This paper focuses on the relationship of myth with the ancient regime and on the transformation of poetic wisdom into poetic politics. The basic idea of this study claims that the political life in ancient communities was been projected into a mythology, and, in turn, a mythology often legitimizes political life. By reading Plato’s Timaeus and Novalis’ Heinrich von Afterdingen, this study aims to bring out the connection between the ancient and modern political regimes.

We aim to understand how different conceptions of the world coexisted, were created and maintained, and to understand the differences between classical and contemporary mythology in the art context. Are we living in post-mythological times? Is there a pattern or a semblance of structure in both classical mythology and contemporary myths such as the cyborg? Can we stretch the definition of mythology so that it encompasses everything that in some way tries to imbue a sense of order in the chaos (...) of human life? (shrink)

A comprehensive cross-referenced guide to classical Hinduism from its beginnings to the fifteenth century explains rites, concepts, myths, symbols, literary texts.

The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature explores the growth, makeup, and transformation of Chan (Zen) Buddhist literature in late medieval China. The volume analyzes the earliest extant records about the life, teachings, and legacy of Mazu Daoyi (709-788), the famous leader of the Hongzhou School and one of the principal figures in Chan history. While some of the texts covered are well-known and form a central part of classical Chan (or more broadly Buddhist) (...) literature in China, others have been largely ignored, forgotten, or glossed over until recently. Poceski presents a range of primary materials important for the historical study of Chan Buddhism, some translated for the first time into English or other Western language. He surveys the distinctive features and contents of particular types of texts, and analyzes the forces, milieus, and concerns that shaped key processes of textual production during this period. Although his main focus is on written sources associated with a celebrated Chan tradition that developed and rose to prominence during the Tang era (618-907), Poceski also explores the Five Dynasties (907-960) and Song (960-1279) periods, when many of the best-known Chan collections were compiled. Exploring the Chan School's creative adaptation of classical literary forms and experimentation with novel narrative styles, The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature traces the creation of several distinctive Chan genres that exerted notable influence on the subsequent development of Buddhism in China and the rest of East Asia. (shrink)

This study describes Raden Panji Natarata's thoughts as a humanist, poet and religious scholar who thinks that the concepts of Javanese Sufism and Islamic Sufism are two contradictory ideas. Raden Panji Natarata describes his ideas through the medium of têmbang macapat (Javanese song) in a classic Javanese literature entitled Sêrat Bayanullah. Sêrat Bayanullah, which is used as a source of data for this research, is a collection of the Pura Mangkunegaran library, Surakarta, with catalogue number A-393. The scope of (...) this study focuses on Raden Panji Natarata's thoughts on the nature of life, which include the concepts of human creation, human death, and the after-death union of the servant with God. To obtain objective and comprehensive research results, the researchers used a qualitative descriptive research paradigm by applying hermeneutic theory. The results showed that Raden Panji Natarata's thoughts about the nature of life did not go beyond the limits of monotheism, while other poets tended to acculturate Javanese Sufism thoughts, which sometimes were not in line with the teachings of monotheism. CONTRIBUTION: As an academic contribution, this research is expected to enrich and preserve the repertoire of local research literature with Sufism nuances and their relationship with the thoughts of Sufi experts. Differences in perspective is natural, and the most important thing is mutual respect for differing opinions for the sake of creating harmony in life. (shrink)

Juan Cepeda finds, in texts of the greek mythology, elements that helps to locate the origin of the western philosophy, like a pre-classic thought, quite a lot of ages before the classic philosophy development around the 12th century B.C., besides he proposes his hypothesis in the literature’s ph..

