Richard F. Thomas - Böcker

A GUARDIAN AND INDEPENDENT BEST MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan’ Mary Beard ‘Thomas’s elegant, charming book offers something for everyone – not just the super-fans’ Independent When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world’s most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his Seventies, who wouldn’t even deign to make an acceptance speech?In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil and Ovid. Dylan’s Nobel prize win brought him vindication. This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas’s famous course, and makes a compelling case for moving Dylan out of the rock n’ roll Hall of Fame and into the pantheon of Classical poets. You’ll never think about Bob Dylan in the same way again.

This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

This volume and its companion volume devoted to the second half of the poem provide a detailed commentary, with text, on the whole of Virgil's Georgics. Professor Thomas describes this work as 'perhaps the most difficult, certainly the most controversial, poem in Roman literature'. He presents the Georgics as the finished poem of Virgil's mature years, approaching it not merely as a part of the tradition of didactic poetry, but rather as a work which confronts, behind its generic appearance, issues not essentially different from those which inform the Eclogues and Aeneid. His introduction and Commentary argue that Virgil's agricultural world, with its successes, failures and ultimate limitations, represents the arena for man's struggle with the realities of existence. Professor Thomas pays particular attention to Virgil's allusion to and reshaping of prior Greek and Latin poetry. The Introduction also covers stylistic, metrical and structural questions. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume. This edition is aimed primarily at students at university and in the upper forms of schools, but the range of its scholarship means that it will be valuable to all classical scholars. The Introduction contains material for non-classicists interested in Latin literature.

This volume, the second of two companion volumes which provide a detailed commentary, with text, on the whole of Virgil's Georgics, is devoted to Books III and IV of the poem. Professor Thomas describes the Georgics as 'perhaps the most difficult, certainly the most controversial, poem in Roman literature'. He presents the Georgics as the finished poem of Virgil's mature years, approaching it not merely as a part of the tradition of didactic poetry, but rather as a work which confronts, behind its generic appearance, issues not essentially different from those which inform the Eclogues and Aeneid. His introduction (in Volume 1 only) and Commentary argue that Virgil's agricultural world, with its successes, failures and ultimate limitations, represents the arena for man's struggle with the realities of existence. Professor Thomas pays particular attention to Virgil's allusion to and reshaping of prior Greek and Latin poetry. The Introduction also covers stylistic, metrical and structural questions. A subject index and indexes of important Greek and Latin words conclude each volume, the indexes in this volume covering the whole work. This edition is aimed primarily at students at university and in the upper forms of schools, but the range of its scholarship means that it will be valuable to all classical scholars. The Introduction contains material for non-classicists interested in Latin literature.

The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

This book is an examination of the ideological reception of Virgil at specific moments in the last two millennia. The author focuses on the emperor Augustus in the poetry of Virgil, detects in the poets and grammarians of antiquity alternately a collaborative oppositional reading and an attempt to suppress such reading, studies creative translation (particularly Dryden's), which reasserts the 'Augustan' Virgil, and examines naive translation which can be truer to the spirit of Virgil. Scrutiny of 'textual cleansing', philology's rewriting or excision of troubling readings, leads to readings by both supporters and opponents of fascism and National Socialism to support or subvert the latter-day Augustus. The book ends with a diachronic examination of the ways successive ages have tried to make the Aeneid conform to their upbeat expectations of this poet.

This volume includes: Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, “Half Slave, Half Free: Partial Manumission in the Ancient Near East and Beyond”; Chris Eckerman, “I Weave a Variegated Headband: Metaphors for Song and Communication in Pindar’s Odes”; Alexander Nikolaev, “Through the Thicket: The Text of Pindar Olympian 6.54 (βατιᾶι τ’ ἐν ἀπειράτωι)”; Tobias Joho, “Alcibiadean Mysteries and Longing for ‘Absent’ and ‘Invisible Things’ in Thucydides’ Account of the Sicilian Expedition”; Peter Barrios Lech, “Menander and Catullus 8—Revisited: Menander Misoumenos and Catullus Carmen 8”; Katharina Volk, “Varro and the Disorder of Things”; John T. Ramsey, “The Date of the Consular Elections in 63 and the Inception of Catiline’s Conspiracy”; Brian D. McPhee, “Erulus and the Moliones: An Iliadic Intertext in Aeneid 8.560–567”; Julia Scarborough, “Eridanus in Elysium: The Underground Poetics of Virgil’s Violent River”; Geert Roskam, “Providential Gods and Social Justice: An Ancient Controversy on Theonomous Ethics”; Rafael J. Gallé Cejudo, “Progymnasmatic Alteration in the Love Letters of Philostratus”; Moysés Marcos, “Callidior ceteris persecutor: The Emperor Julian and His Place in Christian Historiography”; Valéry Berlincourt, “Dea Roma and Mars: Intertext and Structure in Claudian’s Panegyric for the Consuls Olybrius and Probinus”; Fabio Stok, “What is the Spangenberg Fragment?”; George M. Hollenback, “Do Not Steal Seed: An Overlooked Double Entendre in Oracula Sibyllina 2.71”; and Paolo Pellegrini, “R. A. B. Mynors and Harvard: An Unpublished Letter to E. K. Rand (10.10.1944).”

