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The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus
Latin literature exploded onto the scene from relatively humble beginnings in the third century BCE. In an astonishingly short time the Romans adopted and adapted nearly all the genres of literature known to them and not only were they well aware of their large-scale appropriation but even, curiously, boasted of it. This readable new history of Latin literature covers the full span of the Roman republic, concluding with the age of Augustus, whose great poets engaged with the enormous political and cultural changes of their time and laid the foundations for the literature of the Imperial period. All the major writers are covered but attention is also paid to more fragmentary but still key authors such as Ennius, Cato, Lucilius, and Varro. Readers are given the essential historical, cultural, and literary background as well as close readings of specific passages, which reveal the charm and complexity which animate Latin literature.
Encompassing the period from the earliest archaic epics down through classical Athenian drama, this is the first concerted, step-by-step examination of the development of allusive poetics in the early Greek world. Recent decades have seen a marked rise in intertextual approaches to early Greek literature; as scholars increasingly agree on the need to read these texts in a comparative way, this only makes all the more urgent the question of how best to do so. This volume brings together divergent scholarly voices to explore the state of the field and to point the way forward. All twelve chapters address themselves to a core set of fundamental questions: how do texts generate meaning by referring to other texts and how do the poetics of allusivity change over time and differ across genres? The result is a holistic study of a key dimension of literary experience.
Plato's Republic is a central text in the Western philosophical tradition and also a specimen of its author's exceptional literary and dramatic skill. The first book introduces, and conspicuously fails to answer, the question: What is justice? It also introduces the sophist Thrasymachus, who is quite certain that he knows what justice is, namely that it is nothing other than what the dominant power in the state considers to be in its own interest. The contentious confrontation between Thrasymachus and Socrates sets the stage for Plato's controversial construction of an ideal state in which the true nature of justice will be revealed. The Commentary draws attention to the way Plato anticipates developments in later books, thus serving as an introduction to Republic as a whole. Particular attention is paid to Plato's language and style, so that students of Greek literature as well as philosophy are well served.
Lucian is one of the most prolific and wide-ranging writers from antiquity and one of the most influential and controversial. His work is deeply embedded in the cultural and religious politics of the Greek world in the Roman Empire, but also played an important role in later periods, particularly during the Renaissance, and was considered a crucial example of the inherited wisdom of classical antiquity. Lucian's prose is limpid and elegant as well as sharply funny and full of great stories, dramatic dialogues, and brilliant satire. This Companion, written by world-leading scholars, introduces the major themes of his corpus and provides more detailed studies of individual works. Readers will be able to appreciate his major contributions to the history of satire, comic dialogues, religion, art, and erotics as well as being given a snapshot of the most important episodes in his work's reception in the West.
Greek attitudes to settlement and territory were often articulated through myths and cults. This book emphasizes less the poetic, timeless qualities of the myths than their historical function in the archaic and Classical periods, covering the spectrum from explicit charter myths legitimating conquest, displacement, and settlement to the 'precedent-setting' and even aetiological myths, rendering new landscapes 'Greek'. This spectrum is broadest in the world of Spartan colonization – the Spartan Mediterranean – where the greater challenges to territorial possession and Sparta's acute self-awareness of its relative national youthfulness elicited explicit responses in the form of charter myths. The concept of a Spartan Mediterranean, in contrast to the image of a land-locked Sparta, is a major contribution of this book. This revised edition contains a substantial new Introduction which engages with critical and scholarly developments on Sparta since the original publication.
How are poetry and the figure of the poet represented, discussed, contested within the poetry of ancient Greece? From what position does a poet speak? With what authority? With what debts to the past? With what involvement in the present? Through a series of interrelated essays on Homer, lyric poetry, Aristophanes, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes, this landmark volume discusses key aspects of the history of poetics: tale-telling and the representation of man as the user of language; memorial and praise; parody, comedy and carnival; irony, masks and desire; the legacy of the past and the idea of influence. Detailed readings of major works of Greek literature and liberal use of critical writings from outside Classics help to align modern and ancient poetics in enlightening ways. This revised edition contains a substantial new Introduction which engages with critical and scholarly developments in Greek literature since the original publication.
Philo's Quod deterius is a discussion of the Cain and Abel episode in the Bible. Philo follows the Greek translation of the Septuagint, not the Hebrew text, although he may have known traditions that relied on the Hebrew. His treatment of the text is unique, combining elements of traditional Greek commentary on literary texts, moralizing diatribe in highly wrought rhetorical language, midrashic-like exegesis involving the extensive use of other biblical passages, and philosophical theory. The present commentary illuminates these various components of Philo's discussion, especially by means of parallel texts, pagan, Jewish, and Christian, from across antiquity. Using these sources and paying attention to ancient exegetical thinking, Adam Kamesar attempts to trace the overall direction and coherence of what Philo is saying. This kind of treatment of Philo's allegorical treatises has rarely been undertaken before on this scale. The volume also includes a new English translation of the work.