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832 results in Classical studies (general)

Page 1 of 42

Impaired Consciousness in Ancient Medical Texts

Myth, Ritual, and Society in Mycenaean Anatolia
  • Identifying Asian Influences
  • Roger D. Woodard
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Despite the Mycenaean Linear B script having been deciphered some seventy years ago, much has remained uncertain regarding the ritual ideology of Mycenaean society that the Linear B documents reveal. Roger Woodard here explores this problem by investigating a new range of sources from the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, together with processes of the transfer of knowledge between Anatolia and European Hellas. Bringing together evidence from Mycenaean culture with mythic and cult traditions of Iron Age Greek culture and Indo-Iranian sources, he reveals the close parallels between Mycenaean and Vedic ritual structures and practices, these being particular expressions of Mycenaean Asianism. He also demonstrates how features inspired from Indo-Iranian sources are present in Aeolian Greek epic traditions that emerged during the Iron Age, notably the Argonautic search for the Golden fleece.

Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion
  • Tatiana Bur
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • This book investigates the ways that technological, and especially mechanical, strategies were integrated into ancient Greek religion. By analysing a range of evidence, from the tragic use of the deus ex machina to Hellenistic epigrams to ancient mechanical literature, it expands the existing vocabulary of visual modes of ancient epiphany. Moreover, it contributes to the cultural history of the unique category of ancient 'enchantment' technologies by challenging the academic orthodoxy regarding the incompatibility of religion and technology. The evidence for this previously unidentified phenomenon is presented in full, thereby enabling the reader to perceive the shifting matrices of agency between technical objects, mechanical knowledge, gods, and mortals from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE.

Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile
  • Rebecca Menmuir
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • The Augustan poet Ovid exerted significant influence over the Middle Ages, and his exile captured the later medieval imagination. Medieval Responses to Ovid's Exile examines a variety of creative scholastic and literary responses to Ovid's exile across medieval culture. It ranges across the medieval schoolroom, where new forms shape Ovidian exile anew, literary pilgrimages, medieval fantasies of dismemberment and visits to Ovid's tomb. These responses capture Ovid's metamorphosis into a poet for the Christian age, while elsewhere medieval poets such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer demonstrate how to inhabit an Ovidian exilic voice. Medieval audiences fundamentally understood the foundations laid by the exilic Ovid, and so from antiquity and from exile Ovid shaped his own reception. The extent, enthusiasm and engagement of medieval responses to Ovid's exile are to such a degree that they must be considered when we read Ovid's exilic works, or indeed any of his poetry.

Proclus on Aristotle on Plato
  • A Case Study on Motion
  • Rareș Ilie Marinescu
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • This is a study of Proclus' engagement with Aristotle's theory of motion, with a specific focus on Aristotle's criticism of Plato. It refutes the often-held view that Proclus – in line with other Neoplatonists – adheres to the idea of an essential harmony between Plato and Aristotle. Proclus' views on motion, a central concept in his thought, are illuminated by examining his Aristotelian background. The results enhance our view of the reception and authority of Aristotle in late antiquity, a crucial period for the transmission of Aristotelian thought which immensely shaped the later reading of his work. The book also counteracts the commonly held view that late antique philosophers straightforwardly accepted Aristotle as an authority in certain areas such as logic or natural philosophy.

Translating Virgil
  • A Cultural History of the Western Tradition from the Eleventh Century to the Present
  • Susanna Morton Braund
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Virgil remains one of the most important poets in the history of literature. This emerges in the rich translation history of his poems. Hardly a European language exists into which at least one of his poems has not been translated, from Basque to Ukrainian and Dutch to Turkish. Susanna Braund's book is the first synthesis and analysis of this history. It asks when, where, why, by whom, for whom and how Virgil's poems were translated into a range of languages. Chronologically it spans the eleventh- and twelfth-century adaptations of the Aeneid down to present-day translation activity, in which women are better represented than in earlier eras. The book makes a major contribution to western intellectual history. It challenges classicists and other literary scholars to reassess the features of Virgil's poems to which the translators respond and offers a treasure-trove of insights to translation theorists and classicists alike.

Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture
  • Francesca Modini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    15 May 2025
  • This book is the first study of the persistence and significance of ancient lyric in imperial Greek culture. Redefining lyric reception as a phenomenon ranging from textual engagement with ancient poems to the appropriation of song traditions, Francesca Modini reconsiders the view of imperial culture (paideia) as dominated by Homer and fifth-century Attic literature. She argues that textual knowledge of lyric allowed imperial writers to show a more sophisticated level of paideia, and her analysis further reveals how lyric traditions mobilised distinctive discourses of self-fashioning, local identity, community-making and power crucial for Greeks under Rome. This is most evident in the works of Aelius Aristides, who reconfigured ancient lyric to shape his rhetorical persona and enhance his speeches to imperial communities. Exploring Aristides' lyric poetics also changes how we interpret his reconstruction of the classical tradition and his involvement in the complex politics of the Empire.

Roman Identity and Lived Religion
  • Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity
  • Stefanie Lenk
  • Published online:
    08 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. This book demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy.

Cretan Hieroglyphic
  • Edited by Matilde Civitillo, Silvia Ferrara, Torsten Meissner
  • Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Nearly 4000 years ago a hieroglyphic script was used on Crete which predates Linear A and Linear B, indeed any other writing in Europe, but remains undeciphered since its discovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the first comprehensive account of this script, which is analysed by the leading experts through an array of lenses, including archaeology, philology, palaeography, cognitive studies and decipherment theory, in order to showcase its importance in the history of writing. The book takes a broad approach to writing, understanding it not solely or even mainly as a visual tool to convey language, but primarily as a social and cultural phenomenon rooted in agency, materiality, and semiotics. The volume will provide an invaluable tool for scholars and will facilitate further research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Freed Persons in the Roman World
  • Status, Diversity, and Representation
  • Edited by Sinclair W. Bell, Dorian Borbonus, Rose MacLean
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • How were freed people represented in the Roman world? This volume presents new research about the integration of freed persons into Roman society. It addresses the challenge of studying Roman freed persons on the basis of highly fragmentary sources whose contents have been fundamentally shaped by the forces of domination. Even though freed persons were defined through a common legal status and shared the experience of enslavement and manumission, many different interactions could derive from these commonalities in different periods and localities across the empire. Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, this book provides cases studies that test the various ways in which juridical categories and normative discourses shaped the social and cultural landscape in which freed people lived. By approaching the literary and epigraphic representations of freed persons in new ways, it nuances the impact of power asymmetries and social strategies on the cultural practices and lived experiences of freed persons.

The Cambridge Companion to Alexander the Great
  • Edited by Daniel Ogden
  • Published online:
    04 January 2024
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • Has any ancient figure captivated the imagination of people over the centuries so much as Alexander the Great? In less than a decade he created an empire stretching across much of the Near East as far as India, which led to Greek culture becoming dominant in much of this region for a millennium. Here, an international team of experts clearly explains the life and career of one of the most significant figures in world history. They introduce key themes of his campaign as well as describing aspects of his court and government and exploring the very different natures of his engagements with the various peoples he encountered and their responses to him. The reader is also introduced to the key sources, including the more important fragmentary historians, especially Ptolemy, Aristobulus and Clitarchus, with their different perspectives. The book closes by considering how Alexander's image was manipulated in antiquity itself.

Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres
  • Towards New Ways of Looking and Looking Back
  • Marchella Ward
  • Published online:
    30 November 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these 'meanings' attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing – and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.

Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity
  • The Shock of the Old
  • Edited by Simon Goldhill, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft
  • Published online:
    28 September 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • The nineteenth century was a period in which ideas of history and time were challenged as never before. This is the first book to explore how the study of classical antiquity and the study of the Bible together formed an image of the past which became central to Victorian self-understanding. These specially commissioned, multi-disciplinary essays brilliantly reveal the richness of Victorian thinking about the past and how important these models of antiquity were in the expression of modernity. In an age of progress, cultural anxiety and cultural hope was fuelled by the shock of the old – new discoveries about the deep past, and new ways of thinking about humanity's place in history. The volume provides a rich and readable feast which will be fundamental to all those seeking a greater understanding of the Victorians, as well as of the reception of classics and the Bible.

Connecting Communities in Archaic Greece
  • Exploring Economic and Political Networks through Data Modelling
  • Michael Loy
  • Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • This is a new history of Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BC written for the twenty-first century. It brings together archaeological data from over 100 years of 'Big Dig' excavation in Greece, employing experimental data analysis techniques from the digital humanities to identify new patterns about Archaic Greece. By modelling trade routes, political alliances, and the formation of personal- and state-networks, the book sheds new light on how exactly the early communities of the Aegean basin were plugged into one another. Returning to the long-debated question of 'what is a polis?', this study also challenges Classical Archaeology more generally: that the discipline has at its fingertips significant datasets that can contribute to substantive historical debate -and that what can be done for the next generation of scholarship is to re-engage with old material in a new way.

Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power
  • Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire
  • Lea Niccolai
  • Published online:
    07 July 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • This book rethinks the Christianisation of the late Roman empire as a crisis of knowledge, pointing to competitive cultural re-assessment as a major driving force in the making of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian state. Emperor Julian's writings are re-assessed as key to accessing the rise and consolidation of a Christian politics of interpretation that relied on exegesis as a self-legitimising device to secure control over Roman history via claims to Christianity's control of paideia. This reconstruction infuses Julian's reaction with contextual significance. His literary and political project emerges as a response to contemporary reconfigurations of Christian hermeneutics as controlling the meaning of Rome's culture and history. At the same time, understanding Julian as a participant in a larger debate re-qualifies all fourth-century political and episcopal discourse as a long knock-on effect reacting to the imperial mobilisation of Christian debates over the link between power and culture.

Greek Declamation and the Roman Empire
  • William Guast
  • Published online:
    22 June 2023
    Print publication:
    06 July 2023
  • A Greek declamation was an 'imaginary speech': a fictitious speech composed for a rhetorical scenario set in Classical Greece. Although such speeches began as rhetorical exercises, under the high Roman empire they developed into a full-blown prestigious genre in their own right. This first monograph on Greek declamation for nearly forty years re-evaluates a genre that was central to Greek imperial literature and to ancient and modern notions of the 'Second Sophistic'. Rejecting traditional conceptions of the genre as 'nostalgic', this book considers the significance of Greek declamation's re-enactment of classical history for its own times, and integrates the genre into the wider history of the period. It shows through extended readings how the genre came to constitute a powerful and subtle instrument of identity formation and social interaction, and a site for free thinking on issues of major contemporary importance such as imperialism and inter-polis relations.

Orthographic Traditions and the Sub-elite in the Roman Empire
  • Nicholas Zair
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • This book makes use of digital corpora to give in-depth details of the history and development of the spelling of Latin. It focusses on sub-elite texts in the Roman empire, and reveals that sophisticated education in this area was not restricted to those at the top of society. Nicholas Zair studies the history of particular orthographic features and traces their usage in a range of texts which give insight into everyday writers of Latin: including scribes and soldiers at Vindolanda, slaves at Pompeii, members of the Praetorian Guard, and writers of curse tablets. In doing so, he problematises the use of 'old-fashioned' spelling in dating inscriptions, provides important new information on sound-change in Latin, and shows how much can be gained from a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of ancient texts.

Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry
  • Thomas J. Nelson
  • Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023
  • Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions – placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.

Augustine's Theology of the Resurrection
  • Augustine M. Reisenauer
  • Published online:
    21 April 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • In this volume, Augustine M. Reisenauer, O.P. provides a comprehensive study of Augustine's theology of the resurrection, the human return from death to life. Contextualizing Augustine within the early Church and the intellectual and religious cultures of the late Roman Empire,he interrogates the development of Augustine's thoughts on the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ, the spiritual resurrection of the soul in time, and the fleshly resurrection of the body at the end of time.  Augustine offers profound insights into issues of personal and communal identity, human continuity and transformation, historical and eschatological events, and the God of the resurrection. He also elaborates a biblical paradigm that acknowledges how the resurrected Christ offers an intrinsic participation in his paschal mystery to the souls and bodies of the rest of humanity. Proposing fresh ideas regarding a central topic in Christian theology, Reisenauer's, study also reveals Augustine's defenses of the resurrection against its pagan, philosophical and heretical opponents.

Traditional and Cosmic Gods in Later Plato and the Early Academy
  • Vilius Bartninkas
  • Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • This book sheds new light on Plato's cosmology in relation to Greek religion by examining the contested distinction between the traditional and cosmic gods. A close reading of the later dialogues shows that the two families of gods are routinely deployed to organise and structure Plato's accounts of the origins of the universe and of humanity and its social institutions, and to illuminate the moral and political ideals of philosophical utopias. Vilius Bartninkas argues that the presence of the two kinds of gods creates a dynamic, yet productive, tension in Plato's thinking which is unmistakable and which is not resolved until the works of his students. Thus the book closes by exploring how the cosmological and religious ideas of Plato's later dialogues resurfaced in the Early Academy and how the debates initiated there ultimately led to the collapse of this theological distinction.

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