Category: Ancient Medieval Literature

By Kathryn A. Morgan

This groundbreaking booklet makes an attempt an absolutely contextualized analyzing of the poetry written via Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse within the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and different occasional songs composed through Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant have been a part of an intensive cultural software that incorporated athletic pageant, coinage, structure, sanctuary commitment, urban starting place, and lots more and plenty extra. within the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their towns struggled to capitalize at the Greek victory and to outline themselves as loose peoples who triumphed over the specter of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an immense contribution to Hieron's aim of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing modern tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with top Greek culture. In a fragile means of cultural legitimation, the poet's compliment deploys athletic victories as a symptoms of extra common preeminence. 3 preliminary chapters set the degree via providing the historical past and tradition of Syracuse below the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring problems with functionality and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders at the mainland. next chapters research in flip all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and contributors of his courtroom, and contextualizes this poetry through evaluating it to the songs written for Hieron via Pindar's poetic modern, Bacchylides. those odes enhance a in particular "tyrannical" mythology during which a hero from the previous enjoys strange closeness with the gods, merely to carry spoil on him or herself via failing to regulate this closeness competently. Such unfavourable exemplars counterbalance Hieron's success and current the hazards opposed to which he needs to (and does) defend himself by way of regal advantage. The readings that emerge are marked via unheard of integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.

By Dr Gwendo Leick

Intercourse and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature is a brand new contribution to present debates approximately intercourse and eroticism. It offers an perception into Mesopotamian attitudes to sexuality via analyzing the oldest preserved written proof at the topic - the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform resources - which have been written among the twenty first and the fifth centuries B.C. utilizing those long-neglected and sometimes superb info, Gwendolyn Leick is ready to anlayse Mesopotamian perspectives of prostitution, love magic and deviant sexual behaviour in addition to extra common problems with sexuality and gender. This attention-grabbing e-book sheds gentle at the sexual tradition of 1 of the earliest literate civilisations.

By John Philoponus

Aristotle's Posterior Analytics elaborates for the 1st time within the heritage of Western philosophy the notions of technological know-how and the necessities for the designated type of wisdom scientists own. His version is arithmetic and his remedy of technological know-how quantities to a philosophical dialogue, from the point of view of Aristotelian syllogistic, of mathematical proofs and the rules they're in keeping with. Chapters 1-8 expound the principles of Aristotle's idea, mentioning the similarities and ameliorations among clinical wisdom and different forms of wisdom, developing the necessity for simple ideas, and opting for the kinds of ideas and the resource of necessity linked to clinical proof. Philoponus' colossal observation, the main whole historic dialogue of Posterior Analytics publication 1, deals uniquely precious testimony to the way in which this ebook was once learn and understood in past due antiquity, in addition to supplying info on past interpretations. Of specific curiosity is Philoponus' account of clinical rules, that's dependent not just on Aristotle but in addition at the Greek mathematical culture, in particular Euclid and his commentator Proclus.

By Jacqueline Foertsch

This e-book explores the foremost cultural kinds of Nineteen Forties the US - fiction and non-fiction; track and radio; movie and theatre; critical and well known visible arts - and key texts, traits and figures, from local Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob desire. After discussing the dominant principles that tell the Forties the ebook culminates with a bankruptcy at the 'culture of war'. instead of splitting the last decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the Nineteen Forties might be taken as an entire, searching out hyperlinks among wartime and postwar American tradition

By W. Heath Robinson

By Alain M. Gowing

Even though the Roman Republic got here to an indisputable result in 31 BC with the accession of the emperor Augustus, the reminiscence of the Republic persevered. This publication explores how that reminiscence manifested itself, serving as an street for dissent in addition to imperial propaganda, sooner than progressively fading over the process the early Empire (AD 14-117). proposing case-studies of a number of imperial authors and key Roman monuments, it additionally examines the shut dating among reminiscence and historical past in Roman suggestion, trained by means of sleek reports of historic reminiscence.

By Pliny, H. Rackham

Pliny the Elder, tireless researcher and author, is writer of the encyclopedic typical heritage, in 37 books, an unequalled compendium of Roman wisdom. The contents of the books are as follows. publication 1: desk of contents of the others and of experts; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3-6: geography and ethnography of the identified global; 7: anthropology and the body structure of guy; 8-11: zoology; 12-19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20-27: plant items as utilized in medication; 28-32: clinical zoology; 33-37: minerals (and medicine), the wonderful arts, and gem stones. The Loeb Classical Library version of ordinary historical past is in ten volumes.

By Bryan Hainsworth, G. S. Kirk

The six-volume observation on Homer's Iliad ready less than the overall Editorship of Professor G. S. Kirk is entire with the book of this quantity. It opens with introductory chapters: the 1st on Homeric diction, the second one at the contributions that comparative reports have made to seeing the Homeric epics in sharper standpoint. within the remark Dr. Hainsworth confronts the intense difficulties posed through the 9th, 10th and 12th books of the Iliad. The Greek textual content isn't really integrated.

By Malcolm Andrew (auth.)

By Judith Fletcher

Oaths have been ubiquitous rituals in historical Athenian felony, advertisement, civic and foreign spheres. Their value is mirrored through the truth that a lot of surviving Greek drama incorporates a formal oath sworn earlier than the viewers. this is often the 1st complete research of that phenomenon. The ebook explores how the oath can mark or constitution a dramatic plot, every now and then compelling characters like Euripides' Hippolytus to behave opposite to their top pursuits. It demonstrates how dramatic oaths resonate with oath rituals normal to the Athenian audiences. Aristophanes' Lysistrata and her accomplices, for instance, swear an oath that blends protocols of overseas treaties with priestesses' vows of sexual abstinence. by means of utilising the foundations of Speech Act thought, this booklet examines how the performative energy of the dramatic oath can replicate the established order, but additionally disturb different types of gender, social prestige and civic id in ways in which redistribute and confound social authority.