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Aristophanes, whose eleven surviving plays are all that remain of Old Comedy, has been stereotyped since ancient times as the poet who brought order and stability to this rowdy theatrical genre. But how did this image arise, and why were the rivals Cratinus and Eupolis relegated to secondary status and merely fragmentary survival? This book traces Aristophanes’ supremacy, paradoxically, back to the defeat of his Clouds at the Great Dionysia in 423 BCE. Both Wasps (422) and the revised Clouds (419–417), the two plays at the center of this study, depict the earlier Clouds as a failed attempt by Aristophanes, the good son, to heal the comic audience—reflected in the plays in a pair of dysfunctional fathers. Through this narrative of failure, Aristophanes advances a “proto-canonical” discourse that anticipates the contours of the Hellenistic comic canon by elevating his aesthetic mode while delegitimizing his rivals. Aristophanic comedy is cast as a prestigious object, an expression of the supposedly timeless values of dignity and self-control. This discourse, which depends on both internal and external textual connections, is grounded in the distinctive feelings that different comic modes purportedly transmitted to an audience. In Wasps and Clouds the Aristophanic style is figured as a soft, protective cloak meant to shield an audience from debilitating competitors and restore it to paternal responsibility and authority. Aristophanes’ narrative of afflicted fathers and healing sons, of audience and poet, is thus shown to be at the center of the proto-canonical discourse that shaped his eventual dominance.

The third and fourth books of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations deal with the nature and management of human emotion: first grief, then the emotions in general. In lively and accessible style, Cicero presents the insights of Greek philosophers on the subject, reporting the views of Epicureans and Peripatetics and giving a detailed account of the Stoic position, which he himself favors for its close reasoning and moral earnestness. This book gives the Stoics' analysis of the causes of grief, their classification of emotions by genus and species, their lists of oddly named character flaws, and by the philosophical debate that develops over the utility of anger in politics and war. This translation makes Cicero's work accessible. The accompanying commentary explains the philosophical concepts discussed in the text and supplies many helpful parallels from Greek sources.

Latin epics such as Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, and Statius' Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. This book argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society. Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, it highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, the book closes its case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

This book explores how communities formed around artworks in the Iron Age Levant (c. 1200-600 BCE). It argues that portable luxury arts forged collective memories and community identities through the production and consumption of style, understood as stylistic practices, and offers a rethinking of the way art historians approach style as an analytical feature of art. Stylistic analysis of Iron Age Levantine ivories and metalworks reveals a spectrum of heterogeneous styles that point to flexible networked communities of practice, rather than to one-to-one geographical associations between style and city-state, challenging the autochthonous nature of style and strictly culture-history classifications of art. An alternative approach for interpreting stylistic traits, derived from practice theory, proposes that stylistic practices be understood as part of embodied social relations. These are considered from the vantage point first of the Levant and then of its increasingly powerful neighbor Assyria. Contextualizing the stylistic practices of specific Levantine artworks, such as decorated metal (“Phoenician”) bowls, articulates the ways in which collective memories could coalesce around them through social activities such as drinking and libating. The artworks’ efficacy in creating social relations extends to contexts of displacement, recycling, and reuse, and the book concludes by tracing the narratives of several Levantine ivories and metalworks that moved in multiple contexts across cultures and social strata in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, this book harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. The author contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues—such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one's body—that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, he considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The book philosophically explores twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, revealing that their relationship has great potential to inform our understanding of human nature.

An enormous amount of literature exists on Greek law, economics, and political philosophy. Yet no one has written a history of trust, one of the most fundamental aspects of social and economic interaction in the ancient world. This volume explores the way democracy and markets flourished in ancient Greece, not so much through personal relationships as through trust in abstract systems—including money, standardized measurement, rhetoric, and haggling. Focusing on markets and democratic politics, the book draws on speeches given in Athenian courts, histories of Athenian democracy, comic writings, and laws inscribed on stone to examine how these systems worked. It analyzes their potentials and limitations and how the Greeks understood and critiqued them. The book links Greek political, economic, social, and intellectual history and examines contemporary analyses of trust and civil society.

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book 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. The book 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. This book 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, the book explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; after the triumph of Christianity, the book argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well.

