Classical Inter/faces – serie

Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things", one of the glories of Latin literature, provides a vivid poetic exposition of the doctrines of the Greek atomist, Epicurus. The poem played a crucial role in the reinvention of science in the seventeenth century, its influence on the French Enlightenment was powerful and pervasive, and it became a major battlefield in the wars of religion with science in nineteenth-century England. But in the twentieth century, despite its vital contributions to modern thought and civilisation, it has been largely neglected by common readers and scientists alike. This book offers an extensive description of the poem, with special emphasis on its cheerful version of materialism and on its attempt to devise an ethical system that suits such a universe. It surveys major relevant texts form the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries (Dryden, Diderot, Voltaire, Tennyson, Santayana) and speculates on why Lucretius and the ancient scientific tradition he championed has become marginalised in the twentieth century.It closes with a discussion of what value the poem has for students of science and technology in the new century: what advice it has to offer us about how to go about reinventing our machines and our morality.

Socrates wrote nothing; Plato's accounts of Socrates helped to establish western politics, ethics, and metaphysics. Both have played crucial and dramatically changing roles in western culture. In the last two centuries, the triumph of democracy has led many to side with the Athenians against a Socrates whom they were right to kill. Meanwhile, the Cold War gave us polar images of Plato as both a dangerous totalitarian and an escapist intellectual. This book is framed by accounts of modern responses to the trials of Socrates and the ironies of Socratic inquiry. At its centre are two chapters exploring the idea of Platonic 'origins' in philosophy, and of Platonic 'foundations' for philosophical politics, as these have been read by Coleridge, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Popper, and Murdoch among others. Melissa Lane argues that the search for Platonic origins is an artefact of post-modern literalism. Yet images of Socratic inquiry can still invigorate our ethics and politics.

"Pity Transformed" is an examination of how pity was imagined and expressed in classical antiquity. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the pity of the Greeks and Romans differed from modern ideas. Among the topics investigated in this study are the appeal to pity in courts of law and the connection between pity and desert; the relation between pity and love or intimacy; self-pity; the role of pity in war and its relation to human rights and human dignity; divine pity from paganism to Christianity; and why pity was considered an emotion. This book will lead readers to ponder how the Greeks and Romans were both like and unlike us in this fundamental area of cultural sensibility.

Never have there been so many different types of translations of Greek and Latin literature into English. Most people experience Homer and Greek tragedy for the first time through translations. New versions of Vergil and Ovid have become best sellers. This book examines the literary and cultural environment underlying the various kinds of translation - from 'faithful' and 'equivalent' through 'imitation' to 'adaptation' and 'version' - discussing the extent to which translations have been regarded as creative work in their own right and their impact in the work of modern writers such as Harrison, Heaney, Hughes and Walcott. Key themes include the challenge presented by translations to conventional interpretations of the classical canon; the implications of translating across genres - for example in the staging of epic; and the role of translations in twentieth-century conflicts. Lorna Hardwick suggests that translations from Greek and Latin literature are catalysts in the refiguring of both poetic and political awareness and that in transplanting myths and metaphors into disparate cultures, translations energise new senses of cultural identity.

Why should Greek tragedy matter now? This book opens a dialogue between the tragic theatre in ancient Athens and the multiple performances of the modern world. In five interconnected chapters, Rush Rehm engages tragedy on its own terms, using our oldest theatre as inspiration for how we might shape the theatre of the future. Part analysis, part polemic, this book engages the aesthetic, political and ethical challenges of Greek tragedy as a means of confronting what tomorrow's theatre can do.

Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and the diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and folklorist. 'Popular' uses of classical mythology, from television and comic books to the evocation of goddesses in Jungian psychology, are also explored.

What sort of people were able to grab the attention of the public in the ancient world? How was celebrity achieved? What methods did people use to achieve it? Robert Garland turns the spotlight on the careers of some of the most successful and colourful self-promoters ever to have lived, including Alcibiades, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, Jesus, Nero and Theodosia, and investigates the secrets of their success. He also looks at ways in which other highly talented individuals turned themselves into celebrities, including sports personalities, entertainers, philosophers, founders of new religions, and internationally renowned prostitutes. The reader may be forgiven for supposing that celebrity is a phenomenon that has no equivalent in antiquity. This book proves that it did!

This radical series shows how Classical ideas and material have helped to shape the modern world. The interdisciplinary approach makes stimulating reading for all who welcome the challenge offered by new perspectives on Classical culture. Today we attribute a tragic quality to many things - works, experiences, values, events - but we forget how modern this idea is. This book traces the rise of the tragic idea from early Romanticism to late Modernism. Focusing on succinct, major statements, it maps one of the most absorbing philosophical conversations in modernity: the debate about the tragic meaning of life. This conversation has crossed geographical, linguistic, ideological and religious borders to bring thinkers together in an inquiry into the inner contradictions of liberty. While originally the tragic idea stood for the conflict of freedom and necessity, it gradually absorbed other irreconcilable dialectical collisions. It turned tragedy from a genre into a problem for ethics, aesthetics, criticism, classics, politics, anthropology and psychology, to name but a few.Scholars in these fields today will be fascinated to find human responsibility caught in the tragic web of modern dilemmas. Classicists in particular will be intrigued by the story of how, over the last two centuries, tragedy has acquired a second, parallel life away from the stage.

In this fascinating addition to the "Classical Inter/faces" series, Karelisa Hartigan suggests that drama was regularly performed in the theatres built within or adjacent to the ancient sanctuaries of Asklepios. She argues that a pageant which showed the enactment of the god healing prompted the dream therapy the patient experienced at the sanctuary. Patients who viewed this drama were ready to receive the nightly ministrations of the deity, his attendants and his animals while they slept in the dormitory at the Asklepieion. To support her thesis, Hartigan discusses the mind-body relationship in the healing process, a relationship the medical profession is beginning to recognize. She concludes by presenting first-hand material based on her experience doing Playback Theatre for patients at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida. In performing improvisational scenes at bedside or in a community space, she has witnessed how the mini-dramas lift the patients' spirits and offer them hope for a successful outcome to their illness.

The poetry of Horace was central to Victorian male elite education and the ancient poet himself, suitably refashioned, became a model for the English gentleman. Horace and the Victorians examines the English reception of Horace in Victorian culture, a period which saw the foundations of the discipline of modern classical scholarship in England and of many associated and lasting social values. It shows that the scholarly study, translation and literary imitation of Horace in this period were crucial elements in reinforcing the social prestige of Classics as a discipline and its function as an indicator of ‘gentlemanly’ status through its domination of the elite educational system and its prominence in literary production.The book ends with an epilogue suggesting that the framework of study and reception of a classical author such as Horace, so firmly established in the Victorian era, has been modernised and ‘democratised’ in recent years, matching the movement of Classics from a discipline which reinforces traditional and conservative social values to one which can be seen as both marginal and liberal.