Browse

This book is concerned with the relationship between a modern philosophical idea and an ancient historical moment. It explores how the notion of pluralism, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, may be seen to feature in the Classical Greek world and, more specifically, in the thought of three of its most prominent figures: Protagoras, Herodotus, and Sophocles. The book falls into three parts, each of which considers one of these authors in detail and investigates how the core aspects of pluralism — diversity, conflict, and incommensurability — manifest themselves in a particular literary arena. Part One illustrates, through an analysis of two of his fragments and the portrait of him from Plato's Protagoras, that the sophist Protagoras held that perspectives on truth and value could be plural, while retaining a degree of objectivity that distinguishes his position from relativism. Part Two turns attention towards the ways in which historical writing can be understood in pluralist terms. It portrays Thucydides as an exemplar of a monistic historical style in deliberate contrast to Herodotus. It then examines how ideas of diversity and conflict figure in Herodotus' Histories in a variety of methodological and moral contexts. Part Three focuses on conflict in Sophocles. It argues that pluralist messages emerge from four of his tragedies, in which a certain kind of hero and a certain kind of ethical disagreement are present. These features of Ajax, Antigone, Electra, and Philoctetes are related to the Homeric moral patterns from which their meaning in large part derives. The overall aim of the book is to identify a pluralist temper of thought in the age of Sophocles and, in doing so, to offer an enriched understanding of this crucial intellectual period.

Proclus (AD 412–85) was one of the last official ‘successors’ of Plato at the head of the Academy in Athens at the end of antiquity, before the school was finally closed down in 529. As a prolific author of systematic works on a wide range of topics and one of the most influential commentators on Plato of all times, the legacy of Proclus in the cultural history of the west can hardly be overestimated. This book introduces the reader to Proclus’ life and works, his place in the Platonic tradition of antiquity, and the influence his work exerted in later ages. Various chapters are devoted to Proclus’ metaphysical system, including his doctrines about the first principle of all reality, the One, and about the Forms and the soul. The broad range of Proclus’ thought is further illustrated by highlighting his contribution to philosophy of nature, scientific theory, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of language. Finally, also his most original doctrines on evil and providence, his Neoplatonic virtue ethics, his complex views on theology and religious practice, and his metaphysical aesthetics receive separate treatments.

Countering an unflagging modernist infatuation with the new, Antiquities beyond Humanism maps out the ground for a richer and more sustained encounter with Greco-Roman antiquity, excavating an ante-humanism that nonetheless does not seek any kind of return to a pre-humanist arcadia. The volume arises from a commitment to actively engage the ancient philosophical tradition as a powerful field through which to tackle some of the most urgent questions addressed by the new materialisms and forms of post- and non-humanism. The papers gathered here take up ancient Greek philosophical and literary texts as at once live with possibilities for the present and uncannily distant. Collectively, they approach antiquity as neither origin nor telos but as asynchronous or untimely in Nietzsche’s sense. By bringing together a range of international scholars actively working at the intersections of ancient philosophy, literature, continental philosophy, feminist theory, and political theory, the volume opens up new vectors for thinking beyond the human that are informed by and responsive to the contemporary world while proposing a complex set of relationships to the longue durée of Western history, to deep time, and to the profound strangeness and unsettling familiarity of the Greco-Roman world. In this way, the volume resists and displaces the seductions of presentism, scientism, and technological determinism that often limit the horizons of new materialist thinking.

This book is a study of a Hellenistic didactic poem, the Phaenomena, written by Aratus in c.276 BC, and of its reception, primarily in the Roman period up to the fourth century AD. Aratus’ poem about the stars and weather-signs immediately acquired a popularity baffling to the modern reader; it was translated into Latin many times between the first century BC and the Renaissance, and carried lasting influence outside its immediate genre. This book answers the question of Aratus’ popularity by looking at the poem in the light of Western cosmology. It argues that the Phaenomena is the ideal vehicle for the integration of astronomical ‘data’ into abstract cosmology, a defining feature of the Western tradition. This book embeds Aratus’ text into a close network of textual interactions, beginning with the text itself and ending in the sixteenth century, with Copernicus. All conversations between the text and its successors experiment in some way with the balance between cosmology and information. The text was not an inert objet d’art, but a dynamic entity which took on colours often conflictual in the ongoing debate about the place and role of the stars in the world. In this debate Aratus plays a leading, but by no means lonely, role. Many texts which have not been considered as part of the repertoire of Aratean studies are also present, with Aratus himself as the harmonizing force between texts and concepts often disparate, even at odds.

