Martin Classical Lectures

"Winner of the 2012 Robert Lowry Patten Award, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Rice University" Simon Goldhill is professor of Greek literature and culture and fellow and director of Studies in Classics at King's College, University of Cambridge. His many books include Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives. How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, Simon Goldhill examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, Goldhill demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, Goldhill addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction--specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire--he discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture. "[I]mmensely scholarly, highly-entertaining and broad-ranging. . . . Goldhill's timescale offers a new and contentious definition of the term 'Victorian', stretching from 1760 to the 1980s."---Jane Thomas, Times Higher Education Supplement "[G]ripping." "Simon Goldhill, a professor at Cambridge, is a leading expert on Greek literature and culture; if you want to know more about the world of Aeschylus and Euripides, Goldhill is your man."---Daniel Snowman, Literary Review "Using reception theory, Goldhill examines paintings, operas, and novels produced in Europe that appropriate stories from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. He shows how artists and writers retold these ancient stories to further their political and religious agendas. The author is persuasive in arguing that in the 19th century the classics were used to bolster an agenda of anti-Semitism, setting the state for WW II. The book contains beautiful color plates and also black-and-white photos showing works of art of the period and poses drawn from classical statuary. . . . The book is well written and the thesis well worth development." "[T]he book is of interest from a Wagnerian perspective in the insight it offers into the concerns of a society contemporary with Wagner and just across the water. . . . In its main topics, the painting and historical novel of Britain in the 19th century, this book is an eye-opener in its fascinating material and its approach."---Michael Dyson, Wagner Journal "In its scope and verve, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity clearly signals just how far reception studies has come within the field of classics, but remains, as well, a timely reminder of just how far we have to go if we are to achieve a true, lasting, and abiding interdisciplinarity."---Thomas E. Jenkins, New England Classic Journal "[O]ne of the many virtues of Goldhill's work . . . is his ability to draw connections across centuries."---William Baker, Years Work in English Studies "[T]his is an extremely good book. If it finds the readership it deserves, this volume, which is at once humane and scholarly in its historical account of culture and its vicissitudes, will not only illuminate central issues in Victorian culture

Victoria Wohl is professor of classics at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy, Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton), and Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory. She is also the editor of Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought. How can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits-from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense-shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment. Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated-and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically. "Wohl is a careful reader of Euripides and she advances cogent observations and arguments, many about more than just the formal aspects of his plays." "An important and thoughtful analysis of the relationship between politics and aesthetic form in a select number of Euripidean plays. . . . An insightful study that is accessible to students and rewarding for scholars. It makes a major contribution to the study of Euripidean drama and offers a productive model for rethinking how tragedy worked through aesthetic form."---David Kawalko Roselli, Bryn Mawr Classical Review "This book goes to the heart of thinking about tragedy and politics. Victoria Wohl links issues of tragic form directly to politics in a subtle and smart way. And the book is written with a clarity and simplicity that will make it very popular among students."-Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge "In this elegantly written book, Victoria Wohl advances our thinking about Euripidean drama by supplying a new framework for reading the plays. Her bold proposal to connect aesthetics to politics enriches a long debate surrounding the plays' relation to Athenian democratic institutions and civic discourse."-Angeliki Tzanetou, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Michael C. J. Putnam is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of ten books, including The Poetry of the Aeneid, and coeditor of The Virgilian Tradition (forthcoming). The lives of Catullus and Horace overlap by a dozen years in the first century BC. Yet, though they are the undisputed masters of the lyric voice in Roman poetry, Horace directly mentions his great predecessor, Catullus, only once, and this reference has often been taken as mocking. In fact, Horace's allusion, far from disparaging Catullus, pays him a discreet compliment by suggesting the challenge that his accomplishment presented to his successors, including Horace himself. In Poetic Interplay, the first book-length study of Catullus's influence on Horace, Michael Putnam shows that the earlier poet was probably the single most important source of inspiration