In this concise but wide-ranging study, Luc Brisson describes how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. He argues that philosophy was responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegory. Brisson reveals how philosophers employed allegory and how it enabled myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. “This (...) wonderful book confirms Brisson’s status as one of the major authorities in the field of classical antiquity. Overall, and with this excellent translation, the book is invaluable.”—_Choice_ “A compressed overview with moments of great insight.... Its strengths lie in the details Brisson is able to work into this brief treatment.”—Peter Struck, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. Luc Brisson argues that philosophy was ironically responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth because it could not be declared true or false and because it was inferior to argumentation, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegorical exegesis. Brisson shows to what degree allegory was employed among philosophers and how it enabled myth to take on (...) a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. How Philosophers Saved Myths also describes how, during the first years of the modern era, allegory followed a more religious path, which was to assume a larger role in Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Brisson explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance after the triumph of Chistianity, Brisson argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well. (shrink)

This book offers an ideal first reader in ancient Greek. It presents a selection of extracts from a comprehensive range of Greek authors, from Homer to Plutarch, together with generous help with vocabulary and grammar. The passages have been chosen for their intrinsic interest and variety, and brief introductions set them in context. All but the commonest Greek words are glossed as they occur and a general vocabulary is included at the back. Although the book is designed to be used (...) by students who have only completed a beginner's course in Greek, students of all ages will find that it helps them to improve their ability and confidence in reading a wide range of prose and verse texts, while at the same time providing a fascinating and copiously illustrated introduction to the riches and variety of ancient Greek literature over a period of almost a thousand years. (shrink)

This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. A chapter on books and readers in the Greek world concludes Part 4. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index.

The Cambridge History of Classical Literature provides a comprehensive, critical survey of the literature of Greece and Rome from Homer till the Fall of Rome. This is the only modern work of this scope; it embodies the very considerable advances made by recent classical scholarship, and reflects too the increasing sophistication and vigour of critical work on ancient literature. The literature is presented throughout in the context of the culture and the social and hisotircal processes of (...) which it is an integral part. The overall aim is to offer an authoritative work of reference and appraisal for one of the world's greatest continuous literary traditions. The work is divided into two volumes, each with a similar and broadly chronological structure. Among the special features are important introductory chapters by the General Editors on 'Books and Readers', discussing the conditions under which literature was written and read in antiquity. There are also extensive Appendices or Authors and Works giving detailed factual information in a convenient form. Technical annotation is otherwise kept to a minimum, and all quotations in foreign languages are translated. (shrink)

Jamake Highwater is a master storyteller and one of our most visionary writers, hailed as "an eloquent bard, whose words are fire and glory" (Studs Terkel) and "a writer of exceptional vision and power" (Ana"is Nin). Author of more than thirty volumes of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Highwater--considered by many to be the intellectual heir of Joseph Campbell--has long been intrigued by how our mythological legacies have served as a foundation of modern civilization. Now, in The Mythology of Transgression, he (...) uses his remarkable narrative powers to offer a personal and extraordinarily far-ranging examination of how people who stand outside of society--by dint of their sexual orientation, physical appearance, ideas, artistic inclinations, or ethnic heritage--often achieve lasting, even profound influence upon the culture at large. Drawing from a stunningly rich variety of sources ranging from the arts and literature to biology, physics, psychology, and anthropology, Highwater looks at his own outsider status--as a gay man, an artist, and an orphaned Native American--in an attempt to explore how mythologies from ancient times to the present have shaped the ways we think about social "abnormality" and alienation. Throughout, he points to a paradox at the center of Western values--the competing notions that the outsider is at once sinful and wise, that in everyday life the transgressor is ostracized, while in our most durable folklore and religious legends, heroes must break the rules to achieve greatness. Focusing in particular on homosexuality as a modern metaphor of transgression, Highwater brilliantly mixes personal anecdotes with wide ranging research, leading us on a tour through the history of social conformity and rejection, citing examples that span from Judeo-Christian-Islamic doctrines of good and evil, to the Navajo Nation's ambivalence toward the nature of sexuality, to Carson McCullers's treatment of physical deformity in the novella Member of the Wedding, to Descartes's theories of dualism. He also pays special attention to the debates currently raging in science regarding the biology of homosexuality and provides an engaging discussion of why we are motivated to seek a genetic basis of sexual orientation in the first place. Jamake Highwater has long been celebrated as a writer uniquely suited to give voice to the social outsider. Often provocative, always fascinating, The Mythology of Transgression is a tour de force of eloquent scholarship, a book that will prompt discussion and debate on the subject for years to come. (shrink)

