However, the relation of the novels to ancient philosophy remains under-studied. This volume is intended to open up some of the issues involved.

The present volume comprises thirteen of the papers delivered at RICAN 5, which was held in Rethymnon, Crete, on May 25-26,2009. The theme of the volume, ' The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel, ' allows the contributors the freedom to use their skills to examine the real and the ideal either individually or in conjunction or in interaction. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: a political reading of prose (...) fiction in Late Period Egypt ; the presence of robbers and murderers in ideal fiction ; the interaction between illusion and reality in novelistic ekphrasis ; divine loves as real precedents for human loves ; comical elements in Heliodorus' Aethiopika ;myths as paradigms for the inexperienced lovers in the Greek novels ; moral ideas in the Odyssey and the Greek novels in relation to moralizing interpretations of Homer ; the reality of the basic plot of Callirhoe in the light of historical events and Aristotle's Poetics ; the interaction between fictionality and reality in Daphnis and Chloe ; entrapment and insu fficient understanding of reality in the Satyrica ; fantasy, physical and ideal landscapes in Apuleius' Metamorphoses ; bridging the gap between Photis and Isis in Apuleius ; the gendered aesthetics of the Greek novels viewed through the lens of the mimetic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related GenresAndrew WalkerDavid Konstan. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiii + 270 pp. Cloth, $35.“Thus there begins to develop an erotics different from the one that had taken its starting point in the love of boys.... This new erotics organizes itself around the symmetrical and reciprocal (...) relationship of a man and a woman, around the high value attributed to virginity, and around the complete union in which it finds perfection.” So Michel Foucault asserts in a concluding chapter of his three-volume History of Sexuality (III, The Care of the Self [1984, trans. 1986] 232), a history that began as an effort to describe the emergence of sexuality as the subject of a distinct science in the late nineteenth century (I, An Introduction [1976, trans. 1978]) and that later broadened into “a genealogy of desiring man, from classical antiquity through the first centuries of Christianity” (II, The Use of Pleasure [1984, trans. 1985] 12). Here Foucault is commenting on the transition from pederasty to heterosexual love as the subjects of philosophical reflection on the nature of desire and its proper management. It is to this “new erotics” of heterosexual reciprocity that David Konstan’s title Sexual Symmetry refers: the notion that a new construction of sexuality emerged in the Common Era, a sexuality structured, not hierarchically as in the relationship between the erasts and the ermenos (with its predatory dynamic of subject and object, active and passive partners), but symmetrically, with an emphasis on the subjectivity of both partners who, although of opposite sex, are alike in age, social standing, and measure of amatory attachment, culminating in the Christian ideal of conjugal love and heterosexual fidelity. Konstan’s subtitle, Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres, provides an index to the book’s focus on literary genres and to Konstan’s generic approach to his subject matter, first locating the ideal of erotic reciprocity in the five Greek romances that survive (chaps. 1 and 2) and then showing how this type of relationship differs markedly from the representation of desire in the (roughly contemporaneous) Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius (chap. 3), as well as in a wide variety of related literary genres that antedate the novel and contributed to its emergence as a literary form (chap. 4). In none of these, Konstan argues, do we find the type of erotic reciprocity enjoyed by the hero and heroine of the standard Greek romance. In later chapters, Konstan contrasts further still this idea of erotic reciprocity, as represented in the ancient texts, with the representation of desire in modern fiction (from Sidney’s Arcadia and Richardson’s Pamela to the contemporary Harlequin Romance, chap. 5), and he attempts (however briefly) to identify those aspects of the social milieu that might account for the emergence and appeal of “sexual symmetry” in Greek fiction (chap. 6).Konstan’s argument is summarized in his introduction, and the progression of each chapter is aided by subheadings which are listed in the table of contents. All Greek is transliterated, and all foreign-language texts, including modern [End Page 165] scholarship, are translated to make the work accessible for the nonspecialist. A single index collects words, themes, topics, and authors—both ancient and modern—discussed. The list of works cited runs for nearly thirty pages and contains more than seven hundred items. The book is suitable for comparativists curious about the antecedents of modern romance, and especially useful for classicists who desire a synoptic view of gender studies in the context of classical literature and culture. Few scholars, I suspect, will complete this book without encountering something new in the way of ancient text or modern scholarship—a fact which in itself is testimony to the impressive breadth of Konstan’s own reading and depth of his erudition.This is not to say that the work is without problems of its own, both of a technical nature and of a theoretical sort. For one thing, Konstan’s argument by its very nature demands a large measure of plot summary of the detailed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel by Silvia MontiglioTim WhitmarshSilvia Montiglio. Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ix + 255 pp. Cloth, $74.Terence Cave’s Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) opened up the subject of recognition scenes to a new readership, with sparkling discussions not just of the medieval and renaissance (...) literature of his own specialism, but also of its Classical antecedents. Without offering (and without claiming to offer) a systematic study of the ancient sources, Cave demonstrated the power and capaciousness of the motif, in particular through a wonderfully dexterous reading of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. For Cave, recognition is a dangerous force at both the social and the literary levels: it threatens to expose the fictionality of identity as a construct of human relations (for recognition is an act of collective assent, not an acknowledgement of any kind of deep truth), and indeed the fictionality of fiction itself.Silvia Montiglio’s new book treats not the entirety of Classical literature but an impressive range of novelistic texts, covering not just the canonical Greek and Latin works but also Jewish and Christian material such as Joseph and Aseneth, the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (unavoidable, perhaps!), and Apollonius, King of Tyre. Montiglio avoids Cave’s grand, theoretical claims about what recognition is and focuses instead on what it does within the texts. Her procedure is to stick closely to the contours of the text, tracing the progress of themes through the narrative. In contrast to Cave, Montiglio sees recognition as primarily running along the dominant ideological grains of the individual novels: in the Greek and Judaeo-Christian texts at any rate it exists in order to affirm the idealising thrust, be it matrimonial or religious. Recognition’s primary role, for Montiglio, is to affirm identity, to validate the relationships to which texts normatively commit.The book proceeds via a series of close, immersive encounters with the texts. Although prodigiously widely read in the modern literature on the novels, Montiglio has little interest in wider social frameworks, and is virtually immune to the theoretical and cultural-historical bugs doing the rounds: intertextuality (though she is certainly alive to the power of literary precedent), narratology, cognitive theory, gender, sexuality, identity, cultural transfer, and so forth. Her story, rather, concerns the fluctuations of literary form across a range of periods and texts, and comparisons between different handlings of this central (but rather [End Page 166] neglected) topos. Although rather more detailed, sophisticated, and wide-ranging in its subject-matter, it harks back in a way to some of the motif-based, formalist novel scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s: Consuelo Ruiz Montero’s La estructura de la novela griega: análisis funcional (Salamanca 1988), Bryan Reardon’s The Form of Greek Romance (Princeton 1991), Françoise Létoublon’s Les lieux communs du roman: stéréotypes grecs d’aventure et d’amour (Leiden 1993).Five substantial chapters deal with Chariton and Xenophon (chap. 1), Achilles and Longus (chap. 2), Heliodorus (chap. 3), Petronius and Apuleius (chap. 4), and the Jewish and Christian “novels” (chap. 5). This cumulative approach allows her to ease a story out of her material by progressively comparing later to earlier treatments of similar themes. To restate it simply, her argument is that Chariton and Xenophon handle recognition relatively “straight,” presenting it as an opportunity for the lovers to reunite triumphantly and to reassert their love (although there are multiple other recognitions that interact with the lovers’ own). In Chariton there is an interesting emphasis on the power of the voice to impel recognition. Achilles, characteristically, turns the topos inside out: in this novel preoccupied with self-presentation, display, and disguise, Clitophon repeatedly fails to recognise Leucippe. In Longus, the central recognition is the New Comedy–style acknowledgement of the lovers by their parents, which not only validates their identities as urban aristos but also legitimises their love for each other. Heliodorus has the most elaborate recognition scene of all, with the extended revelation of Charicleia’s identity offsetting and finally banishing all the perceptual misdirection of the earlier parts of the... (shrink)

