Evangelos Karakasis - Böcker

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the language of Roman comedy in general and that of Terence in particular. The study explores Terence's use of language to differentiate his characters and his language in relation to the language of the comic fragments of the palliata, the togata and the atellana. Linguistic categories in the Terentian corpus explored include colloquialisms, archaisms, hellenisms and idiolectal features. Terence is shown to give his old men an old-fashioned and verbose tone, while low characters are represented as using colloquial diction. An examination of Eunuchus' language shows it to be closer to the Plautine linguistic tradition. The book also provides a thorough linguistic/stylistic commentary on all the fragments of the palliata, the togata and the atellana. It shows that Terence, except in the case of his Eunuchus, consciously distances himself from the linguistic/stylistic tradition of Plautus followed by all other comic poets.

Agonistic or friendly song exchange in idyllic settings forms the very heart of Roman pastoral. It is also a key means of metapoetic stance-taking on the part of the long line of authors who have cultivated this “traditional” genre. The present book examines the motif of song exchange in Roman bucolic poetry under this double aspect: as a central theme with established or constantly forming sub-themes and paraphernalia (thus providing a comprehensive listing, description and analysis of such scenes in the totality of Roman literature), and as the locus where, thanks to its very traditionality, innovative generic tendencies are most easily expressed. Starting from Vergil, and continuing with Calpurnius Siculus, the Einsiedeln Eclogues and Nemesianus, the book focuses on how politics, panegyric, elegy, heroic and didactic poetry function as guest genres within the pastoral host genre, by tracing in detail the evolution of a wide variety of literary, linguistic, stylistic and metrical features.

Plautine Trends: Studies in Plautine Comedy and its Reception, a collective volume published as a Festschrift in honour of Prof. D. Raios (University of Ioannina), aims to contribute to the current, intense discussion on Plautine drama and engage with most of the topics which lie at the forefront of recent scholarship on ‘literary Plautus’. 13 papers by experts on Roman Comedy address issues concerning a) the structure of Plautine plot in its social, historical and philosophical contexts, b) the interfaces between language and comic plot, and c) plot and language as signs of reception. Participants include (in alphabetical order): A. Augoustakis, R.R. Caston, D.M. Christenson, M. Fontaine, S. Frangoulidis, M. Hanses, E. Karakasis, D. Konstan, K. Kounaki–Philippides, S. Papaioannou, A. Sharrock, N.W. Slater, and J.T. Welsh. The papers of the volume are preceded by an introduction offering a review of the extensive literature on the subject in recent years and setting the volume in its critical context. The preface to the volume is written by R.L. Hunter. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Plautine Comedy and its reception.

T. Calpurnius Siculus: A Pastoral Poet in Neronian Rome is the first ever detailed examination of the whole of Calpurnius' pastoral corpus in English. It aims to offer an overall picture of Calpurnius’ epigonal and generically transcending poetics and meta-poetics through a thorough comparative analysis of the generic interfaces between the bucolic host genre (as bequeathed to Siculus from Theocritus to Vergil) and various generic modes which operate in Calpurnius’ eclogues, such as epic, panegyric, elegiac, didactic/georgic. The analysis includes themes/motifs, intertexts and allusion, narrative sequences, diction and metre as well as meta-generic/meta-poetic signs, including Calpurnius' redirection and inversion of the Callimachean-neoteric poetological meta-language. The study’s interests also revolve around the ways in which Neronian ideology and imperial politics inform the pastoral narrative and often account for the formalistic change discerned as well as the manner in which Post-Classical diction functions as a targeted, self-conscious linguistic tell-tale of generic evolution. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Roman pastoral and its generic evolution as well as Neronian Literature.

T. Calpurnius Siculus: A Pastoral Poet in Neronian Rome is the first ever detailed examination of the whole of Calpurnius' pastoral corpus in English. It aims to offer an overall picture of Calpurnius’ epigonal and generically transcending poetics and meta-poetics through a thorough comparative analysis of the generic interfaces between the bucolic host genre (as bequeathed to Siculus from Theocritus to Vergil) and various generic modes which operate in Calpurnius’ eclogues, such as epic, panegyric, elegiac, didactic/georgic. The analysis includes themes/motifs, intertexts and allusion, narrative sequences, diction and metre as well as meta-generic/meta-poetic signs, including Calpurnius' redirection and inversion of the Callimachean-neoteric poetological meta-language. The study’s interests also revolve around the ways in which Neronian ideology and imperial politics inform the pastoral narrative and often account for the formalistic change discerned as well as the manner in which Post-Classical diction functions as a targeted, self-conscious linguistic tell-tale of generic evolution. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Roman pastoral and its generic evolution as well as Neronian Literature.

This volume collects the most recent essays of Richard Hunter, one of the world's leading experts in the field of Greek and Latin literature. The essays range across all periods of ancient literature from Homer to late antiquity, with a particular focus not just on the texts in their original contexts, but also on how they were interpreted and exploited for both literary and more broadly cultural purposes later in antiquity. Taken together, the essays sketch a picture of a continuous tradition of critical and historical engagement with the literature of the past from the period of Aristophanes and then Plato and Aristotle in classical Athens to the rich prose literature of the Second Sophistic. Richard Hunter's earlier essays are collected in On Coming After (Berlin 2008).