J. L. Lightfoot – författare

The corpus of astrological material ascribed to the Egyptian priest Manetho consists of six books of poetry. This book serves as the companion to the one published by OUP in 2020, which was the first commentary in any language on the earliest three books of Manetho's poetry (two, three, and six as they appear in the manuscript). This volume supplies the remainder (books four, one, and five).Manetho was credited with a series of didactic poems which list outcomes for planetary set-ups in a birth chart. The books covered in this volume are not as easily dated as those in the first volume, but the most recent is probably no later than the fourth century and they are still Egyptian. As in the first volume, their descriptions of the kinds of person who are born under happy and unhappy configurations of stars speak to the lived realities, aspirations, and fears of the astrologer's clientele. Unlike in the first volume, however, the individual books treated here have different authors, and there is more emphasis on profiling individual poets in terms of style, metre, and mannerisms. As in the first volume, there is a Greek text with English translation and an apparatus with parallel material to enable comparison with related works. But this volume pays more attention to the transmission of traditional material from one author to another, and to the special approach required of an editor of material which, being in practical use, circulated in unstable and minutely-varying textual forms.

This is the first study of all the extant remains of the important Hellenistic poet and mythographer, Parthenius of Nicaea, reputed to have been Virgil's tutor in Greek and a major literary figure in his own right. A new edition of his poetic fragments, it presents the first commentary on them since the work of August Meineke (1843); it also attempts to contextualize Parthenius within the traditions of Hellenistic poetry and within the `neoteric revolution' of late Republican Rome. It is also the first detailed study of and commentary on the extant collection of love-stories, the Erotika Pathemata, showing their roots in Hellenistic historiography, on the one hand, and their connection to the increasingly popular genre of the novel, on the other. It uses narratology to illustrate the hitherto entirely unrecognised skill and artistry with which the stories are told, and offers a close linguistic analysis of a work of prose from a singularly badly documented period. The detailed commentary considers each story in terms of structure, literary and mythological affiliations, and parallel treatments; and a new text aims to provide an improved apparatus criticus with a good number of new suggestions. The prime importance of the work is that it aims to be a comprehensive treatment of a relatively neglected and marginalized figure; and that it sets Parthenius' poetry and prose side by side to illustrate and contextualize a literary personality who was unusual in antiquity as an accomplished writer in both genres.

This is the first commentary in any language on three of the books of ancient Greek astrological poetry ascribed to the Egyptian priest Manetho. Manetho, who became a figure for recondite wisdom, came to be credited with a series of didactic poems which list outcomes for planetary set-ups in a horoscope or birth chart. This book contends that we can learn a great deal from this material about the intellectual, cultural, social, and literary history of the world in which it was written--Hadrianic Egypt, and the second-century Roman Empire at large. Its descriptions of the kinds of person who are born under happy and unhappy configurations of stars speak to the lived realities, aspirations, and fears of the astrologer's clientele. Given astrology's enormous contemporary prestige, this means we are offered insights into the mental universe and values of the common man, l'homme moyen sensuel, that élite literature largely bypasses.The volume addresses current work on the emotions and popular ethics. It also brings to the fore a neglected witness to a type of imperial didactic poetry--functional, technical in content, and yet sharing a degree of artistrywith better-known poets such as Dionysius the Periegete. The Manethonian poems are placed in the context of other ancient astrological literature--much of it very different in idiom, complexity, and method--but also in the wider one of other divinatory texts, philosophical writing, and the novel. There is a Greek text with English translation and an apparatus with parallel material to enable comparison with related works.

In this book, J. L. Lightfoot throws a bridge between two mutually ignorant areas: pagan oracles and Judaeo-Christian studies. The Sibyl was a legendary figure in Greco-Roman antiquity who was credited with verse prophecies, often of an apocalyptic character. Lightfoot describes how she was taken over by Jews in the Hellenistic period, and later by Christians, as a vehicle for their own understandings of prophecy. She explores what those understandings were, and describes how the message was then clothed in the very distinctive and mannered pagan idiom that was the hallmark of Sibylline prophecy. The volume contains an edition, translation, and commentary on the undeservedly neglected first and second books of extant oracles. The commentary illustrates some of the ways in which biblical scriptures were represented and recast in an oracular idiom, and pays particular attention to the oracle's most noteworthy feature, its extraordinarily rich description of the Day of Judgement.

This is the first edition of and full-length commentary on On the Syrian Goddess, an Ionic ethnography of the Holy City of Hierapolis in northern Syria, where the Syrian goddess Atargatis was worshipped. This treatise is one of the most important literary sources for 'oriental' religions under the Roman Empire. Traditionally ascribed to Lucian of Samosata, the work has often been viewed as satire. Lightfoot argues for a much subtler reading, for the first time combining a literary and philological approach with the evidence of archaeology to set this complex treatise in the fullest possible context. The result bears on the religious culture of Roman Syria; on the genre of Herodotean ethnography and its revival and reception in the Second Sophistic; and on Lucian of Samosata himself. The edition is based on a fresh collation of all existing manuscripts and an English translation is provided.

In this volume, Lightfoot offers a detailed study of an ancient Greek geographical poem by Dionysius, a scholar-poet who flourished in Alexandria during the reign of Hadrian, which describes the world as it was then known. In antiquity, it was widely read and extremely influential, both in the schoolroom and among later poets. Translated into Latin, the subject of commentaries, and popular in Byzantium, it offers insights into multiple traditions of ancient geography, both literary and more scientific, and displays interesting affiliations to the earlier school of Alexandrian poets. The introductory essays discuss the poem's place in the literary context of ancient geography, focusing on its language, style, and metre, whereby Dionysius shows himself a particularly painstaking heir of the Hellenistic poets, and illustrates how intricately he interlaces sources and models to produce a mosaic of geographical learning. Particular emphasis is given to Dionysius' place in the ancient tradition of didactic poetry, and to his artful manipulations of ancient ethnographical convention to produce a vision of a bounteous, ordered, and harmonious world in the high days of the Roman Empire. The commentary, supported by a fresh edition and English translation, discusses Dionysius as a geographer but, above all, as a literary artist. This volume contributes to the revival of interest in, and appreciation of, imperial hexameter poetry, and brings to the fore a poem that deserves to be every bit as well-known as its Hellenistic counterpart, the Phaenomena of Aratus.