Donald Lateiner – författare

The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.

This edited collection looks at two of the most important ancient Greek historians living in the 5th Century BCE who are considered to be the founders of the western tradition of historiography. Thucydides and Herodotus examines the relevant relationship between these historians which is considered, especially nowadays, by historians and philologists to be more significant than previously realized. The volume includes an introduction by the editors which addresses our changing view of how the historians relate to one another, and twelve papers written by leading experts in the field of ancient history and philology. Nine of the papers discuss either comprehensive issues pertaining to the historians' relationship or their common themes and practices, while three further papers discuss the ancient reception of Herodotus and Thucydides and investigate the historians' debt to Homer.

This cutting-edge collection of essays offers provocative studies of ancient history, literature, gender identifications and roles, and subsequent interpretations of the republican and imperial Roman past. The prose and poetry of Cicero and Petronius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid receive fresh interpretations; pagan and Christian texts are re-examined from feminist and imaginative perspectives; genres of epic, didactic, and tragedy are re-examined; and subsequent uses and re-uses of the ancient heritage are probed with new attention: Shakespeare, Nineteenth Century American theater, and contemporary productions involving prisoners and veterans. Comprising nineteen essays collectively honoring the feminist Classical scholar Judith Hallett, this book will interest the Classical scholar, the ancient historian, the student of Reception Studies, and feminists interested in all periods. The authors from the United States, Britain, France and Switzerland are authorities in one or more of these fields and chapters range from the late Republic to the late Empire to the present.

In Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic, Donald Lateiner examines every major variety of Homeric nonverbal behavior, especially in the Odyssey. Noting differences from modern gestures and attending to variation that results from gender, age, and status, Lateiner explores the "silent language" and "what goes without saying" among the heroes Odysseus, Telemakhos, and Penelope -- but also the savage Kyklops, the suitors, and the servants. No previous work has thoroughly analyzed nonverbal behavior in Homeric epic. Gesture and posture, conscious and unconscious manipulation of space and time, and involuntary "leakage," such as twitching and shivering, can intensify and underline -- or contradict and ironize -- the speech of characters and hexameter narrative. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1995. "An important contribution to Homeric studies." --Choice "Sardonic Smile opens up new dimensions for the study of ancient literature; one may predict that analysis of the nonverbal 'parallel texts' will become increasingly common as a result of the important study." --Walter Donlan, Classical Journal

Herodotus was the first writer in the West to conceive the value of creating a record of the recent past. He found a way to co-ordinate the often conflicting data of history, ethnology, and culture. The Historical Method of Herodotus explores the intellectual habits and the literary principles of this pioneer writer of prose. Donald Lateiner argues, against the perception that Herodotus' work seems amorphous and ill organized, that the Histories contain their own definition of historical significance. He examines patterns of presentation and literary structure in narratives, speeches, and direct communications to the reader, in short, the conventions and rhetoric of history as Herodotus created it. This rhetoric includes the use of recurring themes, the relation of speech to reported actions, indications of doubt, stylistic idiosyncrasies, frequent reference to nonverbal behaviours, and strategies of opening and ending. Lateiner shows how Herodotus sometimes suppresses information on principle and sometimes compels the reader to choose among contending versions of events. His inventories of Herodotus' methods allow the reader to focus on typical practice, not misleading exception. In his analysis of the structuring concepts of the Histories, Lateiner scrutinizes Herodotean time and chronology. He considers the historian's admiration for ethnic freedom and autonomy, the rule of law, and the positive values of conflict. Despite these apparent biases, he argues, the text's intellectual and moral preferences present a generally cool and detached account from which an authorial personality rarely emerges.The Historical Method of Herodotus illuminates the idiosyncrasies and ambitious nature of a major text in classics and the Western tradition and touches on aspects of historiography, ancient history, rhetoric, and the history of ideas.