In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the mythology of modern law and its scholarly reverberations, I consider the constitutive tensions of this law as exemplified in the relation (...) between praxis and poiesis, the operative function of the former dependent upon the creative unfolding of the latter. The alchemy of autopoiesis, by which law boldly proclaims itself law, is made explicit in the eschatology of its archive and the formation of its sovereign subject in negation. Revealing the literary dimensions of this law, the conceit of autonomy is nonetheless subject to the subversive substitutions of the supplement. Pressing yet further, the autopoiesis of law is found to be enfolded within a generative sympoiesis, constituted by the movement between its apposite dimensions. Ultimately, extending Fitzpatrick’s rendering of the irresolution of modern law as decolonial, I explore the possibilities afforded by a reading of the fundamental mutuality of myths, and the decolonial conviviality of poiesis. (shrink)

The word “romanticism” designates in German as in other European languages a broad movement in literature that originated at the beginning of the nineteenth century and has often been characterized as an opposition to the preceding age of rationalism and Enlightenment. Situated between the classicist schools of taste of the previous century and the realistic and naturalistic trends in literature of the later nineteenth century, Romanticism or romantic literature is the product of the creative power of the (...) imagination; it appeals to the emotions, has a preference for the mysterious aspects of nature, and shows a strong predilection for the past, the Middle Ages, and mythological traditions. With its strong affinity to the novel, romantic literature departs from the classical forms and the classicist canon of literature, but when these classical forms were nevertheless used by the authors of this movement, something new was created – the romantic tale, the romantic drama, and romantic poetry. The great romantic authors in Germany were E. T. A. Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Brentano, Arnim, and Fouqué. There is both a narrower and a broader notion of Romanticism in Germany, the broader also relating to painting (Friedrich, Runge) and music (Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bartholdy, Wagner). Romanticism had a great impact on the general view of the world and was influential in the rise of the historical consciousness, the revival of a religious spirit, and the emergence of a conservative political attitude. As far as philosophy and the sciences are concerned, Romanticism is associated with figures such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, the development of a philosophy of art, of nature, and of the subconscious. On the whole, Romanticism is one of those movements that shaped an entire age and manifested itself down to the most particular features of popular belief and scientific interest. (shrink)

In Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, he outlines an aesthetic theory of the novel and how it communicates truth, based around his Identitätssystem. In doing so, he understands truth as symbolic, where the symbolic is tautegorical. In his later lectures on mythology he instantiates a new understanding of ontology and mythology as tautegorical, and makes gestures towards how to understand aesthetic forms based on these new accounts. This paper explores how that new aesthetic understanding of truth, ontology, and (...) aesthetics can be used to create a new Schellingian theory of the novel. To explore this, the paper looks at the worldview presented in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, arguing that it could be seen as the late Schellingian novel and as such, present a new paradigm for understanding truth as communicated through literature. (shrink)

This anthology is heavy on poetry and letters, light in the other categories. There are some anomolies: Seneca's philosophy is represented by a piece of little historical interest, Cicero is alloted only five letters, Ovid is correspondingly slighted in poetry. Here also, as in the volume above, the editor's contribution is slight. No translations are acknowledged.—W. G. E.

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our (...) relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective. (shrink)

The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most (...) stimulating in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of the age itself - political and social stability reflected in artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the literature itself. (shrink)

In the two centuries covered by this volume, from about AD 250 to 450, the Roman Empire suffered a period of chaos followed by drastic administrative and military reorganization. Simultaneously Christianity emerged as a new religious force, to be first recognized by Constantine and then eventually to become the official religion of the Roman state. The old pagan culture continued to provide the basis for education and the staple literary diet of the leisured classes; but it now had perforce to (...) coexist and indeed to compete with a new, specifically Christian-oriented literature. These and associated developments are reflected in the Latin books of the period. Of the traditional forms and genres, some atrophied, some were transformed and invigorated; and yet others, such as autobiography in something like the modern sense, emerged in response to the pressures of the times. Professor Browning's masterly and comprehensive survey is mostly concerned with pagan literature, but takes into account Christian texts written in classical forms and directed at classically educated readers. The volume ends with a chapter on Apuleius by Professor Walsh, followed by a brief Epilogue from the same hand, sketching the part played by classical studies in the formation of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This book explores feminine archetypes and mythological figures in African and European traditions with an underlying goal of describing the foundations of social status for women. The author provides a rich corpus of mythology and tales to illustrate aspects of female and mother-daughter relationships. Diop analyzes the symbolic aspects of maternity and femininity, describing the social meaning of the matrix, breasts, and breastfeeding. A retrospective of female characters in African literature brings an interesting approach to explore the figures of (...) femininity and maternity in society. After an extensive analysis of African mythology and tales, the author proposes a way to integrate them in the clinical psychotherapy as a projective material. The analysis of clinical cases offers an example of how this material can be used in therapy with women from African descent. (shrink)

This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. A chapter on books and readers in the Greek world concludes Part IV. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index.