for Horace's Odes, the later author's magnum opus. Except in some half-dozen poems, Catullus is not, technically, writing lyric because his favored meters do not fall into that category. Nonetheless, however disparate their preferred genres and their stylistic usage, Horace found in the poetry of Catullus, whatever its mode of presentation, a constant stimulus for his imagination. And, despite the differences between the two poets, Putnam's close readings reveal that many of Horace's poems echo Catullus verbally, thematically, or both. By illustrating how Horace often found his own voice even as he acknowledged Catullus's genius, Putnam guides us to a deeper appreciation of the earlier poet as well. "This study makes an important contribution to classical scholarship in its reassessment of Horace's engagement with Catullan lyric by reminding the reader of the extent of Horace's formal and thematic debts to Catullus and the range of strategies he employs for diffusing the visibility of the earlier poet's influence." "Scholars in particular may profit a lot from such a detailed treatment of the subject, but for anyone who is intrigued by the allusions to Catullus that continually surface in Horace, this is the book to consult."---Bruce Arnold, The Classical Outlook "This new book is thought provoking and persuasive in its argument for 'the ubiquity of Catullus as a presence' in the Horatian lyric corpus. It is also a work that should be of considerable interest not only for students of Horace but also for those who study the relationship between Augustan literature and the literature of the late Republic."---Grigory Starikovsky, Classical World "P.'s groundbreaking work on Catullus and Horace in the 1960s and 70s finds its complement in his new book, which puts flesh on an old connection that has never been systematically explored. This expanded version of the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lectures, delivered at Oberlin College in March 2004, provides a fascinating close-up on the way one poet inhabits another."---William Fitzgerald, Journal of Roman Studies "This is a book that has long been needed and I can't think of anyone better to have written it than Michael Putnam. For any scholar working on either Horace or Catullus, this book will be essential reading. Putnam's argument about the extent of their 'poetic interplay' is not only convincing, but also quite astonishing."-Ronnie Ancona, Hunter College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York "Exceptionally fluent. There is no other book-length study on this subject. Putnam makes a convincing case for the central role Catullus plays in Horace's lyric poetry."-Ortwin Knorr, Willamette University

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010" Kenneth J. Reckford is the Kenan Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His books include Aristophanes' Old-And-New Comedy. Recognizing Persius is a passionate and in-depth exploration of the libellus--or little book--of six Latin satires left by the Roman satirical writer Persius when he died in AD 62 at the age of twenty-seven. In this comprehensive and reflectively personal book, Kenneth Reckford fleshes out the primary importance of this mysterious and idiosyncratic writer. Reckford emphasizes the dramatic power and excitement of Persius's satires--works that normally would have been recited before a reclining, feasting audience. In highlighting the satires' remarkable honesty, Reckford shows how Persius converted Roman satire into a vehicle of self-exploration and self-challenge that remains relevant to readers today. The book explores the foundations of Roman satire as a performance genre: from the dinner-party recitals of Lucilius, the founder of the genre, through Horace, to Persius's more intense and inward dramatic monologues. Reckford argues that despite satire's significant public function, Persius wrote his pieces first and mainly for himself. Reckford also provides the context for Persius's life and work: his social responsibilities as a landowner; the interplay between his life, his Stoic philosophy, and his art; and finally, his incomplete struggle to become an honest and decent human being. Bringing the modern reader to a closer and more nuanced acquaintance with Persius's work, Recognizing Persius reinstates him to the ranks of the first-rate satirists, alongside Horace and Juvenal. "The book retains the informal approach of the original lectures, a shrewd choice since Reckford excels at using the public speaker's panoply to bring his subject to life; by book's end, readers will fell that they not only know Persius better but also understand more deeply his struggle, as a person and as an author, against humanity's foibles and follies." "Reckford takes his reader through a well-structured overview of the genre, which I believe will be particularly helpful to students just encountering Roman Satire. Because of the scope of this book, therefore, I would strongly recommend it as an introduction not only to Persius but also to the entire genre, for it places Lucilius, Horace, and to some extent Juvenal, in a context that is often elusive, largely because of the very nature of satire."---Patricia A. Johnston, Bryn Mawr Classical Review "With effortless execution, Reckford draws the reader gently and persuasively into the remote world of this brilliant, young Roman satirist. This is a warm, deeply thoughtful, and perceptive book."-Dan Hooley, University of Missouri "English language books focusing on Persius are few and far between. Reckford is well-versed in ancient satire and his close analyses of particular words, lines, and passages are often compelling."-Cedric Littlewood, University of Victoria

