Janet Downie - Böcker

Aelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi present a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world--a narrative that seems at once public and private, artful and naive. While scholars have embraced the Logoi as a rich source for Imperial-era religion, politics, and elite culture, the style of the text has presented a persistent stumbling block to literary analysis. Setting this dream-memoir of illness and divine healing in the context of Aristides' professional concerns as an orator, this book investigates the text's rhetorical aims and literary aspirations. At the Limits of Art argues that the Hieroi Logoi are an experimental work. Incorporating numerous dream accounts and narratives of divine cure in a multi-layered and open text, Aristides works at the limits of rhetorical convention to fashion an authorial voice that is transparent to the divine. Reading the Logoi in the context of contemporary oratorical practices, and in tandem with Aristides' polemical orations and prose hymns, the book uncovers the professional agendas motivating this unusual self-portrait. Aristides' sober view of oratory as a sacred pursuit was in conflict with a widespread contemporary preference for spectacular public performance. In the Hieroi Logoi, Aristides claims a place in the world of the Second Sophistic on his own terms, offering a vision of his professional inspiration in a style that pushes the limits of literary convention.

Focusing on the Greek world during the high Roman Empire between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE, this edited volume examines the representation of space in literary, rhetorical, and mythographic texts of the period. Authors under discussion include major figures such as Dio of Prusa, Aelius Aristides, Arrian, Lucian, and Philostratus. Texts by Apollodorus, Alciphron, Aelian, Artemidorus, and Pausanias also receive attention, along with the Alexander Romance and Egyptian apocalyptic narratives. Attending to the relationship between mobility and cultural rootedness, each chapter examines how Greek writers of the imperial era constructed and represented the multi-temporal landscapes of their contemporary world.This edited volume contributes to a growing interest in the topographical imagination of the ancient Mediterranean. The Roman Empire was a world of vast trade networks, cosmopolitan culture, and high elite mobility, making geography an essential component of the language of power and culture. Volume contributors present a composite picture of how imperial-era Greek writers constructed and curated topographies of the Greek world – urban, rural, cultic, and monumental – to tell new stories about Hellenic space and its place within the broader empire.