The period from the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C. was one of extraordinary creativity in the Greek-speaking world. Poetry was a public and popular medium, and its production was closely related to developments in contemporary society. At the time when the city states were acquiring their distinctive institutions epic found the greatest of all its exponents in Homer, and lyric poetry for both solo and choral performance became a genre which attracted poets of the first rank, writers of the (...) quality of Sappho, Alcaeus and Pindar, whose influence on later literature was to be profound. This volume covers the epic tradition, the didactic poems of Hesiod and his imitators, and the wide-ranging work of the iambic, elegiac and lyric poets of what is loosely called the archaic age. The contributors make use of recent papyrus finds to fill out the picture of a cosmopolitan and highly sophisticated literary culture which had not yet found its intellectual centre in Athens. (shrink)

Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings of early pioneers such as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Hume (...) Serves as an ideal introduction to the philosophy of literature or the philosophy of art, as well as a handy compilation of contributions to the field by its leading figures. (shrink)

The editorial note recommending the book by Vladimir Kantor Russkaya Klasika Ili Bytiye Rassiyi communicates that the author (philosopher, novelist and historian) believes that only this culture is fully valuable whose most representative artists’ work turns into classics, thus gaining the status of high culture. It indicates the extent to which the great names of Russian literature write with an awareness that in order to make it into the classics canon of European literature, too, one needs to reckon (...) with the previous work of Dante, Goethe, Schiller, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and a number of other prominent representatives of the culture of the West. This is not to say that Pushkin, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Gogol or Dostoyevsky were imitators. By reproducing patterns or themes developed by the literature of the West, they set those in realities fundamentally different from the social realities of the West, often in a polemic vein. Kantor stresses that the great artistic ambitions or the Russian classics are accompanied by great social duties because they lived and created their artin a country that had been lagging behind for centuries. It did catch up at times, but it was successful only as of Czar Peter I, not without periodic regressive collapses, though. The sense of social obligations, characteristic of Russian writers, intellectuals, or intelligentsia, and to be more precise, the implementation of these obligations, enabled Kantor to prove that the progress of literature—the great classics in particular—was linked in Russia with civilizational progress, and that in terms of the weight of these links, Russia was very different in civilizational progress from Europe, which lay ahead civilization-wise. (shrink)

The Gods and Typhon.—The story of how the gods took bestial shape to hide from the fury of Typhon is several times told in Hellenistic and Latin authors. There seems no room for doubt that it is an aetiological myth, intended to explain the cult of beasts in Egypt, and also, in one or two versions, the sacredness of fish in Syria. That in one form, that given by Antoninus Liberalis, it goes back to Nikandros is reasonably certain. The doubtful (...) point, to my mind, is whether it can be traced much further, and, in particular, whether it was known to Pindar, as is commonly assumed. The authority for supposing that he knew and referred to it is a single passage of Porphyry, de abstinentia III. 16 . It runs: Πίνδαρος δ ν προσοδίοις παντας τος θεος ποίησεν τε ύπ Τυνος διώκοντα οủκ νθρώποις όμοιωθέντας λλ τοις λοις ζοις έρασθέντα δ Πασιάης Δία γενέσθαι μν ταρον νν δ ετν και κύκνον. (shrink)

Here Gellius, also the target of poems 74, 80, 89, 90, 91 and 116, is accused of incest with his mother, sister, and aunt. This accusation is coupled with the only extended mythological reference to be found in the group of short Catullan epigrams 69–116:2 not even Tethys or Oceanus can wash out Gellius' crimes. This notion that large bodies of water are unable to wash away the stain of crime is of course a topos going back to Greek tragedy, (...) but the individual naming of the two sea-deities seems to make a point—a literary point which is relevant to the invective of the poem. (shrink)

