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Ancient epistolary fiction is a still largely under-explored field of research, at the intersection of studies on epistolography and on pseudepigraphy. The present volume sketches out a broad panorama of ancient fiction in letters. It covers a large period of time up to late Antiquity, with a main focus on letters from the imperial era. Epistolary fiction is examined as a mainly Greek phenomenon (there are few Latin equivalents) that was characteristic of both pagan and Christian literature. The material investigated falls within two categories: fictional letter collections from well-known authors of the Second Sophistic and their successors (Lucian, Alciphron, Philostratus, Aristaenetus); l...
Evagrius Ponticus is regarded by many scholars as the architect of the eastern heresy Origenism, as his theology corresponded to the debates that erupted in 399 and episodically thereafter, culminating in the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 AD. However some scholars now question this conventional interpretation of Evagrius' place in the Origenist controversies. Augustine Casiday sets out to reconstruct Evagrius' theology in its own terms, freeing interpretation of his work from the reputation for heresy that overwhelmed it, and studying his life, writings and evolving legacy in detail. The first part of this book discusses the transmission of Evagrius' writings, and provides a framework of his life for understanding his writing and theology, whilst part two moves to a synthetic study of major themes that emerge from his writings. This book will be an invaluable addition to scholarship on Christian theology, patristics, heresy and ancient philosophy.
This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a ‘genre’ is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label ‘love letter’, are compared with more c...
Sosipatra, Hypatia, Macrina: some of the most famous female philosophers of antiquity were connected to Neoplatonism. But what does it mean to be a woman philosopher in late antiquity? How is the inclusive nature of the Neoplatonic schools connected to their ethical, political, and metaphysical ideas? What role does the religious dimension of late Neoplatonism and the role of women as priestesses play in understanding Neoplatonic women philosophers? This book offers thirteen essays that examine women and the female in Neoplatonism from a variety of perspectives, paying particular attention to the interactions between the metaphysics, psychology, and ethics.
Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.
The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, ...
In their "prototypical" form, both the letter and the epigram are characterised by brevity and a focus on the essentials. From an ancient perspective, both types of text also ranked at the lower end of the genre hierarchy. Over time, however, the letter and epigram established themselves as "serious", competitive forms and lent themselves to literary experimentation and innovation. Moreover, they often outgrew their original status as "simple" or "minor" text types and thus defied conventional expectations. This volume examines the relationships and interactions between letters and epigrams in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This broad temporal framework makes it possible to analyse constants and divergences across various epochs and literary spaces. The individual contributions focus on the similarities and differences between the two text types and also examine how they interpenetrate each other and thus produce a mixture or even a crossover of the genres: A letter can have epigrammatic moments or even have the overall effect of an epigram due to its pointedness, an epigram can be written in letter form, epigrams can be embedded in letters, etc.
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In den letzten Jahren entstand ein neues Cicerobild, das Cicero als akademischen Philosophen wieder ernst nimmt. Davon ausgehend wird in Studien zu seinem Werk und seiner Wirkung gezeigt, wie der römische Philosoph in seinen Dialogen eine innovative Art skeptischen Philosophierens entwickelt. Cicero transferiert die griechische Philosophie nicht nur in die römische Lebenswelt, sondern transformiert sie durch die probabilistische Methode seines Philosophierens auch in philosophisch relevanter Weise. Mit dieser Transformation versetzt Cicero seine Leser in die Lage, eigenständig nach Lösungen der in Rede stehenden philosophischen Probleme zu suchen. Cicero leistet so einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Veränderung von Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Denn seine Erneuerung des philosophischen Diskurses verliert im Laufe der Zeit nicht an Bedeutung. Mit ihrem Potenzial zur Entwicklung eigenständigen Denkens und von Selbstkritik scheinen Ciceros Denkanstöße in einer von mangelnder Reflexion und Hassrede geprägten Gegenwart vielmehr aktueller denn je zu sein.