The Club, by the Greek author Stratis Tsirkas, classified among the political novels, is a work that brings also to the center stage the importance of myths and symbols, both ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian, in the context of the Second World War in the Middle East. People of various nationalities and goals, boundless and completely confused, profaning the sacred and at the same time making sacred the profane, are concentrated around the city of Jerusalem. The novel’s mythic imaginary (...) revolves around three main axes: the first is the sacredness of the city and the importance of the center; the second concerns aquatic symbols and dreams and the third, the symbol of woman. Their analysis will help us to perceive the myths and symbols as modus vivendi and their effect on human consciousness, behavior and action in 1942, during the period of the armed conflict in Europe. (shrink)

This article explores Herodian's History of the Roman Empire alongside Chariton's novel Callirhoe with an eye to how the minds of collective entities are represented and function in the two narratives. It argues that Chariton, unlike Herodian, elaborates on the diversity of emotions that characterizes a specific collective experience and has groups use direct speech throughout. These choices add vividness to the narrative and intensify the fictional sensationalism and dramatic character of the novel. It also shows that, whereas (...) collectives in Chariton's narrative are primarily designed to highlight a specific characteristic of a hero, dramatize an event and enhance suspense, in Herodian's historiography they are an integral part of the plot and central to his historical analysis of contemporary political and social world. This article offers a new analytical tool geared towards the development of a poetics of the collective in ancient narrative as well as a poetics of fictional and factual narration in antiquity, and advances our understanding of the complex relationship between ancient historiography and novelistic writing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 376-379 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, by Diana de Armas Wilson; 254 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, $74.00. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Diana de Armas Wilson describes and analyzes the link between the birth of the New World in European consciousness (...) and the expression of that consciousness in the novels of Cervantes. Those of us whose teaching includes works from both Peninsular and Spanish American literature have long felt the need for a study that goes beyond a cataloging of Cervantes's references to the world beyond Europe, and those Cervantine scholars among us have variously hinted at and side-stepped the fullness of this issue. As it was with those exemplary figures of the age of exploration she examines, it is to Professor de Armas Wilson's great credit that she has risen to the challenge. Her analysis is well-organized, reasoned, thoughtful, and readable.De Armas Wilson's knowledge of previous and current research in Cervantine studies as well as genre, colonial and postcolonial, and gender studies is impressive. She also admits to participating "in the kinds of critique currently associated with cultural studies, although not without reservations regarding the alleged presentism of that discipline or its tendency to turn primary texts into commodities." I would respond that de Armas Wilson's concerns and techniques in this study are precisely the tools we need to help us define "cultural studies" to our students and to ourselves as scholars of various literatures and cultures.To begin her study, de Armas Wilson mentions many of Cervantes's literary and personal references to geographies, customs, and other contacts with the [End Page 376] world outside Spain. The first chapter, "The Americanist Cervantes," focuses on that material and includes a brief review of recent research--the latest "grande escrutinario" (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter VI)--regarding what works might have been in Cervantes's library and/or the texts potentially available to him. Professor de Armas Wilson looks at Cervantes's references and the texts available to him through three lenses: imitation, influence, and intertextuality. She sees these methodologies as interdependent and argues that: "the intertextual practices in this book--based on a revised concept of intertextuality that includes the notion of agency and participates in a historical project--are as American as its central topic." (Finding myself in the process of completing this review on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I can only wonder what texts will not be influenced by the "historical project" of this day.)In the second chapter, "The Novel about the Novel," de Armas Wilson surveys Cervantes's status in Continental and Anglo-American criticism, reminding her readers of the polemic between scholars of the ancient novel and those who, bent on refusing to accept the Greco-Roman works as novels, designate them "romances." De Armas Wilson's contention that the Persiles is a "long exemplary novel," is convincingly depicted. Her arguments are based on the fact of the fictional time of the Persiles being within fifty years of the time when Cervantes wrote it, "its self-conscious theorizing, its rationalizing of 'miracles,' and its avowed imitation of Heliodorus' Aethiopica." She is not alone in arguing that Heliodorus' novel is the antithesis of a romance of chivalry. On these bases de Armas Wilson speaks not only to those who may not have recognized the importance of the Persiles because it has been called a romance (an often "despised or despicable" genre), but also to those of us who view consideration of the Persiles essential to an understanding of Don Quijote, if not a key to comprehending the major goals of all of Cervantes's works and his expression of the consciousness of his day.De Armas Wilson continues by arguing for "coevolutionary histories of the novel as alternatives to evolutionary ones." She bases her argument on echoes of widely disseminated accounts of happenings in the New World, (most significantly those of... (shrink)

Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination, edited by Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn, approaches the early modern republican political imagination from a fresh perspective. While most scholars agree on the importance of the classical world to early modern republican theorists, its role is all too often described in rather abstract and general terms such as "classical republicanism" or the "neo-roman theory of free states". The contributions to this volume propose a different approach and all focus on the (...) specific ways in which ancient republics such as Rome, Athens, Sparta, and the Hebrew Republic served as models for early modern republican thought. The result is a novel interpretation of the impact of antiquity on early modern republicanism. (shrink)

The Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla, a 5th-century hagiographical work, feature many elements recalling the ancient novel. Even if the first part of the text, the Life, must be considered a novel itself due to its dependence on the model of the Acts of Paul and Thecla, some novelistic motifs - especially the use of descriptions, digressions and first-person narrations − appear throughout the whole text. In addition, we also examine the textual evidence of the influence (...) of the ancient novel on this hagiographical text through the analysis of some lexical details which suggest the reading of the ancient novels. The hagiographer uses these elements to rewrite in same cases the original scene of the Acts of Paul and Thecla or to evoke in other scenes the universe of the ancient novel in order to delight his readers. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 38, Issue 1, pp 211 - 228 In this Reply, I argue that _pace_ Knud Haakonssen it is dubious that Adam Smith managed to ‘blow up’ Hugo Grotius’s universalist system of natural jurisprudence. Rather, Smith emerges as a closet rationalist who put forward crypto-normative universalist claims himself and found that he could not in the end improve upon Grotius’s system. Grotius was not seen by Smith as a ‘casuist’ _tout court_. I try to give an explanation for (...) the tensions introduced into Smith’s work by his incorporation of key aspects of Grotius’s theory of justice. Furthermore, I try to clarify in what regard Grotius should be seen as a novel and original thinker. Lastly, I argue in favor of according ideas and arguments their own weight, against a facile contextualism that is always in danger of falling prey to the genealogical fallacy. (shrink)

This essay analyses the contribution of the knowledge of Greek culture in Antiquity for Mikhail Bakhtin’s achievement. It shows how the Socratic dialogue and serious-comic genres contributed to forming the novel – according do Bakhtin’s conceptions – by developing its carnavalized line. It concludes that, although Bakhtin was not properly a Hellenist, he has contributed to Ancient Greece studies, by exploring the literary creativity of Hellenist period.