"Winner of the 2009 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association" Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Catullus, Catullus in English, Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men, and Catullus and His Renaissance Readers. This book traces the transmission and reception of one of the most influential novels in Western literature. The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety, tells of a young man changed into an ass by magic and his bawdy adventures and narrow escapes before the goddess Isis changes him back again. Its centerpiece is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche. Julia Gaisser follows Apuleius' racy tale from antiquity through the sixteenth century, tracing its journey from roll to codex in fourth-century Rome, into the medieval library of Monte Cassino, into the hands of Italian humanists, into print, and, finally, over the Alps and into translation in Spanish, French, German, and English. She demonstrates that the novel's reception was linked with Apuleius' reputation as a philosopher and the persona he projected in his works. She relates Apuleius and the Golden Ass to a diverse cast of important literary and historical figures--including Augustine, Fulgentius, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bessarion, Boiardo, and Beroaldo. Paying equal attention to the novel's transmission (how it survived) and its reception (how it was interpreted), she places the work in its many different historical contexts, examining its representation in art, literary imitation, allegory, scholarly commentary, and translation. The volume contains several appendixes, including an annotated list of the manuscripts of the Golden Ass. This book is based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 2000. "With a graceful style and an immense knowledge of the vicissitudes of the story, Gaisser traces the manuscripts that carried The Golden Ass through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance; the editions and translations that followed; and the ways in which readers interpreted, imitated, and adapted it. The result is a remarkable work of scholarship: detailed and learned, but accessible to the general reader with an interest in the fate of a brilliant book over the course of two millennia."---D. Konstan, Brown University, for, CHOICE "Gaisser has done all students of Apuleius a profound service in a book that is not only a model for reception studies but will also be a standard reference in Apuleian studies for at least a generation."---Joel C. Relihan, New England Classical Journal "This valuable book provides a fascinating perspective for comparativists on the nature of early modern exegesis. More importantly, it offers an invigorating re-evaluation of an enigmatic author whom many Latinists see only in the context of the time in which he lived--a context which has been constructed and constrained by the myopias of early-twentieth-century classical scholarship."---Andrew Laird, European Legacy "Donkeys get little enough respect, and to have been made the subject of a comic novel has done little for their reputation or for that of the author, Apuleius. Julia Haig Gaisser follows Apuleius and his donkey through a journey of many centuries-a journey as remarkable as the one recounted in the novel. She is wise, witty, learned, and sharp-eyed: the perfect guide."-James J. O'Donnell, Georgetown University "This is a terrific book. Julia Gaisser follows the fortunes of the Roman sophist Apuleius and his masterpiece, the Golden Ass, in the centuries after the author's death. Through a richly learned and imaginative inquiry, she shows us how the text itself survived, first in manuscript and then in print, how scholars tried to understand it, and how it sparked the curiosity and creativity of philosophers, imaginative writers, and artists working in radically different times and contexts. Meticulous

"Winner of the Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History" "One of Choice Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles of 2018" David Frankfurter is professor of religion at Boston University and a scholar of early Christianity whose specialties include apocalyptic literature, magical texts, demonology, popular religion, and Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods. He is the author of Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance and Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (both Princeton). Each won an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity. As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term "syncretism" for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints' shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past. Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints' lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change-from the "conversion" of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment. "Outstanding. . . . The thesis is interesting [and] the evidence effective. . . . Agree or disagree with Frankfurter's central claims, Christianizing Egypt may become a methodological must-read for anyone working in pre-modern Christianity."---Zachary B. Smith, Reading Religion "Christianizing Egypt is a thoughtful and exceptionally valuable study, with implications that go far beyond either Egypt or Late Antiquity. . . . An excellent book."---Philip Jenkins, Journal of Church and State "Christianizing Egypt builds on David Frankfurter's career working on the religious history of Roman and late antique Egypt and his deep knowledge of the Egyptian sources, material and literary alike, from hagiographical texts and sermons (in both Coptic and Greek) to terracotta figurines and amulets. The contribution this book makes to describing, analysing and interpreting religious change and process is very valuable indeed. There is much in this book for those interested in questions of religious change far beyond the confines of late antique Egypt."