In the first chapter of my book Tradition and Originality in Plautus: Studies of the Amatory Motifs in Plautine Comedy, I have expressed the view that mythological hyperboles in which the Comic character asserts his superiority in one respect or another to a mythological hero, far from being a product of Plautus' own imagination, as suggested by E. Fraenkel, are a specifically Greek element, adapted by Plautus from his originals. Here I should like to draw attention to one particular aspect (...) of the pattern of thought in question, not dealt with in my book, which reinforces my argument and further underlines the traditional framework of which this pattern forms part. (shrink)

Since Freud reimagined Sophocles' Oedipus as a transhistorical Everyman, far-reaching changes have occurred in the social and sexual conditions of Western identity. This book shows how both classical and Freudian perspectives may now differently illuminate the forming stories of a present-day world of serial families, multiple sexualities, and reproductive technologies.

The symmetrization postulates of quantum mechanics (symmetry for bosons, antisymmetry for fermions) are usually taken to entail that quantum particles of the same kind (e.g., electrons) are all in exactly the same state and therefore indistinguishable in the strongest possible sense. These symmetrization postulates possess a general validity that survives the classical limit, and the conclusion seems therefore unavoidable that even classical particles of the same kind must all be in the same state—in clear conflict with what we know about (...) classical particles. In this article we analyze the origin of this paradox. We shall argue that in the classical limit classical particles emerge, as new entities that do not correspond to the “particle indices” defined in quantum mechanics. Put differently, we show that the quantum mechanical symmetrization postulates do not pertain to particles, as we know them from classical physics, but rather to indices that have a merely formal significance. This conclusion raises the question of whether many discussions in the literature about the status of identical quantum particles have not been misguided. (shrink)

The third international conference on classical influences took place in Cambridge in 1977 under the title 'Classical Influences in Western Education, Philosophy and Social Theory'. Dr Bolgar has here collected and edited the proceedings and produced a volume which attempts to relate the progress of classical studies to the general history of ideas from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The book should be of interest to specialists in classical studies, to students of the literature of the period, and (...) to students of eighteenth-century French, Italian and American history. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to explore the representation of Pashtuns in Pashtu classic (before 1985) and modern (after 2000) movies and what is the difference of the portrayal of these movies and Pashtun literature. In particular, this study investigated in which time frame the depiction of Pashtun is positive and similar to their academic descriptions. A mixed methods approach consisting of qualitative case study, content analysis and comparative semiotic analysis was used to examine the content of the (...) movies. Eighty positive leading characters were purposely selected from the sample (ten classic and ten modern Pashtu movies) to compare with academic literature on Pashtun culture. (shrink)

Sport, in modern times, finds its roots in the mythological sources of ancient Greece, where it was born as a sacred game to be performed in the honour of Zeus in Olympia or of other gods elsewhere during the Panhellenic games. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and until the 1970s sport was mythogenic (Barthes 1975). But is sport still mythogenic in the twenty-first century? Our analysis attempts to answer two questions: (i) what has been the influence of doping (...) and sponsorship on contemporary sport; and (ii) how (if at all) have both influenced the symbolic contemporary forms of the sportsman/woman myth. We argue that modern sport has become increasingly dependent upon the industrial and entertainment worlds, thus losing along the way the imprinting of symbolic innocence that the myth conferred in the recent past. Moreover, the contemporary perception of sportsmen/women by the general public has changed in so far as it concerns the symbolic aspect of the performer. If their function as social link appears to be intact, sportsmen seem to have lost the classical Olympic symbolism that was generally accepted among spectators until a few decades ago. It does not appear that the mythical aura of sport has been lost but rather the symbols that it has previously carried. Popular admiration is nowadays more concentrated on the sportsman's capacity to acquire fame and fortune by means that appear to be in everybody's reach, including doping. Consequently, the commoner identifies him/her self with the sportsman/woman but does not see him/her any longer as a hero carrying classical moral values. (shrink)