James Loeb (1867–1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), psychology and medicine (2021), and music (2023).The subject of the inaugural conference was the legacy for which Loeb is best known and the only one to which he attached his name—the Loeb Classical Library, and the three series it has inspired: the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, and the Murty Classical Library of India. Including discussions by the four General Editors of each Library’s unique history, mission, operations, and challenges, the papers collected in The Loeb Classical Library and Its Progeny also take stock of these series in light of more general themes and questions bearing on translations of “classical” texts and their audiences in a variety of societies past, present, and future.

This volume includes: Daniel Kölligen, “Ὄρθος, The Watchdog”; Richard L. Phillips, “Invisibility and Sight in Homer: Some Aspects of A. S. Pease Reconsidered”; Antonio Tibiletti, “Pondering Pindaric Superlatives in Context”; Matthew Hiscock, “Αὐθέντης: A ‘Mot Fort’ in the Discourse of Classical Athens”; James T. Clark, “Off-Stage Cries? The Performance of Sophocles’ Philoctetes 201–218, Trachiniae 863–870, and Euripides’ Electra 747–760”; Giuseppe Pezzini, “Terence and the Speculum Vitae: ‘Realism’ and (Roman) Comedy”; Neil O’Sullivan, “Quotations from Epicurean Philosophy and Greek Tragedy in Three Letters of Cicero”; Ernesto Paparazzo, “A Study of Varro’s Account of Roman Civil Theology in the Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum and Its Reception by Augustine and Modern Readers”; Joseph P. Dexter and Pramit Chaudhuri, “Dardanio Anchisae: Hiatus, Homer, and Intermetricality in the Aeneid”; Michael A. Tueller, “Dido the Author: Epigram and the Aeneid”; Benjamin Victor, Nancy Duval, and Isabelle Chouinard, “Subordinating si and ni in Virgil: Some Characteristic Uses, with Remarks on Aeneid 6.882–883”; Richard Gaskin, “On Being Pessimistic about the End of the Aeneid”; Gregory R. Mellen, “Num Delenda est Karthago? Metrical Wordplay and the Text of Horace Odes 4.8”; Kyle Gervais, “Dominoque legere superstes? Epic and Empire at the End of the Thebaid”; D. Clint Burnett, “Temple Sharing and Throne Sharing: A Reconsideration of Σύνναος and Σύνθρονος in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods”; Charles H. Cosgrove, “Semi-Lyrical Reading of Greek Poetry in Late Antiquity”; Byron MacDougall, “Better Recognize: Anagnorisis in Gregory of Nazianzus’s First Invective against Julian”; Alan Cameron, “Jerome and the Historia Augusta”; Jessica H. Clark, “Adfirmare and Appeals to Authority in Servius Danielis”; and Jarrett T. Welsh, “Nonius Marcellus and the Source Called ‘Gloss. i.’”

James Loeb (1867–1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), and after pandemic postponement, psychology and medicine (2023), and music (2025).The subject of the second conference was Loeb’s deep and multifaceted engagement with the material culture of the ancient world as a scholar, connoisseur, collector, and curator. The volume’s contributors range broadly over the manifold connections and contexts, both personal and institutional, of Loeb’s archaeological interests, and consider these in light of the long history of collection and connoisseurship from antiquity to the present. Their essays also reflect on the contemporary significance of Loeb’s work, as the collections he shaped continue to be curated and studied in today’s rapidly evolving environment for the arts.

Volume 98 of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology offers the following contributions: Leonard Muellner, “Glaucus Redivivus”; Michael Weiss, “Erotica: On the Prehistory of Greek Desire”; C. O. Pavese, “The Rhapsodic Epic Poems as Oral and Independent Poems”; Miles C. Beckwith, “The ‘Hanging of Hera’ and the Meaning of Greek ἄκμων”; Aryeh Finkelberg, “On the History of the Greek κοσμοσ”; Ruth Scodel, “The Captive’s Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripides’ Hecuba and Troades”; Mary Depew, “Delian Hymns and Callimachean Allusion”; Joshua T. Katz, “Testimonia Ritus Italici: Male Genitalia, Solemn Declarations, and a New Latin Sound Law”; A. R. Dyck, “Narrative Obfuscation, Philosophical Topoi, and Tragic Patterning in Cicero’s Pro Milone”; Michael C. J. Putnam, “Dido’s Murals and Virgilian Ekphrasis”; Jeffrey Wills, “Divided Allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices”; Joseph Farrell, “Reading and Writing the Heroides”; and Rolando Ferri, “Octavia’s Heroines: Tacitus Annales 14.63–64 and the Praetexta Octavia.”

