Cambridge Philological Society – förlag

_Sensing Greek Drama_ explores ancient Greek tragedy and comedy through the lens of the senses. It works within and beyond a number of recent developments in the scholarship of Classics and related fields. The essays within the volume engage with the senses in drama in manifold ways: through various theoretical frameworks borrowed from kindred fields in the humanities and sciences - postmodernism, humanism, feminism, phenomenology, cognitive theory and neuroscience, to name a few - as well as through the more traditional approaches within Classics of philology, historicism, performance studies and reception. The essays cover a relatively narrow range of tragic and comic plays, instead of encompassing the entirety of ancient drama, in order to foster meaningful links throughout the volume and to exemplify the value of engaging with the senses to produce new understandings of drama - and of the senses themselves. As a result of the volume, the study of Greek drama will be opened up for further research. This will not only appeal to Classicists interested in the meaning of the comedies and tragedies of the fifth century BC, but it will also be of interest to scholars interested in sensory approaches to literature. Above all, Sensing Greek Drama will serve as a call to “to recover our senses”, as Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay “Against Interpretation”, in a modern age characterized by sensory overload and deprivation.

Augustus and the Destruction of History explores the intense controversies over the meaning and profile of the past that accompanied the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Augustan principate. The ten case studies collected here analyse how different authors and agents (individual and collective) developed specific conceptions of history and articulated them in a wide variety of textual and visual media to position themselves within the emergent (and evolving) new Augustan normal. The chapters consider both hegemonic and subaltern endeavours to reconfigure Roman memoria and pay special attention to power and polemics, chaos, crisis and contingency – not least to challenge some long-standing habits of thought about Augustus and his principate and its representation in historiographical discourse, ancient and modern. Some of the most iconic texts and monuments from ancient Rome receive fresh discussion here, including the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Fasti Capitolini.