This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index. This volume studies the revolutionary movement represented by the more creative of the Hellenistic poets and finally the very rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period, with rhetoric and the novel (...) contributing a distinctive flavour to the culture of the time. Appropriately enough, the volume closes with a survey of books and readers in the ancient world, which draws attention to the bookish nature of Greek literature from the Hellenistic period onwards and points forward to its survival into the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'Literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, Herodotus, (...) Thucydides and Demosthenes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception: Domina Illustris ed. by Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith PerkinsTeresa RamsbyDonald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith Perkins eds. Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception: Domina Illustris. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2013. x + 337 pp. 5 black-and-white photos. Cloth, $125.Although the Festschrift appears less frequently in publication than it once did, the incentive to publish one is heightened when (...) the honoree is someone with such an extensive record of influence upon and participation within the discipline. This is certainly the case with Judith P. Hallett. She has done stalwart service for the profession, having held many titles and leadership positions in the major Classics organizations, and has mentored many young academic professionals, as is attested in several of the chapters of Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception. This collection appropriately reflects the many strands of scholarship with which Prof. Hallett has fruitfully engaged in her career, and a complete list of her works appears in an eight-page list at the end of the volume.The introduction of the book is a short biography entitled “Judith Peller Hallett: An Introduction to a Force of Nature,” by Donald Lateiner and Amy Richlin. The essay describes the significant obstacles for a woman in academics in the 1960s and 1970s. The insensitive remarks of students and professors are hurtful enough to encounter in these pages, but it is revealed here that she lost her funding in her second year of graduate school—not because she had fallen behind in her studies—but because she got married. Despite this, she did complete her Ph.D. and held her first position at Boston University for seven years before landing happily at the University of Maryland. The essay also makes note of her wide-ranging participation in the promotion of women in academia and in literary enterprise: she was a founding member of the Women’s Classical Caucus in 1972. Professor Hallett is a key pioneer in the study of female voices and writings by women in the Roman world, bringing the attention of Classical scholarship in particular to Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, and the poet Sulpicia. The introduction offers a warm and quite personal tribute to her as scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend.There are nineteen essays in this collection. The table of contents offers [End Page 682] a glimpse of the breadth of Professor Hallett’s interests and the wide circumference of scholarship relevant to her own work. The editors, Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold, and Judith Perkins, have brought together an impressive array of scholars whose works cover a wide variety of perspectives from a variety of periods, genres, and disciplines. Almost all the essays in the book contain a note or a few sentences to honor and thank the dedicatee, and some (such as Richlin’s and Wiseman’s essays) contain a structure of argument built around some facet of Professor Hallett’s lines of inquiry. That said, other than the loose, tripartite structure outlined in the title, there is no essay by the editors to tie the pieces of this collection together, and there seems little momentum within the collection itself besides the personal connections of writers to the dedicatee.The first section on Roman literature contains six essays. Erich Gruen, in “Cicero and the Alien,” challenges the attributions of bigotry or racism to Cicero’s writings on the other. Gruen systematically parses and contextualizes the comments Cicero makes about foreigners and sees a consistent analysis that condemns even the Romans when their actions fall short of what Cicero sees as the key principle of good government, namely, that participation of all members of a polity should be viewed as essential to the health and wellbeing of the state. In “Frigidus Sanguis: Lucretius, Virgil and Death,” Michael Putnam shows that, although Lucretius was ready to discount the power and fear of death through his examination of philosophical principles and scientific phenomena, Vergil was not so convinced. In the Georgics and the Aeneid alike, Vergil poetically expresses the notion that “death ever impends and the fear that it engenders cannot be argued... (shrink)

It can be shown that certain kinds of classical deterministic and indeterministic descriptions are observationally equivalent. Then the question arises: which description is preferable relative to evidence? This paper looks at the main argument in the literature for the deterministic description by Winnie (The cosmos of science—essays of exploration. Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, pp 299–324, 1998). It is shown that this argument yields the desired conclusion relative to in principle possible observations where there are no limits, in principle, on (...) observational accuracy. Yet relative to the currently possible observations (of relevance in practice), relative to the actual observations, or relative to in principle observations where there are limits, in principle, on observational accuracy the argument fails. Then Winnie’s analogy between his argument for the deterministic description and his argument against the prevalence of Bernoulli randomness in deterministic descriptions is considered. It is argued that while the arguments are indeed analogous, it is also important to see they are disanalogous in another sense. (shrink)