A comprehensive look at fictive letters in Greek literature from Homer to Philostratus, first published in 2001. It includes both embedded epistolary narratives in a variety of genres, and works consisting solely of letters, such as the pseudonymous letter collections and the invented letters of the Second Sophistic. The book challenges the notion that Ovid 'invented' the fictional letter form in his Heroides and considers a wealth of Greek antecedents for the later European epistolary novel tradition. Epistolary technique always (...) problematizes the boundaries between fictionality and reality. Based on a process of selection and self-censorship, the letter is a construction, not a reflection, of reality. The author bypasses the question of sincerity for a close look at epistolary self-representation, the function of the letter form and the nature of the relationship between writer and reader in a wide range of ancient Greek texts. (shrink)

This article examines how Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian, ca. 330-390) constructs an image of the priest using political metaphor and vocabulary from previous traditions. The author chooses a specific text from ancient political thought that was close to his own understanding of Christian tradition (Plato’s Republic). In turn, the biblical material he uses comprises fragments that are highly political in nature (for example, criticism of the rulers of Israel by the prophets). Combining these texts first of all (...) leads to their transformation, and secondly allows him to piece together an image of the priest as ruler of the Church. The combination of these two traditions makes it possible to describe both the historical and contemporary legitimization of this image – one novel for Late Antiquity – and to define the main characteristics of its ethos. (shrink)

This book explores the aesthetics of the novel from the perspective of Continental European philosophy, presenting a theory on the philosophical definition and importance of the novel as a literary genre. It analyses a variety of individuals whose work is reflected in both theoretical literary criticism and Continental European aesthetics, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Moving through material from eighteenth century and ancient Greek philosophy and aesthetics, the book provides comprehensive coverage of (...) the major positions on the philosophy of the novel. Distinctive features include the importance of Vico’s view of the epic to understanding the novel, the importance of Kierkegaard’s view of the novel and irony along with his other aesthetic views, the different possibilities associated with seeing the novel as ‘mimetic’ and the importance of Proust in understanding the genre in all its philosophical aspects, relating the issue of the philosophical aesthetics of the novel with the issue of philosophy written as a novel and the interaction between these two alternative positions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the NovelGareth SchmelingJ. N. O'Sullivan. Xenophon of Ephesus: His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel.Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995. xii + 215 pp. Cloth, DM 140, SFr 135, ÖS 1092. (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, 44)To those interested in the ancient novel the name of J. N. O'Sullivan is (...) familiar from his A Lexicon to Achilles Tatius (1980), published in the same series as the book under review. We have come to expect good things from O'Sullivan, and we are not disappointed in this new book. Whole books devoted to Xenophon of Ephesus (hereafter Xenophon) are infrequent: we have earlier ones from Schissel von Fleschenberg (1909) and Schmeling (1980). The reasons for this paucity can be put simply: scholars think that as a novel it is not very interesting or revealing (but, since there are only five Greek novels and Xenophon's is short, it is always included in studies) and that the Greek is inelegant, repetitious, stereotypical, wooden, more transparent than subtle, and paratactical wherever possible. Scholars with a love for texts like pathologists for dead bodies have dissected the corpus of Xenophon (likewise that of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri) and declared it officially an epitome. A few recalcitrants (Hägg, Schmeling), however, have filed a minority opinion that the text is basically intact. Under Merkelbach's scalpel (Roman und Mysterium [1962] 91–113) the [End Page 660] Ephesiaca was discovered to have been written originally as an Isis–Roman (a thinly veiled story of the Isiac mysteries), then clumsily reworked by a devotee of the Sun–god Helios, and finally epitomized by yet another clumsy person. Thus it is not surprising that monographs on this novel are exceedingly few. It seems now, however, that many scholars might have been mistaken about the Ephesiaca, that its language, while not inspired, is not to be judged strictly on literary standards but also on those used to assess oral literature. And further, that Xenophon (or someone else by that same name) wrote the first of the Greek novels, and that Chariton, stripped of his title as "father of the novel," borrowed much from Xenophon—though it is admitted that Chariton refined what he imitated. O'Sullivan's conclusions are startling, perhaps even benign heresy, though the ancient novel mafia is rarely regarded anyway as orthodox (see Bowie and Harrison, JRS 83 [1993] 159–78).Even at the risk of committing a serious biographical fallacy I feel compelled to point out three bits of information at the start: the first is obvious and reveals only that O'Sullivan has a long background of work in the novel; the next is that he is working on a Homeric dictionary and that his comparisons between the oral nature and the formulae of Homeric epics and the language of Xenophon, though at first blush unlikely, are well researched and argued (he will conclude later in the book that there are close connections between epic and the birth of the novel); and third that his Irish heritage has brought him into contact with O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, a collection of Irish tales in prose which derive from oral tradition. He thus mixes the unlikely concoction of one part Greek oral poetry of Homer with one part Greek of Xenophon by using the Irish tales as a kind of catalyst or as an anachronistic missing link, and concludes by comparing the oral nature of Homeric epic with that of Xenophon.In his opening chapter O'Sullivan marshals strong forces to counter the received opinion which dates Xenophon after Augustus (4.2.1, reference to ) and even into the second century because of his reference to the irenarch of Cilicia, an office supposedly established after 116–117 (2.13.3 ). O'Sullivan needs to date Xenophon as early as possible because later he will try to show that Xenophon is the earliest extant Greek novelist and that Chariton (ca. A.D. 50?) borrowed from him.O'Sullivan then moves on to Xenophon's critics, who usually have little good to say about... (shrink)

