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Greek Literature in Late Antiquity
Late Antiquity has attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. As a historical period it has thus far been defined by the transformation of Roman institutions, the emergence of distinct religious cultures (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), and the transmission of ancient knowledge to medieval and early modern Europe. Despite all this, the study of late antique literary culture is still in its infancy, especially for the Greek and other eastern texts examined in this volume. The contributions here presented make new inroads into a rich literature notable above all for its flexibility and unparalleled creativity in combining multiple languages and literary traditions. The authors a...
Nonnus of Panopolis in Context II: Poetry, Religion, and Society
Nonnus of Panopolis in Upper-Egypt is the author of the 48 books of the last large scale mythological epic in antiquity, the Dionysiaca. The same author also wrote an epic poem on the life and times of Jesus Christ according to St John’s Gospel. Nonnus has an outstanding position in ancient literature being at the same time a pagan and a Christian author, living in a time when Christianity was common in the Roman empire, while pagan culture and traditional world views were still maintained. The volume is designed to cover literary, cultural and religious aspects of Nonnus’ poetry as well as to highlight the social and educational background of both the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrasis of the Gospel of St. John.
Brill’s Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis
The Egyptian Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD), author of both the ‘pagan’ Dionysiaca, the longest known poem from Antiquity (21,286 lines in 48 books, the same number of books as the Iliad and Odyssey combined), and a ‘Christian’ hexameter Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel (3,660 lines in 21 books), is no doubt the most representative poet of Greek Late Antiquity. Brill’s Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis provides a collection of 32 essays by a large international group of scholars, experts in the field of archaic, Hellenistic, Imperial, and Christian poetry, as well as scholars of late antique Egypt, Greek mythology and religion, who explore the various aspects of Nonnus’ baroque poetry and its historical, religious and cultural background.
The Comparative Poetics of Homeric Literary Imitation from Antiquity to Renaissance France
Aphrodite’s famous ribbon known as the cestus, the irresistible love charm that she loaned to Hera in the Iliad, was, thanks to a fruitful early misreading, transformed by ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors into a symbol of honorable feminine chastity: in Maurice Scève’s 1560 Microcosme, an epic rewriting of Genesis, Eve first appears before an astonished Adam wearing the virginal cestus as a symbolic guarantee of her sexual innocence. This book traces the history of this curious development from Homer to the end of the sixteenth century in France. Through analyses of both famous and little-known texts, it illustrates the complexity and fecund liberty of Homeric reception.
Orgies of Words
Nonnus’ Paraphrasis, an epic rendition of the Fourth Gospel, offers a highly sophisticated interpretation of the Johannine text. An essential means to this end is extensive use of the imagery related to Greek, and especially Dionysiac, mysteries. Doroszewski successfully challenges the once predominant view that the mystery terminology in the poem is nothing more than rhetorical ornament. He convincingly argues for an important exegetical role Nonnus gives to the mystery terms. On the one hand, they refer to the Mystery of Christ. Jesus introduces his followers into the new dimension of life and worship that enables them to commune with God. This is portrayed as falling into Bacchic frenzy...
From Shame to Sin
The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.
Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception
In classical scholarship of the past two centuries, the term “epyllion” was used to label short hexametric texts mainly ascribable to the Hellenistic period (Greek) or the Neoterics (Latin). Apart from their brevity, characteristics such as a predilection for episodic narration or female characters were regarded as typically “epyllic” features. However, in Antiquity itself, the texts we call “epyllia” were not considered a coherent genre, which seems to be an innovation of the late 18th century. The contributions in this book not only re-examine some important (and some lesser known) Greek and Latin primary texts, but also critically reconsider the theoretical discourses attached to it, and also sketch their literary and scholarly reception in the Byzantine and Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Modern Age.
Nonnus of Panopolis in Context III
Nonnus of Panopolis (5th c. AD), the most important Greek poet of Late Antiquity, is best known for his Dionysiaca, a grand epic that gathers together all myths associated with Dionysus, god of wine and mysteries. The poet also authored the Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel which renders the Fourth Gospel into sophisticated hexameter verse. This volume, edited by Filip Doroszewski and Katarzyna Jażdżewska, brings together twenty-six essays by eminent scholars that discuss Nonnus’ cultural and literary background, the literary techniques and motifs used by the poet, as well as the composition of the Dionysiaca and the exegetical principles applied in the Paraphrase. As such, the book will significantly deepen our understanding of literary culture and religion in Late Antiquity.
What Makes a Church Sacred?
"If churches belong to no one, what is their purpose? Mary K. Farag persuasively demonstrates that three interest groups cared about this question in late antiquity: law-makers, Christian leaders, and wealthy lay-persons. Most of the time, their answers co-existed, sitting side-by-side like tectonic plates. Yet the plates did not always sit still, and it is events on their colliding boundaries that account for familiar Christian controversies in novel ways. What Makes a Church Sacred? argues that scholarship misunderstands well-known religious figures by ignoring the legal issues they faced. In this seminal text, Farag nuances the scholarly conversations on sacred space, gift-giving, wealth, and poverty in the late antique Mediterranean world, making use not only of Latin and Greek sources, but also Coptic and Arabic evidence"--
Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World
This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to ...