On museum visits, we pass by beautiful, well-preserved vases from ancient Greece—but how often do we understand what the images on them depict? This book tells the stories behind the pictures, exploring how artists of antiquity had to determine which motifs or historical and mythic events to use to tell an underlying story while also keeping in mind the tastes and expectations of paying clients. Covering the range of Greek style and its growth between the early Archaic and Hellenistic periods, the book describes the intellectual, social, and artistic contexts in which the images were created. It reveals that developments in Greek vase painting were driven as much by the times as they were by tradition—the better-known the story, the less leeway the artists had in interpreting it. As literary culture transformed from an oral tradition, in which stories were always in flux, to the stability of written texts, the images produced by artists eventually became nothing more than illustrations of canonical works. At once a work of cultural and art history, this book builds a new way of understanding the visual culture of ancient Greece.

In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered—the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, who had hoped for the letters to convey all of the political drama of Cicero's. That the collection included passionate love letters between Fronto and the future emperor Marcus Aurelius was politely ignored—or concealed. And for almost 200 years these letters have lain hidden in plain sight. This book rescues these letters from obscurity and returns them to the public eye. The story of Marcus and Fronto began in 139 ce, when Fronto was selected to instruct Marcus in rhetoric. Marcus was eighteen then, and by all appearances the pupil and teacher fell in love. Spanning the years in which the relationship flowered and died, these are the only love letters to survive from antiquity—homoerotic or otherwise. The translation reproduces the effusive, slangy style of the young prince and the rhetorical flourishes of his master.

In this age of the sound bite, what sort of author could be more relevant than a master of the epigram? Martial, the most influential epigrammatist of classical antiquity, was just such a virtuoso of the form, but despite his pertinence to today's culture, his work has been largely neglected in contemporary scholarship. Arguing that Martial is a major author who deserves more sustained attention, this book provides a tour of his works, shedding light on the Roman poet's world—and how it might speak to our own. Writing in the late first century CE—when the epigram was firmly embedded in the social life of the elites of Rome's elite—Martial published his poems in a series of books that were widely read and enjoyed. Exploring what it means to read such a collection of epigrams, this book examines the paradoxical relationship between the self-enclosed epigram and the book of poems that is more than the sum of its parts. It goes on to show how Martial, by imagining these books being displayed in shops and shipped across the empire to admiring readers, prophetically behaved like a modern author.

Since Aristotle, text has been considered the essence of Athenian tragedy, while theatrical props have been relegated to the category of mere spectacle, external to the text. Objects as Actors argues that far from being inanimate, ancillary “things,” props are fully integrated in tragic text, agents that spark surprising plot turns and unexpected reactions from viewers inside and outside the theatrical frame while furnishing some of the genre’s most purely thrilling moments. Whether it’s the uncanny sword or the diachronic shield of Sophocles’ Ajax, the visually overpowering tapestry of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, the mythically and politically charged recognition tokens of Euripides’ Ion, the canonical urn of Sophocles’ Electra, or the metatheatrical tablet of Euripides’ Hippolytus, props demand our attention. They bridge—even as they disrupt—time, space, and genre; they manipulate even as they are manipulated. Combining theater studies with cultural poetics, this book proposes a new dimension in the study of how tragic plays communicate with each other: not just intertextually, but also intertheatrically. Through their compelling presence and associative power, props provide the key to a new way of looking at the central tragic texts—and, indeed, at theater as a whole.

Persius’ Satires have long resisted interpretation. A curious amalgam of satire and philosophy, they are couched in bizarre and violent metaphorical language and unpleasant imagery. They show little concern for the pleasure and understanding of the reader, instead attacking all humans for falling short of Stoic moral standards and depicting their values and behaviour in mocking terms. This short study investigates the function of Persius’ primary metaphors, showing how he turns to digestion, cannibalism, and pederasty to formulate his critique of men, mores, and contemporary poetry as part of the same corrupt framework. Developing elements taken from the poetic tradition and from philosophy, he opposes his own metaphors to those that give pleasure, casting the latter, and the poetry that uses them, as unable to teach or heal the audience. It is only Persius’ own poetry, a bitter and boiled-down brew, that can make us healthier, better and more Stoic, as if it were a form of poetic medicine, a healing draught with no honey on the rim. Ultimately, however, Persius encourages us to leave behind the world of metaphor altogether, even if his metaphors are salutary and not pleasing; instead, we should concentrate on the non-emotive abstract truths of Stoic philosophy and live in a world where neither poetry, nor rich food, nor sexual charm, are put to use in the service of philosophical teaching.