This book studies Aristotle’s poetic activity in light of an ode he composed commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, his father in law and patron in the 340’s BCE. This remarkable text is said to have later embroiled the philosopher in charges of impiety and so is studied both from a literary perspective and as a window onto the poetic practices of the later fourth century. Aristotle’s literary antecedents are studied with an unprecedented fullness that considers the entire range of the literary tradition, including poems by Sappho, Pindar, and Sophocles, and prose texts as well. Particular attention is paid to understanding the ancient report that political opponents of Aristotle charged him with impiety on the grounds that his song was actually a hymn to Hermias that implied the latter had become a god. Aristotle’s song affords a case study in how Greek poetic texts functioned as performance pieces and how they were recorded, circulated, and preserved. The book argues that Greek lyric poems profit from being read as scripts for performances that both shaped and were shaped by the social occasions in which they were performed. Studying the lyric in light of the history of its interpretation leads to a more fine-tuned appreciation for its literary dynamics and provides a window onto the literary culture of the late classical age.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life studies Aristotle’s understanding of the political character of human intimacy via an examination of the zoological frame informing his political theory. It argues that the concept of shared life, i.e. the forms of intimacy that arise from the possession of logos and the capacity for choice, is central to human political partnership, and serves to locate that life within the broader context of living beings as such, where it emerges as an intensification of animal sociality. As such it challenges a long-standing approach to the role of the animal in Aristotle’s thought, and to the recent reception of Aristotle’s thinking about the political valence of life and living beings.

This volume consists of a set of studies focused on various aspects of a relatively neglected subject: a lost work of Aristotle entitled Homeric Problems. Most of the evidence for this lost work consists mainly of ‘fragments’ surviving in the Homeric scholia (comments in the margins of the medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics, mostly coming from lost commentaries on these epics). But other sources have been neglected. The book has three parts. The first deals with preliminary issues: the relationship of this lost work to the Homeric scholarship that came before it, and to Aristotle’s comments on the Homeric epics in his extant Poetics; the evidence concerning the possible titles of this work; a neglected early edition of these fragments. In the second part, our knowledge of the Homeric Problems is expanded through an examination in context of quotations from (or allusions to) Homer in Aristotle’s extant works, and specifically in the History of Animals, the Rhetoric, and Poetics 21 (to each of which a chapter is devoted). Part III consists of four studies on select (and in most cases neglected) fragments. The volume intends to show (inter alia) that Aristotle in the Homeric Problems aimed to defend Homer against his critics, but not slavishly and without employing allegorical interpretation.

This book presents a reassessment of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi, a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world. While scholars have embraced the Logoi as a rich source for Imperial-era religion, politics and elite culture, the style of the text has presented a persistent stumbling block to literary analysis. Setting this dream-memoir of illness and divine healing in the context of Aristides’ professional concerns as an orator, this book investigates the text’s rhetorical aims and literary aspirations. The book begins from the proposition that understanding the Hieroi Logoi requires grappling with Aristides’ deliberate conjunction of rhetoric and the sacred, and five chapters offer new perspectives on unresolved questions, including the problem of the text’s artistic unity, the unique texture of Aristides’ dream descriptions, the professional claims of his curative performances, and the place of the Hieroi Logoi amid his literary concerns. Reading the Logoi in the context of contemporary oratorical practices, in dialogue with contemporary technical writings on the interpretation of dreams, and in tandem with Aristides’ own polemical orations and prose hymns makes it possible to discern his professional agenda in this unusual, experimental self-portrait. In this multi-layered and open text, the book argues, Aristides works at the limits of rhetorical convention to fashion an authorial voice that is transparent to the divine. In the HL, Aristides claims a place in the world of the Second Sophistic on his own terms, offering a vision of his professional inspiration in a style that pushes the limits of literary convention.

