Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry


Book Description

Taking their point of departure from Frederick Ahl's pioneering work, the distinguished scholars in this volume have come together to re-examine the relation of poetry and power in the context of authoritarian regimes in ancient Rome and to examin




Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry


Book Description

The political allegiances of major Roman poets have been notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because they often shift the onus of political interpretation from themselves to their readers. By the same token, it is often difficult to assess their authorial powerplays in the etymologies, puns, anagrams, telestichs, and acronyms that feature prominently in their poetry. It is the premise of this volume that the contexts of composition, performance, and reception play a critical role in constructing poetic voices as either politically favorable or dissenting, and however much the individual scholars in this volume disagree among themselves, their readings try to do justice collectively to poetry’s power to shape political realities. The book is aimed not only at scholars of Roman poetry, politics, and philosophy, but also at those working in later literary and political traditions influenced by Rome's greatest poets.




Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research


Book Description

This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research.




Latin Poetry and Its Reception


Book Description

This volume offers 18 new studies reflecting the latest scholarship on Latin verse, explored both in its original context and in subsequent contexts as it has been translated and re-imagined. All chapters reflect the wide research interests of Professor Susanna Braund, to whom the volume is dedicated. Latin Poetry and Its Reception assembles a blend of senior scholars and new voices in Latin literary studies. It makes important contributions to the understanding of kingship in Hellenistic and Roman thought, with the first four chapters dedicated to exploring this theme in Republican poetry, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius. Chapters focusing on the modern reception include case studies from the 16th to the 21st century, with discussions on Gavin Douglas, Edward Gibbon, Herman Melville, Igor Stravinsky, and Elena Ferrante, among others. No comparable volume provides a similar range. Latin Poetry and Its Reception will appeal to all scholars of Latin poetry and classical reception, from senior undergraduates to scholars in classics and other disciplines.




Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels


Book Description

"This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels-a literary form that flourished under the Roman empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin-as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular-Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe-are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil's Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil's Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and Seneca's Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil's Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire, and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period"--




True Names


Book Description

A key research tool in Vergilian studies, now in paper with substantial new material




Classical Enrichment


Book Description

This collection brings together twenty eight chapters written by Stephen Harrison’s colleagues and former students from around the globe to celebrate both his distinguished teaching and research career as a classicist and his outstanding and admirable service to the international classical community. The wide variety of original contributions on topics ranging from Greek to Latin and ancient literature’s reception in opera and contemporary writing is divided into five parts. Each corresponds to the staggering publication record of the honorand, encompassing, as it does, a broad literary spectrum, starting from the literature of the end of the Roman Republic and coming down to Neo-Latin and the reception of Classics in Irish, in English poetry and in European literature and culture in general. This corpus of compelling chapters is hoped to match Stephen Harrison’s rich research output in an illuminating dialogue with it.




Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity


Book Description

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Chaya T. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual judge's personal relationships, reactive emotions, and impulse to care. Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in ancient Jewish writings alongside minor case stories in Josephus and rabbinic literature. She shows both the consistency of a counter-tradition that sees legal practice as contingent upon relationship and emotion, and the specific ways in which that perspective was manifest in changing times and contexts.




The Museum of Augustus


Book Description

In the Odes, Horace writes of his own work, “I have built a monument more enduring than bronze,”—a striking metaphor that hints at how the poetry and built environment of ancient Rome are inextricably linked. This fascinating work of original scholarship makes the precise and detailed argument that painted illustrations of the Trojan War, both public and private, were a collective visual resource for selected works of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Carefully researched and skillfully reasoned, the author’s claims are bold and innovative, offering a strong interpretation of the relationship between Roman visual culture and literature that will deepen modern readings of Augustan poets. The Museum of Augustus first provides a comprehensive reconstruction of paintings from the remaining fragments of the cycle of Trojan frescoes that once decorated the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii. It then finds the echoes of these paintings in the Augustan-dated Portico of Philippus, now destroyed, which was itself a renovation of Rome’s de facto temple of the Muses—in other words, a museum, both in displaying art and offering a meeting place for poets. It next examines the responses of the Augustan poets to the decorative program of this monument that was intimately connected with their own literary aspirations. The book concludes by looking at the way Horace in the Odes and Virgil in the Georgics both conceptualized their poetic projects as temples to rival the museum of Augustus.




Geography, Topography, Landscape


Book Description

By introducing a multifaceted approach to epic geography, the editors of the volume wish to provide a critical assessment of spatial perception, of its repercussions on shaping narrative as well as of its discursive traits and cultural contexts. Taking the genre-specific boundaries of Greco-Roman epic poetry as a case in point, a team of international scholars examines issues that lie at the heart of modern criticism on human geography. Modern and ancient discourse on space representations revolves around the nation-shaping force of geography, the gendered dynamics of landscapes, the topography of isolation and integration, the politics of imperialism, globalization, environmentalism as well as the power of language and narrative to turn space into place. One of the major aims of the volume is to show that the world of the Classics is not just the origin, but the essence of current debates on spatial constructions and reconstructions.