Rhetoric, Power, and Possibilities

Thirty years after the publication of Antoinette Clark Wire’s groundbreaking The Corinthian Women Prophets, an interdisciplinary, international, and intergenerational group of scholars reflects upon Wire’s impact on New Testament scholarship. Essays pursue further historical and theoretical possibilities, often in search of marginalized people, including the women of Corinth, using feminist, rhetorical, materialist, decolonizing, queer, and posthumanist approaches to interpret Paul’s letters and the history of ancient Mediterranean assemblies. Contributions from Cavan Concannon, Arminta Fox, Joseph A. Marchal, Shelly Matthews, Anna Miller, Jorunn Økland, and Antoinette Clark Wire reconsider how both the methods and results of Wire’s work reveal the possibilities of other people beside Paul who are worth our attention and effort. The essays in this collection introduce students and scholars to the possibilities of interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches for engaging the broader Pauline corpus.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have fascinated listeners and readers for over twenty-five centuries. In this volume of original essays, collected to honor the distinguished career of Emily T. Vermeule, thirty-four leading experts in Homeric studies and related fields provide up-to-date, multidisciplinary accounts of the most current issues in the study of Homer.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section treats the Bronze Age setting of the poems (around 1200 B.C.), using archaeological evidence to reveal how poetic memory preserves, distorts, and invents the past. The second section explores the early Iron Age, in which the poems were written (c. 800-500 B.C.), using the strategies of comparative philology and mythology, literary theory, historical linguistics, anthropology, and iconography to determine how the poems took shape. The final section traces the use of Homer for literary and artistic inspiration by classical Greece and Rome.

This first focused analysis of veterans’ experiences in ancient Greece offers a fresh, “bottom-up” perspective on important military and political aspects of early Hellenistic history.

Runner-up, PROSE Award, Classics and Ancient History, 2013

From antiquity until now, most writers who have chronicled the events following the death of Alexander the Great have viewed this history through the careers, ambitions, and perspectives of Alexander’s elite successors. Few historians have probed the experiences and attitudes of the ordinary soldiers who followed Alexander on his campaigns and who were divided among his successors as they fought for control of his empire after his death. Yet the veterans played an important role in helping to shape the character and contours of the Hellenistic world.

This pathfinding book offers the first in-depth investigation of the Macedonian veterans’ experience during a crucial turning point in Greek history (323–316 BCE). Joseph Roisman discusses the military, social, and political circumstances that shaped the history of Alexander’s veterans, giving special attention to issues such as the soldiers’ conduct on and off the battlefield, the army assemblies, the volatile relationship between the troops and their generals, and other related themes, all from the perspective of the rank-and-file. Roisman also reexamines the biases of the ancient sources and how they affected ancient and modern depictions of Alexander’s veterans, as well as Alexander’s conflicts with his army, the veterans’ motives and goals, and their political contributions to Hellenistic history. He pays special attention to the Silver Shields, a group of Macedonian veterans famous for their invincibility and martial prowess, and assesses whether or not they deserved their formidable reputation.

Compelled by the emperor Nero to commit suicide at age 25 after writing uncomplimentary poems, Latin poet Lucan nevertheless left behind a significant body of work, including the Bellum Civile (Civil War).  Sometimes also called the Pharsalia, this epic describes the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.Author Giulio Celotto provides an interpretation of this civil war based on the examination of an aspect completely neglected by previous scholarship: Lucan’s literary adaptation of the cosmological dialectic of Love and Strife.

According to a reading that has found favor over the last three decades, the poem is an unconventional epic that does not conform to Aristotelian norms: Lucan composes a poem characterized by fragmentation and disorder, lacking a conventional teleology, and whose narrative flow is constantly delayed. Celotto’s study challenges this interpretation by illustrating how Lucan invokes imagery of cosmic dissolution,  but without altogether obliterating epic norms. The poem transforms them from within, condemning the establishment of the Principate and the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

THIS EBOOK IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

The ancient Greeks invented written law. Yet, in contrast to later societies in which law became a professional discipline, the Greeks treated laws as components of social and political history, reflecting the daily realities of managing society. To understand Greek law, then, requires looking into extant legal, forensic, and historical texts for evidence of the law in action. From such study has arisen the field of ancient Greek law as a scholarly discipline within classical studies, a field that has come into its own since the 1970s.

This edited volume charts new directions for the study of Greek law in the twenty-first century through contributions from eleven leading scholars. The essays in the book’s first section reassess some of the central debates in the field by looking at questions about the role of law in society, the notion of “contracts,” feuding and revenge in the court system, and legal protections for slaves engaged in commerce. The second section breaks new ground by redefining substantive areas of law such as administrative law and sacred law, as well as by examining sources such as Hellenistic inscriptions that have been comparatively neglected in recent scholarship. The third section evaluates the potential of methodological approaches to the study of Greek law, including comparative studies with other cultures and with modern legal theory. The volume ends with an essay that explores pedagogy and the relevance of teaching Greek law in the twenty-first century.

