Author: Kristoffel Demoen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004171096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this collection of interpretative essays on Flavius Philostratusa (TM) "Vita Apollonii," leading scholars and younger critics make for a combination of methodological continuity and innovation. The wide range of approaches does justice to the texta (TM)s high level of literary, historical and philosophical-religious sophistication.
Author: Daniel S. Richter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199837473
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 777
Get Book Here
Book Description
The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity).
Author: Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647540307
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 551
Get Book Here
Book Description
The volume focuses on the various representations of the Beyond in later Antiquity, a period of intense interaction and competition between various religious traditions and ideals of education. The concepts and images clustering around the Beyond form a crucial focal point for understanding the dynamics of religion and education in later Antiquity. Although Christianity gradually supersedes the pagan traditions, the literary representations of the Beyond derived from classical literature and transmitted through the texts read at school show a remarkable persistence: they influence Christian late antique writers and are still alive in medieval literature of the East and West. A specifically Christian Beyond develops only gradually, and coexists subsequently with pagan ideas, which in turn vary according to the respective literary and philosophical contexts. Thus, the various conceptualisations of the great existential unknown, serves here as a point of reference for mirroring the changes and continuities in Imperial and Late Antique religion, education, and culture, and opening up further perspectives into the Medieval world.
Author: Raffaella Cribiore
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
Libanius of Antioch was a rhetorician of rare skill and eloquence. So renowned was he in the fourth century that his school of rhetoric in Roman Syria became among the most prestigious in the Eastern Empire. In this book, Raffaella Cribiore draws on her unique knowledge of the entire body of Libanius’s vast literary output—including 64 orations, 1,544 letters, and exercises for his students—to offer the fullest intellectual portrait yet of this remarkable figure whom John Chrystostom called “the sophist of the city." Libanius (314–ca. 393) lived at a time when Christianity was celebrating its triumph but paganism tried to resist. Although himself a pagan, Libanius cultivated friendships within Antioch’s Christian community and taught leaders of the Church including Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea. Cribiore calls him a “gray pagan” who did not share the fanaticism of the Emperor Julian. Cribiore considers the role that a major intellectual of Libanius’s caliber played in this religiously diverse society and culture. When he wrote a letter or delivered an oration, who was he addressing and what did he hope to accomplish? One thing that stands out in Libanius’s speeches is the startling amount of invective against his enemies. How common was character assassination of this sort? What was the subtext to these speeches and how would they have been received? Adapted from the Townsend Lectures that Cribiore delivered at Cornell University in 2010, this book brilliantly restores Libanius to his rightful place in the rich and culturally complex world of Late Antiquity.
Author: Daniel S. Richter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190454199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is a book about the ways in which various intellectuals in the post-classical Mediterranean imagined the human community as a unified, homogenous whole composed of a diversity of parts. More specifically, it explores how authors of the second century CE adopted and adapted a particular ethnic and cultural discourse that had been elaborated by late fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athenian intellectuals. At the center of this book is a series of contests over the meaning of lineage and descent and the extent to which the political community is or ought to be coterminous with what we might call a biologically homogenous collectivity. The study suggests that early imperial intellectuals found in late classical and early Hellenistic thought a way of accommodating the claims of both ethnicity and culture in a single discourse of communal identity. The idea of the unity of humankind evolved in the fifth and fourth centuries as a response to and an engine for the creation of a rapidly shrinking and increasingly integrated oikoumenê . The increased presence of outsiders in the classical city-state as well as the creation of sources of authority that lay outside of the polis destabilized the idea of the polis as a kin group (natio). Beginning in the early fourth century and gaining great momentum in the wake of Alexander's conquest of the East, traditional dichotomies such as Greek and barbarian lost much of their explanatory power. In the second-century CE, by contrast, the empire of the Romans imposed a political space that was imagined by many to be coterminous with the oikoumenê itself. One of the central claims of this study is that the forms of cosmopolitan and ecumenical thought that emerged in both moments did so as responses to the idea that the natio - the kin group - is (or ought to be) the basis for any human collectivity.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004340114
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Get Book Here
Book Description
Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature: Images, Metatexts and Interpretation is a collection of essays that survey the rhetorical tropes and the metaliterary dimension of works by important authors in a period marked by intense and thriving contact between Classical paideia and Christian culture. The contributions of this volume dissect the reuse of Classical literature and the deployment of rhetorical techniques in the creation of texts and images meant for use in cultural and religious debates by building on recent interpretations of the late antique cultural landscape as a milieu in which our understanding of religious dichotomies requires a more nuanced reassessment. The authors treated in this volume include Eusebius of Caesarea, Methodius of Olympus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Nonnus and the emperor Julian.
Author: Michael Paschalis
Publisher: Barkhuis
ISBN: 9077922547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book Here
Book Description
The present volume comprises most of the papers delivered at RICAN 4 in 2007. The focus is placed on readers and writers in the ancient novel and broadly in ancient fiction, though without ignoring readers and writers of the ancient novel. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: the reading of novels in antiquity as a process of active engagement with the text (Konstan); the dialogic character, involving writer and reader, of Lucian's Verae Historiae (Futre Pinheiro); book divisions in Chariton's Callirhoe as prompts guiding the reader towards gradual mastery over the text (Whitmarsh); polypragmosyne (curiosity) in ancient fiction and how it affects the practice of reading novels (Hunter); the intriguing relationship between the writing and reading of inscriptions in ancient fiction (Slater); the tension between public and private in constructing and reading of texts inserted in the novelistic prose (Nimis); the intertextual pedigree of the poet Eumolpus (Smith); Seneca's Claudius and Petronius' Encolpius as readers of Homer and Virgil and writers of literary scenarios (Paschalis); the ways in which some Greek novels draw the reader's attention to their status as written texts (Bowie); the interfaces between tellers and receivers of stories in Antonius Diogenes (Morgan); the generic components and the putative author of the Alexander Romance (Stoneman); Diktys as a writer and ways of reading his Ephemeris (Dowden); the presence and character of Iliadic intertexts in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (Harrison); the contrasting roles of the narrator-translator in Apuleius' Metamorphoses and De deo Socratis (Fletcher); seriocomic strategies by Roman authors of narrative fiction and fable (Graverini & Keulen); reading as a function for recognizing 'allegorical moments' in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (Zimmerman); active and passive reading as embedded in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius; and the importance of book reading in Augustine's 'novelistic' Confessions (Hunink).
Author: Anna Lefteratou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110527510
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is about the bold, beautiful, and faithful heroines of the Greek novels and their mythical models, such as Iphigenia, Phaedra, Penelope, and Helen. The novels manipulate readerly expectations through a complex web of mythical variants and constantly negotiate their adventure and erotic plot with that of traditional myths becoming, thus, part of the imperial mythical revision to which they add the prospect of a happy ending.
Author: Bruce W. Longenecker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108671292
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 864
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first three hundred years of the common era witnessed critical developments that would become foundational for Christianity itself, as well as for the societies and later history that emerged thereafter. The concept of 'ancient Christianity,' however, along with the content that the category represents, has raised much debate. This is, in part, because within this category lie multiple forms of devotion to Jesus Christ, multiple phenomena, and multiple permutations in the formative period of Christian history. Within those multiples lie numerous contests, as varieties of Christian identity laid claim to authority and authenticity in different ways. The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity addresses these contested areas with both nuance and clarity by reviewing, synthesizing, and critically engaging recent scholarly developments. The 27 thematic chapters, specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of scholars, also offer constructive ways forward for future research.
Author: Marília P. Futre Pinheiro
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504029
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book Here
Book Description
The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.
