman Ephesus to electroplated teapots in present-day household assemblages on the island of Kythera, this volume presents a selection of essays on the complex and ever-progressing relationships between things and people across time and space. Past and present advances in the discourse on materialisms are approached from a case study perspective through the lens of two different but complementary themes: object biography and materiality in relation to medium. Each essay offers a distinct insight into the always shifting meanings, values, and relational connections of things, exploring a diversity of concepts, contexts, and material elements from prehistory to today.
Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a differe...