---Lucy Grig, Times Literary Supplement "Offering a creative and convincing new picture of Christianity in Egypt in late antiquity, this book will appeal to a wide range of scholars in religion, anthropology, and sociology. Every page testifies to David Frankfurter's deep knowledge of an exceptionally wide range of ancient texts and artifacts. And his writing is so engaging and vivid that he makes the religious practices come alive. This will be a very influential book."-AnneMarie Luijendijk, Princeton University "David Frankfurter has cut through a haze of misconceptions and loose interpretations of evidence to get to a new and greatly improved understanding of how Christianity came to dominate Egypt in late antiquity. His book provides ideas for thinking about the spread of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world and inde

"Shortlisted for the 2012 Runciman Award, Anglo-Hellenic League" Erich S. Gruen is the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics (emeritus) at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans and Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples. Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature. Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation. "[T]he range of research, and the depth of thought, are extraordinary. Gruen has taken on a massively important subject, and he has brought a genuinely new perspective to the scholarly conversation."---Emily Wilson, New Republic "[Gruen] is at his best when he dissects Greco-Roman perceptions of the Jews and the Jewish reception of Greco-Roman culture and accommodation with the world of the goyim." "Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, by Erich S. Gruen, out this month from Princeton University Press, like all excellent scholarship massages the mind in useful new directions. . . . Gruen's mission . . . is to unpack the contrary story, far less told: 'that Greeks, Romans, and Jews (who provide us with almost all the relevant extant texts) had far more mixed, nuanced, and complex opinions about other peoples.' In the main text and many useful footnotes of this info-packed but never boring study, Gruen accomplishes that."---Carlin Romano, Chronicle Review "Anthropologists should seriously consider Gruen's case, and it would be wonderful if this appreciation of and openness to different peoples and cultures could somehow enter into contemporary politics and culture."---Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database "Rethinking the Other is an extremely valuable departure from a scholarly viewpoint that has threatened to become ossified of late, and as such is very worthwhile to everyone involved in the study of ancient conceptions of foreignness and belonging."---Antti Lampinen, ARCTOS "Erich Gruen's Rethinking the Other in Antiquity is a book that, for one reason or another, desperately needed to be written, ideally by someone possessing G.'s authoritative command of the vast array of sources indicative of ancient knowledge of, and interest in, foreign peoples. . . . The result is a provocative, wide-ranging and thoroughly engaging volume that is both beautifully produced--with copious footnotes, helpful indices and handsome book-jacket featuring a (highly apposite) janiform vase--and (very) reasonably priced. The latter is fortuitous since it will automatically become a set text for courses touching on ancient self-conception and relations with foreign people

Mark W. Edwards is Emeritus Professor of Classics at Stanford University. He is the author of Homer: Poet of the Iliad and Volume 5 of The Iliad: A Commentary. This book concerns the way we read--or rather, imagine we are listening to--ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Through clear and penetrating analysis Mark Edwards shows how an understanding of the effects of word order and meter is vital for appreciating the meaning of classical poetry, composed for listening audiences. The first of four chapters examines Homer's emphasis of certain words by their positioning; a passage from the Iliad is analyzed, and a poem of Tennyson illustrates English parallels. The second considers Homer's techniques of disguising the break in the narrative when changing a scene's location or characters, to maintain his audience's attention. In the third we learn, partly through an English translation matching the rhythm, how Aeschylus chose and adapted meters to arouse listeners' emotions. The final chapter examines how Latin poets, particularly Propertius, infused their language with ambiguities and multiple meanings. An appendix examines the use of classical meters by twentieth-century American and English poets. Based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 1998, this book will enrich the appreciation of classicists and their students for the immense possibilities of the languages they read, translate, and teach. Since the Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English, it will also be welcomed by non-classicists as an aid to understanding the enormous influence of ancient Greek and Latin poetry on modern Western literature. "If by this book [Edwards] succeeds in heightening sensitivity to the features which he seeks to recuperate, he will indeed have done good service to his peers and successors . . . and have given renewed hope for the continued vitality of ancient Greek and Latin literature."