A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris

A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris PDF Author: Niall Livingstone
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004121430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first commentary on Isocrates "Busiris" explores the work s contribution to rhetorical theory, its parody of Plato s "Republic," and its strategies in advertising Isocratean political rhetoric as a middle way between sophistic education and the abstruse studies of Plato s Academy.

A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris

A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris PDF Author: Niall Livingstone
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004121430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first commentary on Isocrates "Busiris" explores the work s contribution to rhetorical theory, its parody of Plato s "Republic," and its strategies in advertising Isocratean political rhetoric as a middle way between sophistic education and the abstruse studies of Plato s Academy.

A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris

A Commentary on Isocrates' Busiris PDF Author: Livingstone
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047400925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume contains the first scholarly commentary on the puzzling work Busiris – part mythological jeu d’esprit, part rhetorical treatise and part self-promoting polemic – by the Greek educator and rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 BC). The commentary reveals Isocrates’ strategies in advertising his own political rhetoric as a middle way between amoral ‘sophistic’ education and the abstruse studies of Plato’s Academy. Introductory chapters situate Busiris within the lively intellectual marketplace of 4th-century Athens, showing how the work parodies Plato’s Republic, and how its revisionist treatment of the monster-king Busiris reflects Athenian fascination with the ‘alien wisdom’ of Egypt. As a whole, the book casts new light both on Isocrates himself, revealed as an agile and witty polemicist, and on the struggle between rhetoric and philosophy from which Hellenism and modern humanities were born.

Isocrates' Busiris

Isocrates' Busiris PDF Author: Niall Livingstone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 582

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Gift of the Nile

The Gift of the Nile PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520228200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
What the ancient Greeks thought and believed about Egypt and what this tells us about them.

The Gift of the Nile

The Gift of the Nile PDF Author: Phiroze Vasunia
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520926721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Egyptians mesmerized the ancient Greeks for scores of years. The Greek literature and art of the classical period are especially thick with representations of Egypt and Egyptians. Yet despite numerous firsthand contacts with Egypt, Greek writers constructed their own Egypt, one that differed in significant ways from actual Egyptian history, society, and culture. Informed by recent work on orientalism and colonialism, this book unravels the significance of these misrepresentations of Egypt in the Greek cultural imagination in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Looking in particular at issues of identity, otherness, and cultural anxiety, Phiroze Vasunia shows how Greek authors constructed an image of Egypt that reflected their own attitudes and prejudices about Greece itself. He focuses his discussion on Aeschylus Suppliants; Book 2 of Herodotus; Euripides' Helen; Plato's Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias; and Isocrates' Busiris. Reconstructing the history of the bias that informed these writings, Vasunia shows that Egypt in these works was shaped in relation to Greek institutions, values, and ideas on such subjects as gender and sexuality, death, writing, and political and ethnic identity. This study traces the tendentiousness of Greek representations by introducing comparative Egyptian material, thus interrogating the Greek texts and authors from a cross-cultural perspective. A final chapter also considers the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great and shows how he exploited and revised the discursive tradition in his conquest of the country. Firmly and knowledgeably rooted in classical studies and the ancient sources, this study takes a broad look at the issue of cross-cultural exchange in antiquity by framing it within the perspective of contemporary cultural studies. In addition, this provocative and original work shows how Greek writers made possible literary Europe's most persistent and adaptable obsession: the barbarian.

Odious Praise

Odious Praise PDF Author: Eric MacPhail
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271092408
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values. Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science. Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.

Anachronism and Antiquity

Anachronism and Antiquity PDF Author: Tim Rood
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350115215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term 'anachronism' as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied understanding of historical difference, which is reflected in sophisticated notions of anachronism. This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.

Plato and Pythagoreanism

Plato and Pythagoreanism PDF Author: Phillip Sidney Horky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but later scholars have been more skeptical. Plato and Pythagoreanism reconsiders this question by arguing that a specific type of Pythagorean philosophy, called "mathematical" Pythagoreanism, played a profound role in Plato's philosophy.

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric

A Companion to Greek Rhetoric PDF Author: Ian Worthington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144433414X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 633

Get Book Here

Book Description
This complete guide to ancient Greek rhetoric is exceptional both in its chronological range and the breadth of topics it covers. Traces the rise of rhetoric and its uses from Homer to Byzantium Covers wider-ranging topics such as rhetoric's relationship to knowledge, ethics, religion, law, and emotion Incorporates new material giving us fresh insights into how the Greeks saw and used rhetoric Discusses the idea of rhetoric and examines the status of rhetoric studies, present and future All quotations from ancient sources are translated into English

The Search for a New Alphabet

The Search for a New Alphabet PDF Author: Harald Hendrix
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027221561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
Literary Studies is currently going through a deep transformation, preparing itself for the launch into the twenty-first century. The present volume, which is dedicated to Douwe Fokkema on the occasion of his retirement from Utrecht University, captures this transformation in a number of squibs by a select international group of scholars. Topics dealt with are: canon formation, conventions, cultural relativism, hermeneutics vs. empirical studies, and the problem of values, all themes very much central to current discussions in comparative literature and literary theory. Taken together they form a variegated picture of a discipline in a changing world, continually involved, so to speak, in 'The Search for a New Alphabet.'