What significance does the voice or projected persona in which a text is written have for our understanding of the meaning of that text? This volume explores the persona of the author in antiquity, from Homer to late antiquity, taking into account both Latin and Greek authors from a range of disciplines. It contains chapters on pseudepigraphy and fictional letters, as well as the use of texts as authoritative in philosophical schools, and the ancient ascription of authorship to works of art. The thirteen essays are divided into two main sections, the first of which focusses on the diverse forms of writing adopted by various ancient authors, and the different ways these forms were used to present and project an authorial voice. The second part of the volume considers questions regarding authority and ascription in relation to the authorial voice. In particular, the volume looks at how later readers—and authors of later texts—may understand the authority of a text's author or supposed author.

This book has two aims. The first is to determine how the ancient Greeks conceived of beauty—a matter that is not uncontroversial, since some scholars have denied that there existed an autonomous concept of beauty in classical Greece. This question is addressed by an investigation of Greek terminology, singling out in particular, and for the first time, the significance of the noun kállos, as opposed to the adjective kalós. On this basis, the book addresses the role of beauty in sexual attraction, class, art, Platonic idealism, and other areas, and offers a comparison between Greek, Hebrew, and Latin terms for beauty. The book’s second aim is to identify problems that have beset modern aesthetics, such as whether a work of art can be beautiful if its subject matter is not, and to indicate why these difficulties did not pose a problem for the ancient idea of beauty. In the process, the book shows how beauty lost its preeminent place as the central concept in modern aesthetics, and how the ancient conception may contribute to restoring beauty, if not to its former preeminence, at least to a auxiliary role in our understanding of desire and of art.

In 508/7 B.C.E., after years of stasis and uncertainty, the city of Athens was rocked by a momentous occurrence: the passage of a series of reforms that resulted in the creation of what has come to be known as the world’s first democracy. Exactly how the Athenians did this is still a fundamental question 2,500 years later. This book provides a novel answer to these questions by considering the built environment broadly and monumental architecture specifically. The reforms transformed the very nature of what it meant to be Athenian and their far-reaching effects would come to leave their mark on nearly every aspect of society, including the structures at which they prayed and in which they debated legislation. This book investigates the built environment of ancient Athens precisely during this time, the Late Archaic period (ca. 514/13–480/79 B.C.E.). It was in these decades, filled with transition and disorder, that the Athenians transformed their political system from a tyranny to a democracy. Amidst concurrent sociopolitical changes, they altered the physical landscape and undertook the monumental articulation of the city and countryside. Interpreting the nature of the fledgling democracy from a material standpoint, this book approaches the questions and problems of the early political system through the lens of buildings. It draws attention to a pivotal period in Athenian political history through the built environment, thereby exposing the richness of the material record and illustrating how it participated in the creation of a new demotic Athenian identity.

In ancient Greece, a common method of search for divine wisdom was to descend into caves or underground chambers. Entering caves persistently appears as a major requirement for prophecy-giving, both in established cults and in the activities of individual seers. Underground sojourns recur in the activities of several early Greek sages and philosophers. Mystery initiations comprise rites located in caves or dark chambers. The sages, seers, and initiates shared a quest for hidden truth, which they attained as revelation or vision. Exploring the reasons for the predilection for caves in the search for ultimate truth, this book juxtaposes ancient testimonies with the results of modern neuroscience. This approach, new in Classical Studies, enables an examination of the consciousness of people who were engaged in the vision quest. It is argued that cave environment creates conditions which force the human mind to deviate from its normal waking state and to enter altered states of consciousness, in many cases leading to the sensation of ineffable revelation of ultimate reality. Altered states of consciousness often occur in people exposed to sensory deprivation. As a result, various mediators between gods and mortals practice prolonged isolation in caves and other closed spaces in their quest of ecstatic illumination. The book demonstrates that multiple cave experiences of the Greeks are culturally patterned responses to the states determined by the neurology of the human brain.