---Michael W. Haslam, Bryn Mawr Classical Review "This lively and often fascinating exposition of the sound of ancient poetry and its relation to sense and meaning, especially as perceived by the listening audience, is relevant to anyone who tries to understand ancient literature in context. . . . [T]his book is enlightening for both scholars and general readers of the classics, indeed for those interested in the relation between sound and sense in any literature and for lovers of the poetry of any culture."---Jonathan J. Price, Religious Studies Review "Sound, Sense, and Rhythm is superb. Among its many virtues are a remarkable mastery of technical aspects of ancient verse, providing a treasurehouse of information for classicists and other professionals; the excellent use of modern and/or contemporary literature to help explain ancient practice, and the clear and graceful writing."-Thomas Van Nortwick, Oberlin College "Mark Edwards provides an extraordinarily sensitive and intelligent reading of the poems on which he focuses. Every classroom instructor teaching Greek or Roman poetic texts deserves the opportunity to read his book, both for its wonderful particulars and for its important general principles."-Steven Fineberg, Knox College

"Winner of the 2012 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association" "Shortlisted for the 2012 Runciman Award, Anglo-Hellenic League" Leslie Kurke is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold (Princeton). Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Kurke's learned and humane book aims to excavate the vibrant popular tradition assumed by Aesop's fables but now largely buried, and restore it to its place in cultural history. . . . Aesopic Conversations is a brilliant and original book, which will transform the way we read early Greek literature."---Tim Whitmarsh, London Review of Books "There are large ideas in this book. Critical faculties will be honed by reading it."---Vivienne Gray, Bryn Mawr Classical Review "With her keen eye for symbolic expressions of ideological conflict, Kurke has thrust Aesop into the center of major political, philosophical and literary developments of the fifth and fourth centuries. Precisely because of its ambitions, many of the claims this book makes want weighing. But let it be said that if Kurke sometimes pushes the evidence, she never forces it, and she always gives space to alternative views in substantial footnotes."---Andrew Ford, International Journal of the Classical Tradition "[Kurke] consistently succeeds in keeping the main lines of her argument clearly in view. Cumulatively her discussion is both rich and persuasive and often quite witty. The Aesop who emerges is altogether a much more complex, influential, and interesting figure than the homespun rustic narrator of 'Aesop's fables.'"---Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, New England Classical Journal "[A] thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion, here and throughout the book: Kurke makes us look anew at familiar texts, and that is what literary criticism is for."---John Taylor, Anglo-Hellenic Review "Kurke's . . . approach to the text(s) of the Life of Aesop [is] groundbreaking and sophisticated. While there have been a number of valuable studies of the Life of Aesop in recent decades, few have attempted to grapple in earnest with the specific challenges posed by its anonymity, textual multiplicity, and popular character."---Jeremy B. Lefkowitz, Phoenix "Kurke's is a very distinctive voice. Her scholarship is alway

Helene P. Foley is Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, coauthor of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, and editor of Reflections of Women in Antiquity and of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Princeton). Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece. This book examines, for example, the tragic response to legislation regulating family life that may have begun as early as the sixth century. It also draws upon contemporary studies of virtue ethics and upon feminist reconsiderations of the Western ethical tradition. Foley maintains that by viewing public issues through the lens of the family, tragedy asks whether public and private morality can operate on the same terms. Moreover, the plays use women to represent significant moral alternatives. Tragedy thus exploits, reinforces, and questions cultural clichés about women and gender in a fashion that resonates with contemporary Athenian social and political issues. "Innovative and accessible. . . . [Foley] combines wide coverage with nuance and detail. . . . Hers is the best argument you will find to the effect that Greek tragedy gives heroines a (limited) space from which to assert their private and public virtues alongside male vices and transgressions. This builds to a distinctive and carefully historicized vision of tragedy's role in Athens, not to mention its surprising contribution to modern debates about ethics and gender."---Jon Hesk, Times Literary Supplement "[A] well-documented study of Greek tragedy from a feminisit perspective." "This impressive work is noteworthy for its comprehensive scope and its lucid style. All those interested in an expanded understanding of ancient drama should benefit from this major study done by a very important scholar."---Mary-Kay Gamel, Theatre Journal "Sensibility of thought and methodology characterize this work that will be valued by scholars, teachers, and students of Greek tragedy. . . . This study excels because of the author's firm grasp of the ancient texts and her willingness to embrace methodologies that do no violence to them."