How could something as insubstantial as a ghost be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint? Using the figure of the ghost, this book offers a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, it shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of the afterlife more generally, these images ultimately show us something about the visual event of seeing itself.

For centuries, since its inception in fact, rhetoric has been conceived of as an exclusively human art. Only humans, after all, could artfully use language, the very definition of rhetoric. And yet pre- and early-modern treatises about rhetoric are crawling with animals of the nonhuman variety. This book examines the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. In doing so, it brings rhetorical studies into ongoing conversations about animals in the humanities while also offering a counter-history of rhetoric and rhetorical education, one that resists the usual reason-based, cerebral approach and focuses instead on sensation and movement. The book therefore offers a new theoretical perspective on rhetoric’s history: rather than presuming, as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as reasoned argumentation, this history stresses energy, bodies, and sensation, all crucial components of language and communication. Without these components, and without the nonhuman animals that draw them out, words are dead and lifeless, unable to perform any of the three basic aims ascribed to the art of rhetoric by the ancients: to teach, to delight, and—above all—to move.

Ancient Greek tragedy has been an inspiration to Western culture, but the way it was first performed has long remained in question. This book provides a discussion of key issues relating to the use of the playing space and the nature of the chorus, offering a distinctive impression of the performance of Greek tragedy in the fifth century bce. Drawing on evidence from the surviving texts of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it explains how scenes with actors were played in the open ground of the orchestra, often considered as exclusively the dancing place of the chorus. In reviewing what is known of the music and dance of Greek antiquity, the book shows that in the original productions, the experience of the chorus—expressed in song and dance, and in interaction with the characters—remained a vital characteristic in the performance of tragedy. It combines detailed analysis with broader reflections about the nature of ancient Greek tragedy as an art form.

Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome questions the truism that poetry and translation are inherently at odds, arguing for translation as a defining condition of ancient Roman lyricism. The study focuses on the late Republican poet Catullus, arguing that translation plays a central role in his work and conditions many of his most celebrated innovations. It argues that translation permeates this poet’s oeuvre but in forms that are frequently unrecognizable to modern readers. It suggests that many poems we moderns would tend to label as lyric originals have been shaped by Roman translation practices and mentalities quite different from our own. Chief among these is the foundational Roman assumption that translation is not a literary liability but a sign of power and a potential motor of poetic invention. Re-reading Catullan translation from this perspective exposes new layers of ingenuity within a familiar corpus of Latin poems and also offers a number of ancillary rewards: it illuminates the idiosyncrasies of Roman translation practice, it reconfigures our understanding of translation history, and it calls into question basic assumptions about lyric poetry, the genre most closely associated with Catullus’s eclectic oeuvre.

This book investigates the concept, value and poetics of variety, with a particular focus on the Roman concept of varietas and on Latin literature. It divides into two parts, the first belonging to the field of the history of ideas and the second to literary criticism. It argues that a combination of synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, commonplaces and conceptual issues form a distinctive cluster around the Latin word varius and its vernacular derivates, and identifies this ‘variety complex’ in its ancient and modern incarnations with particular reference to ideas of nature, creativity (human and divine), aesthetics and politics. The second part of the book begins by considering how the concept of variety functions in the work of particular Latin authors (Pliny the Younger, Lucretius and Horace); it proceeds to examine how the literary forms of the list and the priamel frame the experience of variety in different genres of Latin poetry, and, finally, describes how variety functions in the genre of the miscellany, with particular attention to the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius. The study has its roots in Latin literature and language but ranges widely over European literature and thought of all periods to analyse the significance of an important but neglected value.

This book looks at mythology and ancient belief, revising our understanding of myth, heroism, and the status of women and animals in Western culture. This book recounts and analyzes a variety of key literary and visual moments that highlight the weasel's many attributes. It highlights its legendary sexual and childbearing habits and symbolic association with witchcraft and midwifery, its role as a domestic pet favored by women, and its ability to slip in and out of tight spaces. The weasel, the book reveals, is present at many unexpected moments in human history, assisting women in labor and thwarting enemies who might plot their ruin.

Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization—home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200–1600 bce that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts. Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, this book focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers considerable insight into how writing and the law evolved together to forge the principles of authority, precedent, and documentation that dominate us to this day. As legal codes throughout the region evolved through advances in cuneiform writing, kings and governments were able to stabilize their control over distant realms and impose a common language—which gave rise to complex social systems overseen by magistrates, judges, and scribes that eventually became the vast empires of history books.