Cicero has long been seen to embody the values of the Roman Republic. This study of Cicero's use of history reveals that rather than promoting his own values, Cicero uses historical representation to explore the difficulties of finding any ideological coherence in Rome's political or cultural traditions. The book looks to the scepticism of Cicero's philosophical education for an understanding of his perspective on Rome's history, and argues that neglect of the sceptical tradition has transformed the doubting, ambiguous Cicero into the confident proponent of a form of Roman identity formed in his own image. The close reading of a range of his theoretical works make up much of the book: De republica, De oratore, Brutus, and De divinatione are treated in detail, and a range of other works are also discussed. The book explores Cicero's ironic attitude towards Roman history, and connects it to the use of irony in mainstream Latin historians, in particular Sallust and Tacitus. It also examines Cicero's approach to the history of rhetoric at Rome. The book concludes with a study of a little-read treatise on Cicero from the early 18th century, by the radical thinker John Toland, which sheds new light on the history of Cicero's reception. Cicero's use of history shows the flexibility of his understanding of Roman identity. The book argues against the image of Cicero as a writer hoping to coerce his readers into identifying himself and his own achievements with the dominant ideologies of Rome.

This book investigates the notion of a ‘democratic turn’, a perspective applied to the ways in which Greek and Roman ideas, texts, and images have been absorbed, reworked, and communicated in the wider world in the modern period and have attracted the interest of recent research. The questions raised by the concept are historical and philosophical as well as artistic and political and they have been intensified (but not invented) by current scholarship on classical receptions. Research has tracked ways in which both ancient and newer works have become better known among less privileged groups, with the modern receptions sometimes acting as an introduction to the ancient. The range of media that use classical material has been extended (e.g. to visual arts as well as literature), often enabling mass consumption, and the independent status and value of new works has been increasingly accepted as providing a commentary on the ancient. Theoretical perspectives on reader and spectator response have widened the constituencies that are perceived to be involved in various phases of the construction of meanings and there have been extensive studies of the use of ancient material as a basis for counter-discourse or resistance in situations of political and cultural oppression (e.g. in the matter of gender). All these phenomena raise questions about the relationship between critical approaches in scholarship and cultural and political practices outside academia.

This book brings together nineteen scholars to rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. Speech was an integral part of decision-making in Republican Rome, and oratory was part of the education of every member of the elite. Yet no complete speech from the period by anyone other than Cicero survives, and as a result the debate on oratory, and political practice more widely, is liable to be distorted by the distinctive features of Cicero’s oratorical practice. With careful attention to a wide range of ancient evidence, this book shines a light on orators other than Cicero, and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the more familiar genres of forensic and political speech. In so doing, it challenges the idea that Cicero is a normative figure, and highlights the variety of career choices and speech strategies open to Roman politicians. The chapters in the book also demonstrate how unpredictable the outcomes of oratory were: politicians could try to control events by cherry-picking their audience and using tried methods of persuasion, but incompetence, bad luck, or hostile listeners were constant threats.

Seneca’s Natural Questions is an eight‐book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, many of which had been treated in the earlier Greco‐Roman meteorological tradition; but what notoriously sets Seneca’s writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca’s first century CE Rome to be reconciled with his main meteorological agenda? In grappling with this familiar question, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions argues that Seneca is no blinkered or arid meteorological investigator, but a creative explorer into nature’s workings who offers a highly idiosyncratic blend of physico-moral investigation in and across his eight books. More importantly, however, The Cosmic Viewpoint stresses the literary qualities and complexities that are essential to Seneca’s literary art of science: his technical enquiries initiate a form of engagement with nature which distances the reader from the ordinary involvements and fragmentations of everyday life, instead centring our existence in the cosmic whole. From a figurative standpoint, Seneca’s meteorological theme raises our gaze from a terrestrial level of existence to a higher, more intuitive plane where literal vision gives way to conjecture and intuition: in striving to understand meteorological phenomena, we progress in an elevating direction – a conceptual climb that renders the Natural Questions no mere store of technical learning, but a work that actively promotes a change of perspective in its readership: the cosmic viewpoint.