Although contemporary historical novels share a number of features with the traditional historical novel, as analysed by Lukács (1981), they display a fundamental change in the perception of history, evident in the disappearance of the omniscient narrator, in their choice of significant and representative figures, and scepticism regarding teleology of history or the world-historical role of war and violence. On the one hand, history has become a riddle, and this is reflected in the preference for the form of the (...) detective novel, for which the model is The Name of the Rose (Eco 1983). On the other hand, there is a clear preference for two historical periods: the collapse of the ancient world and the birth of the modern from the Renaissance to the 18th century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wandering in Ancient Greek CultureVanda ZajkoSilvia Montiglio. Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii + 290 pp. Cloth, $50.Beginning at the beginning with Odysseus's poignant statement to Eumaeus at Odyssey 15.343 that "for mortals, nothing is worse than wandering," Silvia Montiglio seeks to present an overview of the conception of wandering from the archaic to the early Roman age. The introduction (...) states clearly that its approach is both synchronic and diachronic, and the way the chapters are organized reinforces this approach, as they focus on particular themes ("Wandering, Lying and Poetry," "The Meaning of 'Home' in One's Journey: From Apollonius' Argonautica to the Novel") while simultaneously pursuing an historical trajectory. The epilogue, entitled "What Greek Wanderers Did Not Do," expands the time fame and provides insights into the differences between pagan and Christian ideas about wandering, contrasting Neoplatonist and Cynic ascetics who describe wandering primarily as a figurative manifestation of the human condition with the peregrinatio of those Christian sages for whom "to wander means to renounce this world and one's earthly self in the expectation of the Kingdom of God" (264).Throughout, there is a preoccupation both with the semantic fields of the words used for wandering, such as, for example, in the second chapter, where the middle-passive voice of the words used for wandering are adduced to emphasize the fundamental passivity of the wanderer within Greek thought, and with the wider symbolic significance of wandering within mythological, geographical, and political landscapes as it is manifested in a variety of genres and historical periods. [End Page 129] This extensive concentration means that the potential readership of the book is a diverse one and includes both those with and without Greek and those interested in particular texts as well as in the ancient world as it is most broadly conceived. There are some places in the discussion where the material is openly and heavily dependent on other works, such as the discussion of liminality that occupies pages 16–23, which to a large extent reviews the insights of Ken Dowden, Death and the Maiden: Girls' Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology (1989), and 37–41, which revisit some of the points made by Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy (1995); but in a work of such scope and eclecticism, this avowed indebtedness testifies to the thoroughness of the scholarship rather than the unoriginality of the thought involved in its production.One of the great strengths of the book is the forging of connections among different kinds of texts. In the chapter entitled "Wandering in Space and Time," Plato's theory of the wandering cause in the Timaeus is read alongside other narratives of beginnings so that the progress of the cosmos from wandering to stability is associated with that of the individual body: Herodotus contrasts the "much-wandering" of the ancestors of the Dorians with the autochthony of the Athenians who are by far the most developed of the Greeks; his successor Thucydides argues that migrations characterized the patterns of habitation of the earliest times; Democritus describes the mother's navel as an anchor that restrains the wandering womb, and he also considers the earth to have wandered before it thickened and became fixed in one position; pursued by Hera, the pregnant Leto searches far and wide for a place to deliver Apollo until she finds refuge on Delos, the island that, according to Callimachus (Hymn to Delos 191–92), also wandered until the birth of the god enabled it to put down roots. Montiglio describes the thematic and conceptual links among these different discourses in a typically fertile passage:Associating wandering within the amorphous beginnings of the cosmos is not idiosyncratic to the philosopher who disparagingly relegates wandering to the world of matter. The materialistic Democritus shares a similar notion, and so do myth and historiography. Wandering, the liminal condition, is systematically removed by growth and progress. Whether it be in biology, history, or geology, progress equals sedentariness, agglomeration, and fixity; whereas wandering defines the physical or social organism when still in the making and/or disjointed. Wandering marks cultural, biological, and geological protohistory.(12)The book... (shrink)

