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The Dark Side of Statius' Achilleid explores systematically and for the first time the darker aspects of Statius' Achilleid, bringing to light the poem's tragic and epic dimensions. By seeking to position at centre-stage these darker elements, the book offers several new readings of the Achilleid in relation to its literary inheritance, its gender dynamics, and its generic tensions. This volume delves beneath the surface of a story that ostensibly deals with a light subject matter—the cross-dressing of a young Achilles on Scyros—to offer an in-depth examination of the poem's relationship to its epic and tragic precursors, and to explore its more serious themes. It is shown to challenge t...
This special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is devoted to the Aldine edition of the Ancient Greek epistolographers. Published in Venice in 1499 by Aldus Manutius, the Aldine edition was the first printed edition of most of the thirty-six Greek letter collections that it contains. As such, it embodies the intersection between the medieval epistolary anthologies that predated it and the printed editions of Greek epistolographic collections that followed, which were primarily based on its text. In recent decades, the Aldien edition has been the subject of important works, which have sought to analyse its contents and sources. This issue explores the Aldine edition from three perspectives: its relationship to the epistolary collections found in medieval manuscripts, its relationship to the printed editions that followed it and its legacy and value for the modern scholar studying Ancient Greek epistolography.
In 1991, Laura Slatkin published The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, in which she argued that Homer knowingly situated the storyworld of the Iliad against the backdrop of an older world of mythos by which the events in the Iliad are explained and given traction. Slatkin’s focus was on Achilles’ mother, Thetis: an ostensibly marginal and powerless goddess, Thetis nevertheless drives the plot of the Iliad, being allusively credited with the power to uphold or challenge the rule of Zeus. Now, almost thirty years after Slatkin’s publication, this timely volume re-examines depictions and receptions of this ambiguous goddess, in works ranging from archaic Greek poe...
Metamorphic Readings presents a set of original interpretations of Ovid's seminal Metamorphoses and its reception in later literature, representing the state of the art of research on the poem and enhancing the suggestiveness of Ovid's masterpiece.
Considering the ubiquity of rhetorical training in antiquity, the volume starts from the premise that every first-person statement in ancient literature is in some way rhetorically modelled and aesthetically shaped. Focusing on different types of Greek and Latin literature, poetry and prose, from the Archaic Age to Late Antiquity, the contributions analyse the use and modelling of gender-specific elements in different types of first-person speech, be it that the speaker is (represented as) the author of a work, be it that they feature as characters in the work, narrating their own story or that of others. In doing so, they do not only offer new insights into the rhetorical strategies and lit...
Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, compleme...
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...
Although the recent ‘memory boom’ has led to increasing interdisciplinary interest, there is a significant gap relating to the examination of this topic in Classics. In particular, there is need for a systematic exploration of ancient memory and its use as a critical and methodological tool for delving into ancient literature. The present volume provides just such an approach, theorising the use and role of memory in Graeco-Roman thought and literature, and building on the background of memory studies. The volume’s contributors apply theoretical models such as memoryscapes, civic and cultural memory, and memory loss to a range of authors, from Homeric epic to Senecan drama, and from historiography to Cicero’s recollections of performances. The chapters are divided into four sections according to the main perspective taken. These are: 1) the Mechanics of Memory, 2) Collective memory, 3) Female Memory, and 4) Oblivion. This modern approach to ancient memory will be useful for scholars working across the range of Greek and Roman literature, as well as for students, and a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in the intersection of memory studies and Classics.
Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World explores the relationship between the work of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the study of classical antiquity. The collection of essays engages with Greek and Roman history, literature, society, and culture, offering a range of perspectives and approaches building on Gramsci’s theoretical insights, especially from his Prison Notebooks. The volume investigates both Gramsci’s understanding and reception of the ancient world, including his use of ancient sources and modern historiography, and the viability of applying some of his key theoretical insights to the study of Greek and Roman history and literature. The chapters deal with the ideas of hegemony, passive revolution, Caesarism, and the role of intellectuals in society, offering a complex and diverse exploration of this intersection. With its fascinating mixture of topics, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of classics, ancient history, classical reception studies, Marxism and history, and those studying Antonio Gramsci’s works in particular.
This is the first scholarly exploration of concepts and representations of Artificial Intelligence in ancient Greek and Roman epic, including their reception in later literature and culture. Contributors look at how Hesiod, Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Moschus, Ovid and Valerius Flaccus crafted the first literary concepts concerned with automata and the quest for artificial life, as well as technological intervention improving human life. Parts one and two consider, respectively, archaic Greek, and Hellenistic and Roman, epics. Contributors explore the representations of Pandora in Hesiod, and Homeric automata such as Hephaestus' wheeled tripods, the Phaeacian king Alcinous' golden and silve...