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As Witnessed by Images
Lowenstam identifies a variety of images and interpretations--some regarded Achilles as a hero, others believed him to be a cruel bully--that reflect and directly respond to the ancient heroic tradition from which the Iliad and Odyssey evolved.
Rituals in Ink
In order to reconstruct ancient rituals we must rely on ancient texts. That is the premise of these eight papers which are taken from a conference held at Stanford University in 2002 which brought together scholars of Roman religion and scholars of Roman literature to debate the `textuality of ritual'. The papers are followed by six brief essays which discuss the themes of the and consider the problems of retrieving ritual from texts written by such complex authors as Virgil, Ovid and Livy. The essays themselves focus on: the theme of sacrificial ritual in Roman poetry; religious communication in Rome; professional poets and the 2nd-century BC temple of Hercules of the muses; Livy; the Aeneid ; Ovid's use of hymns in the Metamorphoses ; Ovid's depiction of a triumph in Tristia ; the secret name of Rome. The numerous extracts are presented in Latin verse and English prose translation.
Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander
The charismatic Alexander the Great of Macedon (356–323 B.C.E.) was one of the most successful military commanders in history, conquering Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia, central Asia, and the lands beyond as far as Pakistan and India. Alexander has been, over the course of two millennia since his death at the age of thirty-two, the central figure in histories, legends, songs, novels, biographies, and, most recently, films. In 2004 director Oliver Stone’s epic film Alexander generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great and his companions, surroundings, and accomplishments, but the critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiograph...
Topography and Deep Structure in Plato
In this book, Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran examines the use of place in Plato's dialogues. Corcoran argues that spatial representations, such as walls, caves, and roads, as well as the creation of eternal patterns and chaotic images in the particular spaces, times, characterizations, and actions of the dialogues, provide clues to Plato's philosophic project. Throughout the dialogues, the Good serves as an overarching ordering principle for the construction of place and the proper limit of spaces, whether they be here in the world, deep in the underworld, or in the nonspatial ideal realm of the Forms. The Good, since it escapes the limits of space and time, equips Plato with a powerful mythopoe...
Approaches to Homer
Modern Homeric scholarship is distinguished by a dazzling diversity of approaches. That diversity is brilliantly displayed in this volume, in which nine well-known classicists approach the Homeric poems from the various perspectives of archaeology, economic history, philosophy, literary criticism, linguistics, and Byzantine history. Several essays are primarily concerned with what the Homeric poems teach us about the past. Richard Hope Simpson, for example, reviews the controversy sparked by his and John F. Lazenby's 1970 argument that the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad accurately reflects the geography of Mycenean Greece. Using archaeology as just one of his starting points, Gregory Nagy r...
The Wrath of Athena
A complex study that argues that Athena's wrath is essential to both the structure and the theme of the Odyssey shedding light on the central theme of the relations between gods and men and revealing subtleties of narrative and ambiguities of character.
Homer and the Artists
This is a book about Homer, myth and art. The Iliad and Odyssey so dominate our view of ancient Greece that our natural reaction on viewing certain works of early Greek art is to identify them as 'scenes from Homer'. However, Anthony Snodgrass argues that, so far from 'illustrating' the Homeric poems, these works very rarely show signs of acquaintance with the Iliad or Odyssey, seldom even choosing their subject-matter from them. When the subjects do overlap, the artists occasionally give positive signs of preferring a non-Homeric version of the episode. He then attempts to explain why this should be so: despite Homer's unique standing in antiquity, the artists inhabited an independent world, where their own inspirations and concerns dominated their production. It is only the traditional dominance of the literary study of antiquity which has hidden this from us.
Excursions in Epichoric History
In a test case for the study of epichoric Greek history (that not centered on Athens and Sparta), Thomas Figueira deploys a range of disciplinary methodologies to explore the political history of the ancient island city-state of Aigina, down to the Roman conquest of Greece. Excursions in Epichoric History combines previously published articles, revised and updated, and new essays to provide a set of alternative perspectives on the course of Greek foreign policy and institutional history.
Talking Trojan
In this penetrating new look at the use of language in the Iliad, Hilary Mackie examines the portrayal of the opposing forces in terms not only of nationality but of linguistics. The way the Greeks and the Trojans speak, Mackie argues, reflects their disparate cultural structures and their relative positions in the Trojan War. While Achaean speech is aggressive and public, intended to preserve social order, Trojan language is more reflective, private, and introspective. Mackie identifies the differences between Greek and Trojan language by analyzing poetic formulas, usually thought to indicate a similarity of language among Homeric characters, and conversations, which are seen here to be of equal importance to the numerous speeches throughout the Iliad. Mackie concludes with analyses of the two great heroes of the Iliad, Hektor and Achilles, and the extent to which they represent their own cultures in their use of language.
The Pastoral Narcissus
In The Pastoral Narcissus, the only book-length treatment of the First Idyll of Theocritus, Clayton Zimmerman returns to a more philological consideration of the major problems in the text, keeping in sight the best recent scholarship. Zimmerman demonstrates that Theocritus is clearly evoking the Narcissus myth, and in doing so provides readers with the first complete study of that myth since 1860. He then uses his reading of Daphnis to inform other bucolic poems in the corpus, and to expose the connections between Daphnis and a Theocritean ideal of poetic composition.