This article argues that rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming is elaborative encoding for episodic memories. Elaborative encoding in REM can, at least partially, be understood through ancient art of memory (AAOM) principles: visualization, bizarre association, organization, narration, embodiment, and location. These principles render recent memories more distinctive through novel and meaningful association with emotionally salient, remote memories. The AAOM optimizes memory performance, suggesting that its principles may predict aspects of how episodic memory is configured in the brain. Integration (...) and segregation are fundamental organizing principles in the cerebral cortex. Episodic memory networks interconnect profusely within the cortex, creating omnidirectional “landmark” junctions. Memories may be integrated at junctions but segregated along connecting network paths that meet at junctions. Episodic junctions may be instantiated during non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep after hippocampal associational function during REM dreams. Hippocampal association involves relating, binding, and integrating episodic memories into a mnemonic compositional whole. This often bizarre, composite image has not been present to the senses; it is not “real” because it hyperassociates several memories. During REM sleep, on the phenomenological level, this composite image is experienced as a dream scene. A dream scene may be instantiated as omnidirectional neocortical junction and retained by the hippocampus as an index. On episodic memory retrieval, an external stimulus (or an internal representation) is matched by the hippocampus against its indices. One or more indices then reference the relevant neocortical junctions from which episodic memories can be retrieved. Episodic junctions reach a processing (rather than conscious) level during normal wake to enable retrieval. If this hypothesis is correct, the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory. (shrink)

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters—the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16—are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, classical texts, and images of (...) enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature. (shrink)

Private associations abounded in the ancient Greek world and beyond, and this volume provides the first large-scale study of the strategies of governance which they employed. Emphasis is placed on the values fostered by the regulations of associations, the complexities of the private-public divide and the dynamics of regional and global networks and group identity. The attested links between rules and religious sanctions also illuminate the relationship between legal history and religion. Moreover, possible links between ancient associations and (...) the early Christian churches will prove particularly valuable for scholars of the New Testament. The book concludes by using the regulations of associations to explore a novel and revealing aspect of the interaction between the Mediterranean world, India and China. (shrink)

The Clementine Recognitions and Clementine Homilies, both of which evolved between the second and the fourth centuries after Christ, are treated all too frequently as material for historians, not for critics. A book on the ancient novel is sufficiently erudite if the author shows that he has read them; the Homilies are omitted in a volume of translations under the title of Collected Ancient Greek Novels. It might be said that this is as it should be, since (...) the Homilies are largely what their title advertises, and even the Recognitions contain much that is extrinsic to the plot. By itself this threadbare plot holds little to engage us, and it is disposed of in a few pages in the works of Hägg and Perry. My object is to show that this neglect is undeserved. (shrink)