Thorsten Fögen – författare

The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.

This volume brings together revised papers that were presented at a conference, held at Humboldt University of Berlin in March 2004, on technical texts and technical languages in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The contributions investigate the cultural dimension of technical texts and their different manifestations. They analyse how ancient technical writers dealt with linguistic and stylistic, in particular terminological, features, but also focus on the pragmatic level of technical texts, e.g., their structure and form, their intentions and readers, as well as the role of polemics and the relationship between text and illustrations. The contributions are written in German and English.

This volume presents a wide range of contributions that analyse the cultural, sociological and communicative significance of tears and crying in Graeco-Roman antiquity. The papers cover the time from the eighth century BCE until late antiquity and take into account a broad variety of literary genres such as epic, tragedy, historiography, elegy, philosophical texts, epigram and the novel. The collection also contains two papers from modern socio-psychology.

In the Graeco-Roman world, the cosmic order was enacted, in part, through bodies. The evaluative divisions between, for example, women and men, humans and animals, “barbarians” and “civilized” people, slaves and free citizens, or mortals and immortals, could all be played out across the terrain of somatic difference, embedded as it was within wider social and cultural matrices.This volume explores these thematics of bodies and boundaries: to examine the ways in which bodies, lived and imagined, were implicated in issues of cosmic order and social organisation in classical antiquity. It focuses on the body in performance (especially in a rhetorical context), the erotic body, the dressed body, pagan and Christian bodies as well as divine bodies and animal bodies. The articles draw on a range of evidence and approaches, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, and explore the ways bodies can transgress and dissolve, as well shore up, or even create, boundaries and hierarchies. This volume shows that boundaries are constantly negotiated, shifted and refigured through the practices and potentialities of embodiment.

This interdisciplinary volume explains the phenomenon of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe through the prism of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Through a series of case studies covering a broad range of source material, it demonstrates the different purposes the heritage of the classical world was put to during a turbulent period in European history. Contributors include classicists, historians, archaeologists, art historians and others.

The seventeen contributions to this volume, written by leading experts, show that animals and humans in Graeco-Roman antiquity are interconnected on a variety of different levels and that their encounters and interactions often result from their belonging to the same structures, ‘networks’ and communities or at least from finding themselves together in a certain setting, context or environment – wittingly or unwittingly. Papers explore the concrete categories of interaction between animals and humans that can be identified, in what contexts they occur, and what types of evidence can be productively used to examine the concept of interactions. Articles in this volume take into account literary, visual, and other types of evidence. A comprehensive research bibliography is also provided.

Plinius der Jüngere hat als Autor einer umfassenden Briefsammlung und einer Lobrede auf den Kaiser Trajan ein fast ununterbrochenes Fortleben genossen: Seine Werke sind in der Antike und seit der frühen Neuzeit sowohl Modell für Epistolographie als auch Vorlage für verschiedene Fürstenspiegel gewesen. Er kann daher als eine zentrale Figur der europäischen Literatur und Geistesgeschichte gesehen werden. In den letzten Jahren hat vor allem die klassisch-philologische Forschung Plinius als literarische Gestalt neu bewertet. Weil seine Werke jedoch nicht nur für die Klassische Philologie von Belang sind, sondern auch für die Alte Geschichte, Epigraphik, Archäologie, Kunstgeschichte, Visual Studies, Rechtswissenschaft, Soziologie, Komparatistik, Fachdidaktik und Gender Studies, bieten die Beiträger dieses deutsch-italienischen Sammelbandes eine Zusammenschau von unterschiedlichen Zugriffen auf einen "Klassiker" der frühen römischen Kaiserzeit.Mit Beiträgen von:Gianpaolo Angelini, Anna Anguissola, Alberto Canobbio, Thorsten Fögen, Bardo Gauly, Judith Hindermann, Irene Leonardis, Elena Merli, Cosima Möller, Margot Neger, Stefano Rocchi, Silvia Speriani, Giulio Vannini, Gregor Vogt-Spira