Lang Classical Studies – serie

Athena is recognized as an allegory or representative of Athens in most Athenian public art except in tragedy. Perhaps this is because tragedy is rarely studied as a public art form or, perhaps, because her character is not static in tragedy. Although Athena’s characterization changes to fit the needs of a particular drama, her clear connection with justice remains true throughout and suggests that she is always the representative of the city and its institutions. Athens, the city Athena protected, experienced a dramatic transformation in the fifth century: its political institutions, physical landscape, military power and international prestige underwent dynamic change. Athena, its goddess and its symbol, simultaneously transformed as well, although not always for the better. Athena’s Justice follows the question of civic identity and ideology in Athenian tragedy, focusing specifically on the link between tragedy and its influence upon identity creation and promotion during the period when Athens was asserting itself as an imperial power. Through examination of tragedies in which Athena appears, this book traces the process by which Athens came to identify itself with its legal system, symbolized by Athena on stage, and then suffered the corruption of that system by the exercise of imperial power. Athena’s Justice is essential reading not just for classicists and ancient historians, but for anyone interested in the interaction between art and politics and the process by which human beings in any period seek to shape their identity as a people.

Elegiac Eyes is an in-depth examination of vision and spectacle in Roman love elegy. It approaches vision from the perspective of Roman cultural modes of viewing and locates its analysis in close textual readings of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. The paradoxical nature of the Roman eyes, which according to contemporary optical theories were able to penetrate and be penetrated, as well as the complex role of vision in society, provided the elegists with a productive canvas for their poems. By locating the elegists’ visual games within their contemporary context, Elegiac Eyes demonstrates how the elegists were manipulating notions that were specifically Roman and familiar to their readership.

This book offers the first presentation of Hellenistic and Roman period ceramic assemblages from the city of Hierapytna, located on the southeast coast of Crete. Recovered from three rescue excavations in the heart of the ancient city, this pottery records a diachronic history of Hierapytna from the third century B.C. to the seventh century A.D. Through meticulous analysis of these assemblages, including a detailed catalogue of all of the major ceramic categories encountered on Greco-Roman sites and an exhaustive economic synthesis that places Hierapytna in regional and international contexts, Scott Gallimore documents the growth and decline of this ancient city. An evolving role in numerous exchange networks enabled Hierapytna to grow from a promising Hellenistic center into a major Roman metropolis before it succumbed to pressures that led to a steady decline throughout the Late Roman period. An Island Economy outlines the historical trajectory of an eastern polis and demonstrates that its rise and fall are connected to pan-Mediterranean exchange networks, a subject that will be of great interest to archaeologists, ceramicists, economic historians, and students of the Greco-Roman world.

Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 offers a comprehensive overview of British female writing on Greece in the twentieth century and beyond. Contributors cover a vast array of authors: Rose Macaulay, Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin, Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Mary Stewart, Victoria Hislop, Loretta Proctor and Sofka Zinovieff formed special ties with Greece and made it the focus of their literary imagination. Moving from Bloomsbury to Mills & Boon, the book offers insight into the ways romantic literature has shaped readers’ perceptions about Greece. Why have female authors of such diverse backgrounds and literary orientations been attracted by a country burdened by its past and troubled by its present? What aspects of the country do they choose to highlight? Are female perceptions of Greece different from male ones? The book examines these and many more exciting questions. Given its focus and diversity, it is addressed to audiences in English and Greek studies, Classical reception, European modernism, cultural studies and popular fiction, as well as to non-academic English-speaking readers who have an interest in Greece.

This unique collection of essays contains a synthesis of recent works by distinguished archaeologists and historians in their field, illuminating extensive research in the Southern Gaul and on the territory of the Greek city of Marseille.Investigating the occupation of Massalia territory before the foundation of the Greek city to the Roman period, these findings provide an overview of the diverse issues behind the circulations between Greeks from Phocaea and Celtic populations. This reflection on a key region of the Euro-Mediterranean space rests on the analysis of archaeological findings, including: urban excavations, spatial studies, analysis of necropolis, submarine remains, paleo-environmental data, and reviewing the ancient literary documentation. These new and innovative findings in Greek Marseille and Mediterranean Celtic Region will be of particular interest to both students and scholars exploring the political, economic and cultural fields of relationships between the Greek migrants and the populations they started to meet at the end of the seventh century BC.

This book is a study of Theocritus’ narrating techniques, intertextual practices, and the relationship between them. By a close, careful description and analysis of these features as particularly deployed in Idylls 6, 11, 13, 24, and 15, J. Andrew Foster provides detailed readings of these specific poems, demonstrating how each poem’s narrative structure and its intratextual and intertextual affiliations interact to characterize the voices and audiences expressed and imagined by the discourse. Within these poems Theocritus especially orchestrates polyphonic voices speaking to diverse fictional, ideal, and actual audiences and so authorizes a range of responses to speech-in-text. His densely allusive poems exhibit an iterative aspect and resistance to closure that particularly encourage his readers to help compose larger metanarratives in which such resolution can be achieved or the particular episode can be better understood. The interplay between the referential systems inscribed within these poems and their rhetorical structure exemplifies how Theocritus encourages his poetry to be incorporated into a wider literary discourse by which that wider literary landscape is transformed. Within these experiments in narration and reception, Theocritus exhibits an intense engagement with the literary past and his critical present whose receptions and authority are continually problematized. These readings will serve as a springboard into the wider ongoing study of the problems of poetic voice, authority, and literary innovation within Theocritus’ poetry in particular and Hellenistic poetry in general.

In recent years there has been growing interest in the concepts of pictorial vividness («enargeia») and pictorial description («ekphrasis») in the works of ancient writers. Colour imagery can play a significant part in such pictorial effects. This book explores the visual and stylistic contributions that words for colour and shining make to the poetry of Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. First, the instances of colour usage by the three poets are analyzed and compared with the colour imagery of other ancient poets and artists. «Colour readings» of selected poems follow, illustrating how colours are employed by these poets to heighten the visual impact of their poems and influence the reader’s emotional responses. This book fills a gap in the scholarship on colour in ancient poetry and provides fresh perspectives on the work of three important poets.