We investigate the notion of classical negation from a non-classical perspective. In particular, one aim is to determine what classical negation amounts to in a paracomplete and paraconsistent four-valued setting. We first give a general semantic characterization of classical negation and then consider an axiomatic expansion BD+ of four-valued Belnap–Dunn logic by classical negation. We show the expansion complete and maximal. Finally, we compare BD+ to some related systems found in the literature, specifically a four-valued modal logic of Béziau (...) and the logic of classical implication and a paraconsistent de Morgan negation of Zaitsev. (shrink)

In the third century BC Rome embarked on the expansion which was ultimately to leave her mistress of the Mediterranean world. As part of that expansion a national literature arose, springing from the union of native linguistic energy with Greek literary forms. Shortly after the middle of the century the first Latin play took the stage; by 100 BC most of the important genres invented by the Greeks - epic, tragedy, comedy, historiography, oratory - were solidly established in their (...) adoptive Roman forms, and a new genre, satire, had been born. The chapters in this volume describe and analyse the process of creative adaptation which shaped the beginnings of Latin literature and laid the foundations for its future development as one of the great literatures of the world. Essential background is provided by introductory chapters on readers and critics in the Roman world. In these are described the form of the books themselves and the conditions under which they were produced, circulated and read. The whole volume offers an indispensable introduction to the understanding of the nature and quality of Latin literature. (shrink)

A new translation of an important text for Greek mythology used as a source book by classicists from antiquity to Robert Graves, The Library of Greek Mythology is a complete summary of early Greek myth. Using the ancient system of detailed histories of the great families, it contains invaluable genealogical diagrams for maximum clarity. The introduction gives details of sources and narrative traditions, and there is comprehensive annotation. An indispensable reference work for anyone interested in classical mythology.

The essays in this collection all treat in some way the conservative’s vision of society as it is variously manifested in literary art, its scholarship, and its transmission through classical modes of liberal learning. Responding in part to the postmodernist turn in literary study, Literature and the Conservative Ideal examines the ways in which conservatism has been depicted in literature, as well as how its tendencies might restore literature’s potential as an artistic reflection of the universal human (...) condition. (shrink)

Starting from personal experiences which led him to give up teaching at the University of Venice, Alfonso Berardinelli concentrates on the difficulties and paradoxes of the relationship between educational institutions, on the one hand, and the anarchist and misanthropic character of modern literature on the other. The majority of the `classics' of modern times, from Baudelaire to Kafka, from Tolstoy to Svevo, are `scandalous' even today: one cannot teach them without trying to convey the shock of their extraneousness from (...) the modern world and its culture. Modern literature is, in actual fact, almost always anti-modern, asocial, anti-social, apocalyptic. It is not possible to turn it into a simple `object of study' without betraying it. (shrink)

The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales: great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. The eminent British philosopher Anthony O’Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as powerful, thrilling, erotic, politically astute, and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller. O’Hear begins with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After Greek tragedy, Plato, and Virgil’s Aeneid comes Ovid, whose encyclopedic Metamorphoses is an (...) inexhaustible source for European art and literature. Via Saint Augustine, O’Hear reaches Dante and his terrifying and sublime Divine Comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine, and finally Goethe complete the cast list. In each case, O’Hear patiently draws out themes, focuses on key passages, and explains why they are important. Not simply a grand work of reference, The Great Books is also a narrative history shot through with a love of literature and the author’s deeply held belief in its power to enrich and enliven everyone’s world. (shrink)

How empty and barren would life be if all our art and literature were taken away. What a calamity!Beyond the circle of the reading room are the world's greatest collection of books and the finest works of art from all places and times—sculpture from the Parthenon, Ming vases, Viking jewelry, great stone bulls and lions from Assyria, Egyptian mummies, medieval tapestries—brought together and taken out of context and time, like Keats's Grecian urn, because in themselves and in conjunction they (...) create—they are—art. In the courtyard before the huge pillars of the classical front of a Greek temple, thousands of people waited in long lines, like pilgrims at a shrine, to be admitted to look for a few moments at the rare .. (shrink)