Ancient & Classical

The four selected speeches were composed by a professional speechwriter, Isaeus, for litigants contesting inheritance claims in the Athenian courts of the fourth century BC. They offer some intriguing glimpses into the domestic life of (mainly wealthy)...

First published in 1925, Primitive Culture in Greece dispassionately reviews the claim that the Greeks were 'heathen' and asks how much of the savage ancestry was left in the classical Greek. In doing so it traces a historical continuity from the...

Studies the first half of Sidonius' fifth book of letters from a philological, literary and historical perspective Provides the first commentary on Book 5 of Apollinaris' Letters Includes a newly edited Latin text and a new English translation ...

The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton explains the astonishing centrality of the eucharist to poets with a variety of denominational affiliations, writing on a range of subjects, across an extended period in literary...

This work examines the more than one hundred analogues of Samson Agonistes, about half of them written earlier than Milton's drama. The author has gone back in every instance to primary sources, and examined all treatments of Milton's theme, in all...

43 BCE, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. While the Roman republic had seen many conflicts, it was this civil war, headed by the vengeful triumvirate of Mark Anthony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian, that irrevocably transformed Rome with...

This book offers the first critical edition with an English translation and commentary on some of the letters attributed to Alexander and transmitted by mainly Plutarch and Arrian. The vast majority of the texts examined here are constituted by...

"The reasons for the conspicuous popularity of Ovid-his life as well as his works-at the turn of the new millennium bear investigation.... This book speaks of the new bodies assumed in the twentieth century by the poems and tales to which Ovid gave their...

Volume 4 of Indiana's six-volume edition of Dante's Divine Comedy consists of Mark Musa's extensive commentary on the Purgatory. Enlightening for the general reader as well as the student of Italian or comparative literature. Volume 3 is the companion...

The textual tradition of the Latin dramatist Publius Terentius Afer (second century BC) is unusually rich and complex. Over six hundred manuscripts containing some or all of Terence's six comedies have survived, but only one codex and three small...

Critical editions of most classical authors are based on readings transmitted by medieval scholars that can be examined and collated. Modern editions of Petronius, on the other hand, are principally based on printed editions, most of them published in...

Ovid's Fasti is a journey through ancient Rome, using the calendar as a guide. The reader of this poem tours the monuments of the Augustan-era city, witnesses both urban and rustic seasonal festivals, and commemorates the epic events of long-past history...

The Butterfly Lovers Story, sometimes called the Chinese Romeo and Juliet, has been enduringly popular in China and Korea. In Transforming Gender and Emotion, Sookja Cho demonstrates why the Butterfly Lovers Story is more than just a popular love story...

The central character of Vergil's "Aeneid" seems to elude readers. To some, he is unlikable; to others, he seems unreal, a figure on which to hang a plot. "Aeneas" discovers a tragic figure whose defining virtue depends on a past that has been stripped...

The Roman poet and satirist Persius (34-62 CE) was unique among his peers for lampooning literary and social conventions from a distinctly Stoic point of view. A curious amalgam of mocking wit and philosophy, his Satires are rife with violent metaphors...

This is not a commentary on Juvenal Satire 10 but a critical appreciation of the poem which examines it on its own and in context and tries to make it come alive as a piece of literature, offering one man's close reading of Satire 10 as poetry, and...

The elegiac poet Propertius responds in his verse to the complex changes that Rome underwent in his lifetime, taking on numerous topics of poetry, poetic and sexual rivalry, visual art, violence, imperialism, colonialism, civil war, the radical new...

Timely lessons for the digital age about the relation between authors and the materials with which they write, how creativity works, and why literature matters. Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical...

Finalist for the 2020 PROSE Awards, Classics section Homer's Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odyssey...

An anthology of translated analogues, in whole or in part, on the theme of paradise lost. The collection is divided into two parts. Part one is the analogues and part two is a descriptive catalogue of all the analogues the author consulted. The book also...

Ephippus is an outstanding playwright of Greek Middle Comedy. He won a single Lenaean victory ca. 378-376 BC and continued being productive until the late 340s. His twenty-eight surviving fragments reveal a wide thematic range: myth burlesque (with a...

The laments of captive women found in extant Athenian tragedy constitute a fundamentally subversive aspect of Greek drama. In performances supported by and intended for the male citizens of Athens, the songs of the captive women at the Dionysia gave a...

Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century...

The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape exercised great influence over the Roman cultural imagination. A hub of activity outside the city of Rome, the Bay of Naples was a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary...

This novel, ground-breaking study aims to define Hesiod's place in early Greek intellectual history by exploring his conception of language and the ways in which it represents reality. Divided into three parts, it addresses a network of issues related to...

A reader of the epyllion by Dracontius, the elegy by Maximianus, and the epigram by Luxorius should not expect that these works -- and these new embodiments of the 'old' genres -- will be wholly identical with their 'archetypes'. Were it so, it would...

It is a commonly held view among historians of Greek literature that with the advent of Euripides the tragic structure, even the tragic outlook of Greek drama suffered a breakdown from which it never recovered. While there is much truth in this opinion,...

Exploring Greek Myth offers an extensive discussion of variant forms of myths and lesser-known stories, including important local myths and local versions of PanHellenic myths. Clark also discusses approaches to understanding myths, allowing students to...

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary...

English Translation and Classical Reception is the first genuine cross-disciplinary study bringing English literary history to bear on questions about the reception of classical literary texts, and vice versa. The text draws on the author's exhaustive...

Gregory Nagy here provides a far-reaching assessment of the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society. Nagy illuminates in particular the forces of interaction and change that transformed the Indo-European linguistic and cultural...

Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in...

Performing Epic or Telling Tales takes the new millennium as a starting point for an exploration of the turn to narrative in twenty-first-century theatre, which is often also a turn to Graeco-Roman epic. However, the dominant focus of the volume is less...

This book presents the proceedings of the fifth and final meeting of the International Dante Seminar. It addresses four major topics of present-day Dante studies: Dante as a lyric poet; Dante as an ethical poet; Dante and the Eclogues; and Dante in...

Imperial Panegyric from Diocletian to Honorius examines one of the most important literatures of the late Roman period - speeches of praise addressed to the reigning emperor - and the panegyrical culture of the late Roman world more generally. Unlike ...

Homeric Conversation is the first full-length study of conversation in the Homeric poems. Deborah Beck argues that conversation should be considered a traditional Homeric type scene, alongside recognized types such as arrival, sacrifice, battle, and...

In Greek thought, barbaroi are utterers of unintelligible or inarticulate sounds. What importance does the text of Herodotus's Histories attribute to language as a criterion of ethnic identity? The answer to this question illuminates the empirical...

The role of athletics in ancient Greece extended well beyond the realms of kinesiology, competition, and entertainment. In teaching and philosophy, athletic practices overlapped with rhetorical ones and formed a shared mode of knowledge production...

Medieval romances with their magic fountains, brave knights, and beautiful maidens have come to stand for the Middle Ages more generally. This close connection between the medieval and the romance has had consequences for popular conceptions of the...

The "Cort d'Amor" is a late 12th-century allegorical romance in Occitan which fuses a variety of lyric and narrative genres together and which predates the "Roman de la Rose" by some 50 years. In this edition, Matthew Bardell highlights the work's...