Classics
How has classical literature shaped culture, knowledge, the thinkable? What happens when a canonical text is translated from his gaze into her, and their, gaze(s)? These are some of the questions Barbara Köhler pursues in her modern epic poem, Niemands Frau (2007), her response to The Odyssey. Translated and re-imagined over the centuries, Homer’s tale found critical resonance in intellectual traditions from Christianity through to Post-Colonialism. Odysseus has been viewed as an ideal, reputedly using reason rather than force to dominate, but in Niemands Frau Köhler takes inspiration from Penelope to weave a text that challenges the rationalist and patriarchal...
This book presents a new study of Greek large-scale bronze statuary of the late Archaic and Classical periods. It examines the discovery, origin, style, date, artistic attribution, identification, and interpretation of the surviving bronzes, and focuses in particular on their technical features and casting techniques. It contains over 170 plates of photographs and drawings to illustrate its discussion.
It also places the development of the casting techniques in connection with the stylistic evolution in Greek free-standing sculpture. During the Classical period, artists preferred bronze to marble when creating their contrapposto figures. Indisputably, bronze gave particular freedom to artists in creating...
Plutarch’s writings have had a varied reception history from when he was writing in the second century BCE down to today. This volume starts from what may be a translation into the Syriac dialect of a lost Plutarch essay; continues with a tribute from a leading scholar of the later Byzantine period; and follows the centuries of sustained enthusiasm from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. This period started once a translation into Latin had become available, and ended when scholars in the nineteenth century lowered Plutarch’s reputation as historian, biographer, philosopher, and stylist. By the end of the century, he came to symbolize in the eyes of Tolstoy precisely what history should not be. Both the...
Virgil has always been copied, studied, imitated, and revered as perhaps the greatest poet of the Latin language. He has been centrally important to the transmission of the classical tradition, and has played a unique role in European education. In recognition of the richness of his reception the fourth conferences in the joint Warburg Institute and Institute of Classical Studies series on the afterlife of the Classics was devoted to the afterlife of Virgil.
This volume focuses on the reception of the Eclogues and the Aeneid in three main areas: Italian Renaissance poetry, scholarship and visual art; English responses to Virgil’s poetry; and emerging literatures in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and...
Cicero was one of the most prolific and productive figures from ancient Rome, active as both a politician and a writer. As yet however modern scholarship does not do justice to the sheer range of his later influence. This volume publishes papers from a conference which aimed to enlarge the basis for the study of Cicero’s reception, by examining in detail new aspects of its variety. The conference was held in May 2015, and was jointly organized by the Institute of Classical Studies, the Warburg Institute, and the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London.
The book presents twelve case studies on the reception of ‘Cicero the writer’ and ‘Cicero the man’, ranging from thirteenth-century...
Emotion in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds is now an established field of research in classical studies, but so far scholars have made surprisingly few attempts to investigate the emotions of the two cultures in comparative terms.
In this innovative and timely collection, nine leading scholars make a start on that project. Topics include: differences between the Greek and Roman emotional repertoires; the semantic fields and scripts covered by comparable Greek and Latin terms; the impact of bilingualism; the fate of emotion terms in translation; the way Roman authors deal with the emotional aspects of their Greek literary models; Greek and Roman views of the emotional character of their counterparts in the other culture.