This is a book about the ways in which various intellectuals in the post-classical Mediterranean imagined the human community as a unified, homogenous whole composed of a diversity of parts. More specifically, this study explores the ways in which authors of the second century ce adopted and adapted a particular ethnic and cultural discourse that had been elaborated by late fifth- and fourth-century bce Athenian intellectuals. At the center of this book is a series of contests over the meaning of lineage and descent and the extent to which the political community is or ought to be coterminous with what we might call a biologically homogenous collectivity. Beginning in the early fourth century and gaining great momentum in the wake of Alexander’s conquest of the East, traditional dichotomies such as Greek and barbarian lost much of their explanatory power. In the second-century ce, by contrast, the empire of the Romans imposed a political space that was imagined by many to be coterminous with the oikoumenê itself. One of the central claims of this study is that the forms of cosmopolitan and ecumenical thought that emerged in both moments did so as responses to the idea that the natio—the kin group—is (or ought to be) the basis for any human collectivity.

In this book Mirko Canevaro studies the ‘state’ documents (laws and decrees) preserved in the public speeches of the Demosthenic corpus. These documents purport to be Athenian statutes and, if authentic, would provide invaluable information about Athenian history, law and institutions. The authenticity of these documents has not been assessed as a whole for over a century. The author gives a comprehensive account of the presence of the documents in the corpora of the orators and in the manuscript tradition, summarizes previous scholarship and delineates a new methodology for analysing the documents. The core of the book (which includes one chapter by E. M. Harris) analyses in detail the documents found in Demosthenes’ On the Crown, Against Meidias, Against Aristocrates, Against Timocrates and Apollodorus’ Against Neaera, providing a guide for the reliability of the individual documents and advancing new interpretations of important Athenian laws and institutions such as homicide regulations, legislative procedures, laws on theft, seduction, naturalization, outlawry and many others. In the conclusion the author argues that part of the documents have been inserted in the speeches in an Athenian environment at the beginning of the third century BC and are basically reliable. Many others are instead forgeries, very early products of the tradition of historical declamations and progymnasmata, witnesses of the development, side-by-side, of rhetorical education and antiquarianism.

Dynamic Reading examines the reception history of Epicurean philosophy through a series of eleven case studies, which range chronologically from the latter days of the Roman Republic to late twentieth-century France and America. Rather than attempting to separate an original Epicureanism from its later readings and misreadings, this collection studies the philosophy together with its subsequent reception, focusing in particular on the ways in which it has provided terms and conceptual tools for defining how we read and respond to texts, artwork, and the world more generally. Whether it helps us to characterize the “swerviness” of literary influence, the transformative effects of philosophy, or the “events” that shape history, Epicureanism, as these essays demonstrate, has been a dynamic force in the intellectual history of the West.

The passions were a topic of widespread interest in antiquity. This is a study on their role in Roman love elegy (1st c. BCE), a genre rife with passions and jealousy in particular. Jealousy does appear in a number of earlier genres, but never with the centrality and importance it has in elegy. This book offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate the ancient representation of jealousy in its Roman context, as well as its significance for Roman love elegy itself. The narrators portray themselves as poets and as experts of love, championing a view of love that stands in marked contrast to the criticisms that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers had raised. Elegy provides rich evidence of the genesis and development of erotic jealousy: we find suspicions and rumors of infidelity, obsessive attention to visual clues, and accusations and confrontations with the beloved. The Roman elegists depict the susceptibility and reactions to jealousy along gendered lines, with an asymmetric representation of skepticism and belief, violence and restraint. But jealousy has ramifications well beyond the erotic affair. Underlying jealousy are fears about fides or trust and the vulnerability of human relations. These are prominent in love relationships, of course, but the term has broader application in the Roman world, and the poetic narrator often extends his fears about trust into many other dimensions of life, including friendship, religion, and politics. The infidelity rampant in the love affair indicates a more general breakdown of trust in other human relations. All of these features have implications for the genre itself. Many of the distinctive elements of Roman elegy—its first-person narration, obsessive recordkeeping, and role-playing—can be seen to derive from the thematic concern with jealousy. As such, jealousy provides a new way of understanding the distinctive features of Roman love elegy.