This volume includes Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, “‘Trust the God’: Tharsein in Ancient Greek Religion”; Jordi Pàmias, “Acusilaus of Argos and the Bronze Tablets”; Karen Rosenbecker, “‘Just Desserts’: Reversals of Fortune, Feces, Flatus, and Food in Aristophanes’ Wealth”; Yosef Z. Liebersohn, “Crito’s Character in Plato’s Crito”; Alexandros Kampakoglou, “Staging the Divine: Epiphany and Apotheosis in Callimachus HE 1121–1124”; Christopher Eckerman, “Muses, Metaphor, and Metapoetics in Catullus 61”; Christopher P. Jones, “The Greek Letters Ascribed to Brutus”; Jefferds Huyck, “Another Sort of Misogyny: Aeneid 9.140–141”; Mark Heerink, “Hylas, Hercules, and Valerius Flaccus’ Metamorphosis of the Aeneid”; Lowell Edmunds, “Pliny the Younger on His Verse and Martial’s Non-Recognition of Pliny as a Poet”; Eleanor Cowan, “Caesar’s One Fatal Wound: Suetonius Divus Iulius 82.3”; Graeme Bourke, “Classical Sophism and Philosophy in Pseudo-Plutarch On the Training of Children”; Jarrett T. Welsh, “Verse Quotations from Festus”; Benjamin Garstad, “Rome in the Alexander Romance”; James N. Adams, “The Latin of the Magerius (Smirat) Mosaic”; Lucia Floridi, “The Construction of a Homoerotic Discourse in the Epigrams of Ausonius”; Massimilliano Vitiello, “Emperor Theodosius’ Liberty and the Roman Past”; and Thomas Keeline and Stuart M. McManus, “Benjamin Larnell, the Last Latin Poet at Harvard Indian College.”

This volume includes: José Marcos Macedo, “Zeus as (Rider of) Thunderbolt”; Nikoloz Shamugia, “Bronze Relief with Caeneus and Centaurs from Olympia”; Hayden Pelliccia, “The Violation of Wackernagel’s Law at Pindar Pythian 3.1”; John Heath, “Corinna’s ‘Old Wives’ Tales’”; Maria Pavlou, “Lieux de Mémoire in the Plataean Speech (Thuc. 3.53–59)”; Robert Mayhew, “A Note on [Aristotle] Problemata 26.61”; Sam Hitchings, “The Date of [Demosthenes] XVII On the Treaty with Alexander”; John Walsh, “A Note on Diodorus 18.11.1, Arybbas, and the Lamian War”; Loukas Papadimitropoulos, “Charicleia’s Identity and the Structure of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica”; Ian Goh, “Kun-egonde”; Javier Uría, “Iulius Romanus’ Remark on Titinius (123 G.)”; Henry Spelman, “Borrowing Sappho’s Napkins”; Fabio Tutrone, “Granting Epicurean Wisdom at Rome”; Boris Kayachev, “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”; Florence Klein, “Vergil’s ‘Posidippeanism’?”; Gianpero Rosati, “Evander’s Curse and the ‘Long Death’ of Mezentius (Verg. Aen. 8.483–488, 10.845–850)”; Fiachra Mac Góráin, “The Poetics of Vision in Virgil’s Aeneid”; Ioannis Ziogas, “Singing for Octavia”; Benjamin Victor, “Four Passages in Propertius’ Last Book of Elegies”; and David Greenwood, “Julian and Asclepius.”

James Loeb (1867–1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), and after pandemic postponement, psychology and medicine (2023), and music (2025).While the focus of the third conference shifted from Loeb as practitioner to Loeb as patient, the connection between his philanthropy and his personal experience remains clear and fascinating. Loeb suffered from the illness known today as severe bipolar disorder, for which he was treated by Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), a pioneer in interdisciplinary brain and psychiatric research. Starting from the extensive records of this treatment, the volume’s contributors examine the history of mental illness from antiquity to the present in light of Loeb’s own condition, research, and contributions to medical humanism and psychiatric medicine.

This landmark collection presents a wide variety of viewpoints on the value and role of reception theory within the modern discipline of classics. A pioneering collection, looking at the role reception theory plays, or could play, within the modern discipline of classics. Emphasizes theoretical aspects of reception. Written by a wide range of contributors from young scholars to established figures, from Europe, the UK and the USA. Draws on material from many different fields, from translation studies to the visual arts, and from politics to performance. Sets the agenda for classics in the future.

This landmark collection presents a wide variety of viewpoints on the value and role of reception theory within the modern discipline of classics. A pioneering collection, looking at the role reception theory plays, or could play, within the modern discipline of classics. Emphasizes theoretical aspects of reception. Written by a wide range of contributors from young scholars to established figures, from Europe, the UK and the USA. Draws on material from many different fields, from translation studies to the visual arts, and from politics to performance. Sets the agenda for classics in the future.