---John E. Thorburn, The Classical Outlook "Foley offers new perspectives and complete presentations of several tragedy women. . . . This book may not be read in an afternoon. But every classics scholar should read it once and most will reread sections to consider again Foley's selected women."---Karelisa V. Hartigan, Religious Studies Review "Helene Foley's book is exemplary in its use of a variety of approaches and it casts new light on both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of the tragic texts and Greek culture. Her treatment of myth, ritual, and dramatic plot, for example, is much richer and more nuanced than readings that have looked almost exclusively at the patriarchal aspects of the representation of women. Written in a fashion that is accessible to nonspecialists, this book will interest anthropologists, philosophers specializing in ethics, and scholars of gender studies-as well as classicists."-Donald J. Mastronarde, University of California, Berkeley "An important book that will become the standard starting point for s

"Co-Winner of the 2019 Runciman Award, Anglo-Hellenic League" Robin Osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of King's College. His books include Archaic and Classical Greek Art; Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC; Athens and Athenian Democracy; and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body. How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek culture Why did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art? The scenes depicted on Athenian pottery of the mid-fifth century BC are very different from those of the late sixth century. Did Greek potters have a different world to see-or did they come to see the world differently? In this lavishly illustrated and engagingly written book, Robin Osborne argues that these remarkable changes are the best evidence for the shifting nature of classical Greek culture. Osborne examines the thousands of surviving Athenian red-figure pots painted between 520 and 440 BC and describes the changing depictions of soldiers and athletes, drinking parties and religious occasions, sexual relations, and scenes of daily life. He shows that it was not changes in each activity that determined how the world was shown, but changes in values and aesthetics. By demonstrating that changes in artistic style involve choices about what aspects of the world we decide to represent as well as how to represent them, this book rewrites the history of Greek art. By showing that Greeks came to see the world differently over the span of less than a century, it reassesses the history of classical Greece and of Athenian democracy. And by questioning whether art reflects or produces social and political change, it provokes a fresh examination of the role of images in an ever-evolving world. "Osborne's gifts as an observer of ancient art are beyond dispute. His discussions of the vase scenes he has chosen to explore are filled with the kind of insight that make one inclined to accept any conclusions to which they might lead. His book offers a radically new approach to the Attic vases, one that might even achieve the two grand goals Osborne sets for it: not only to 'rewrite the history of art' but also to 'rewrite history.'"---James Romm, New York Review of Books "[The Transfomation of Athens] reinstates Athenian pottery to the place it deserves and acknowledges the enormous potential of painted vases to illuminate many areas of Greek culture. . . . This is a lucid, engaging and persuasive book."---Diana Rodríguez Pérez, Burlington Magazine "This is a highly engaging, persuasive, and original book. Combining rigorous scholarship with clear and lively prose, it almost seamlessly integrates a variety of theories with a more empirical approach."-Jonathan Hall, University of Chicago "This is the first book to address, in a large-scale way, what vase painting reveals about the 'social imaginary' of ancient Athens. It finally accounts for the changes in this area of art in a systematic fashion and contextualizes them within the larger history of Greek art."-Kathryn Topper, University of Washington

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist and scholar of classics who lives in Montreal. Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton), has recently been reissued by The Dalkey Archive. Her most recent book, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Knopf), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility. "Erudite and entertaining, effortlessly able to play across a range of associations, the book traces a number of similarities in artistic approach between two writers who would seem, on the face of it, to have inhabited very different worlds . . . Economy of the Unlost is a beguiling piece of work, both scholarly and persuasive."---Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books "This is one of those rewarding, original, rigorously attentive books that only Anne Carson could have written. At its core is an idea-the way the overlapping senses of 'economy' play out in language and in monetary history-that only this brilliant poet/classicist could have come up with. Economy of the Unlost is a strange book, bringing together as it does Simonides and Paul Celan; but its strangeness is one of its great virtues, for startling insights spring uncannily off every page."---Wendy Lesser, Editor, The Threepenny Review "[A] magnificent and lovely essay. . . . I never wanted [the] book to end. .. ." "[Carson] convincingly draws out the fraternity of tone and inclination in two poets far removed in time, experience, and language, a significant accomplishment. It is. . . .difficult to do full justice to her book--rich, delicate, and complex. . . . An act of grace."---Danielle Allen, Chicago Review "This is a remarkable, gripping, and moving book, itself a kind of extended prose poem, crafted by Carson between the excerpts of the two poets and her amazing readings and juxtapositions thereof. Like all of Carson's writing, it is sui generis, combining meticulous scholarship with the sensibili

