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Fragmented Memory
Chance, in addition to the unavoidable ambiguity caused by time, is one of the main guilty parties in the transmission of ancient texts – or lack thereof. However, the same cannot be said for what concerns the mechanisms of selection and loss of historical and literary memory, where the voluntary awareness of obscuring is often part of a precise aim, thus leading the cultural memory of a literate society to become fragmented. The present volume explores the devices and criteria of selection and loss in Ancient and Medieval texts and the subsequent fragmentation of such literature, but it also addresses the questions of the damnatio memoriae, of literary strategies such as reticence and omi...
The Power of Form
Although positivism dismissed myths as childish fancy, bound to be superseded by reason, there has been a continuous reappraisal of the power of myths since the 19th century. Once viewed as primitive and unreliable accounts and an inadequate and distorted form of knowledge, myths came to be perceived as exemplary narratives, consisting of rich and complex symbolic constructs that carry meaning and a connection to reality. Myths then came to be regarded as a privileged expression of the human soul and of its possibly submerged and unconscious abysses and dramas. Rather than inherently obscure and elusive to a rational grasp, mythical narratives would therefore be driven by logical reasoning, ...
Novel Perspectives on Communication Practices in Antiquity
Documentary texts are vital to our understanding of many aspects of the ancient world, such as its administration, education, and economy. The value of these texts goes even further however: being autographs, they directly testify to ancient communication practices, a field of study which so far has remained underexplored. In this volume, specialists in the field engage with a broad range of documentary sources. They discuss not only how various modes of communication, such as language, handwriting, and lay-out, are employed in specific contexts of writing, but also how these different modes are interrelated. Building on insights from contemporary social-semiotic theory, the volume makes a case for the establishment of historical social semiotics as a discipline.
The Ordered Day
Traces how the day has served as a key organizing concept in Roman culture—and beyond. How did ancient Romans keep track of time? What constituted a day in ancient Rome was not the same twenty-four hours we know today. In The Ordered Day, James Ker traces how the day served as a key organizing concept, both in antiquity and in modern receptions of ancient Rome. Romans used the story of how the day emerged as a unit of sociocultural time to give order to their own civic and imperial history. Ancient literary descriptions of people's daily routines articulated distinctive forms of life within the social order. And in the imperial period and beyond, outsiders—such as early Christians in the...
Reading Quintilian
Reading Quintiliantakes Quintilian's Institutio oratoriaas a coherent literary work: one worth reading in full. This book examines how didactic authority is created and how readers are guided through the Institutiothanks to an overarching framework that holds it together. This framework is composed of several leitmotifs: the author's self-staging, statements of didactic intent and method, the depiction of an ideal didactic constellation, remarks suggesting that the work proceeds in parallel with the pupil's training and the author's life, polemics against other authorities, and proleptic strategies deflecting responsibility for students' potential failures. As Reading Quintilianshows, the pe...
Ideas Under Fire
Since Aristotle's famous declaration that the speculative sciences originated with the emergence of a leisure class, it has been accepted as a truism that intellectual activity requires political stability and leisure in order to flourish. Paradoxically, however, some of the most powerful and influential contributions to Western intellectual culture have been produced in conditions that were adverse-indeed hostile-to intellectual activity. Examples include Socrates' stirring defense of the examined life before a hostile Athenian jury, Boethius writing The Consolation of Philosophy under the specter of impending torture and execution, Galileo devising key notions for modern mechanics while un...
The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies
Essays on the magical handbooks of Greco-Roman Egypt