Ruby Blondell is professor emerita of classics and adjunct professor emerita of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Their books include Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation and Ancient Sex: New Essays. How a legendary woman from classical antiquity has come to embody the threat of transcendent beauty in movies and TV Helen of Troy in Hollywood examines the figure of the mythic Helen in film and television, showing how storytellers from different Hollywood eras have used Helen to grapple with the problems and dynamics of gender and idealized femininity. Paying careful attention to how the image of Helen is embodied by the actors who have portrayed her, Ruby Blondell provides close readings of such works as Wolfgang Petersen's Troy and the Star Trek episode "Elaan of Troyius," going beyond contextualization to lead the reader through a fundamental rethinking of how we understand and interpret the classic tradition. A luminous work of scholarship by one of today's leading classicists, Helen of Troy in Hollywood highlights the importance of ancient myths not as timeless stories frozen in the past but as lenses through which to view our own artistic, cultural, and political moment in a new light. This incisive book demonstrates how, whether as the hero of these screen adaptations or as a peripheral character in male-dominated adventures, the mythic Helen has become symbolic of the perceived dangers of superhuman beauty and transgressive erotic agency. "Engaging."---Harry Strawson, Times Literary Supplement "An enlightening and accessible overview of the pervasive presence of Zeus's daughter in American popular culture, ranging from silent Hollywood cinema to televised speculative fiction . . . {and} a must read for scholars of both classical reception and popular culture."---Gabrielle Stecher, Popular Culture Studies Journal "A smart exploration of how this mythic figure has been portrayed in film and television. {Blondell} has written a thematically bold book that entertainingly contemplates what Helen of Troy signifies in old and modern Hollywood productions."---Christopher Schobert, The Film Stage "Engaging, thoughtful, and highly readable. Written with clarity and brio, Helen of Troy in Hollywood makes for an enlightening exploration."-Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, author of Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World "Helen of Troy in Hollywood is a pleasure to read. In giving an account of how this classic figure's story has been retold, Blondell enhances our sense of the importance of such stories in giving shape and form to our own moment."-William Patrick Day, author of Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year" "Winner of the McKay Award, Vergilian Society" Joseph Farrell is the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Professor in the Humanities and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His many books include Ennius' "Annals": Poetry and History and A Companion to Vergil's "Aeneid" and Its Tradition. A major new interpretation of Vergil's epic poem as a struggle between two incompatible versions of the Homeric hero This compelling book offers an entirely new way of understanding the Aeneid. Many scholars regard Vergil's poem as an attempt to combine Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into a single epic. Joseph Farrell challenges this view, revealing how the Aeneid stages an epic contest to determine which kind of story it will tell-and what kind of hero Aeneas will be. Farrell shows how this contest is provoked by the transgressive goddess Juno, who challenges Vergil for the soul of his hero and poem. Her goal is to transform the poem into an Iliad of continuous Trojan persecution instead of an Odyssey of successful homecoming. Farrell discusses how ancient critics considered the flexible Odysseus the model of a good leader but censured the hero of the Iliad, the intransigent Achilles, as a bad one. He describes how the battle over which kind of leader Aeneas will prove to be continues throughout the poem, and explores how this struggle reflects in very different ways on the ethical legitimacy of Rome's emperor, Caesar Augustus. By reframing the Aeneid in this way, Farrell demonstrates how the purpose of the poem is to confront the reader with an urgent decision between incompatible possibilities and provoke uncertainty about whether the poem is a celebration of Augustus or a melancholy reflection on the discontents of a troubled age. "Thoroughly researched. . . . Highly recommended." "A highly engaging, well-written, and thought-provoking take on the Aeneid, which will become an indispensable guide both to Virgil's text and to the long and rich tradition of scholarship on the poem."---Anke Walter, Greece and Rome "Juno's Aeneid is a landmark work that should be essential reading on Vergil's relation to Homer.-Tedd A. Wimperis, Classical Journal" "A hell of a book. Farrell looks closely at the Latin text of the Aeneid in the light of ancient and modern scholarship and the reception of both Homer and Vergil, making a new and compelling argument about this complex and fascinating poem."-James J. O'Hara, author of Inconsistency in Roman Epic "A magnificently ambitious and learned exploration of the metanarrative, ethical, and ideological implications of Virgilian intertextuality."-Ellen Oliensis, author of Loving Writing/Ovid's "Amores"