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Classics

Although the era of the Enlightenment witnessed the rise of philosophical debates around benevolent social practice, the origins of European humane discourse date further back, to Classical Athens. The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights analyzes the parallel confluences of cultural factors facing ancient Greeks and eighteenth-century Europeans that facilitated the creation and transmission of humane values across history. Rachel Hall Sternberg argues that precursors to the concept of human rights exist in the ancient articulation of emotion, though the ancient Greeks, much like eighteenth-century European societies, often failed to live up to those values.

Merging the history of ideas with cultural history, Sternberg examines literary themes upholding empathy and human dignity from Thucydides’s and Xenophon’s histories to Voltaire’s Candide, and from Greek tragic drama to the eighteenth-century novel. She describes shared impacts of the trauma of war, the appeal to reason, and the public acceptance of emotion that encouraged the birth and rebirth of humane values.

Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people.

Winner, Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2003

Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day?

Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato.

Notion, also known as Colophon-by-the-Sea, was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia. A comprehensive archaeological survey carried out by the University of Michigan and Brown University (2014–21) yielded rich ceramic evidence for the chronology and commercial connections of the settlement, clarified essential aspects of the city plan, provided opportunities for detailed study of major buildings and public works, and shed new light on both the local geology and the modification of the landscape through terracing and stone extraction. These investigations documented a major program of urban development featuring new fortifications and a new city plan in the early to mid-third century BCE, three centuries of prosperous habitation, and the substantial abandonment of the city in the early first century CE. The archaeology of Notion provides vivid evidence for the turbulent history of Ionia in Hellenistic times, and for the different responses of local communities to Roman rule.

Ever since Sir Arthur Evans first excavated at the site of the Palace at Knossos in the early twentieth century, scholars and visitors have been drawn to the architecture of Bronze Age Crete. Much of the attraction comes from the geographical and historical uniqueness of the island. Equidistant from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Minoan Crete is on the shifting conceptual border between East and West, and chronologically suspended between history and prehistory. In this culturally dynamic context, architecture provided more than physical shelter; it embodied meaning. Architecture was a medium through which Minoans constructed their notions of social, ethnic, and historical identity: the buildings tell us about how the Minoans saw themselves, and how they wanted to be seen by others.

Architecture of Minoan Crete is the first comprehensive study of the entire range of Minoan architecture—including houses, palaces, tombs, and cities—from 7000 BC to 1100 BC. John C. McEnroe synthesizes the vast literature on Minoan Crete, with particular emphasis on the important discoveries of the past twenty years, to provide an up-to-date account of Minoan architecture. His accessible writing style, skillful architectural drawings of houses and palaces, site maps, and color photographs make this book inviting for general readers and visitors to Crete, as well as scholars.

Women in ancient Rome challenge the historian. Widely represented in literature and art, they rarely speak for themselves. Amy Richlin, among the foremost pioneers in ancient studies, gives voice to these women through scholarship that scours sources from high art to gutter invective.

In Arguments with Silence, Richlin presents a linked selection of her essays on Roman women’s history, originally published between 1981 and 2001 as the field of “women in antiquity” took shape, and here substantially rewritten and updated. The new introduction to the volume lays out the historical methodologies these essays developed, places this process in its own historical setting, and reviews work on Roman women since 2001, along with persistent silences. Individual chapter introductions locate each piece in the social context of Second Wave feminism in Classics and the academy, explaining why each mattered as an intervention then and still does now.

Inhabiting these pages are the women whose lives were shaped by great art, dirty jokes, slavery, and the definition of adultery as a wife’s crime; Julia, Augustus’ daughter, who died, as her daughter would, exiled to a desert island; women wearing makeup, safeguarding babies with amulets, practicing their religion at home and in public ceremonies; the satirist Sulpicia, flaunting her sexuality; and the praefica, leading the lament for the dead.

Amy Richlin is one of a small handful of modern thinkers in a position to consider these questions, and this guided journey with her brings surprise, delight, and entertainment, as well as a fresh look at important questions.

The first complete English translation of Aristaenetus in nearly three centuries

Through allusion and adaption of earlier authors, Aristaenetus recounts tales that are the stuff of comedy, erotic poetry, and ancient novel. Here we read of lovers who use every trope of erotic literature to praise their beloveds in over-the-top speeches. Aristaenetus amazes us with tales of paramours hatching complicated schemes to achieve their desires, while wily go-betweens help smooth their way. He presents us with accounts of unfaithful spouses who barely avoid capture in the midst of hair-raising and amusing infidelities. This sixth century collection is perfect for anyone interested in classical and postclassical literature.

Features:

• English translation and Greek text on facing pages
• Introduction with history of the text
• Discussion of intertextual connections with Greco-Roman authors

This is the first substantial commentary on Clouds since Dover’s 1968 edition. Intended for intermediate Greek students at undergraduate and graduate levels, the commentary pays careful attention to the basic characteristics of ancient Greek syntax, as well as to how Greek words are formed and can be analyzed.  It offers robust staging notes, information about daily life in late 5th-century Athens, and constant reference to the rhetorical and dramatic strategies of the text. Full support is offered for those interested in the metrical structure of the songs, but in a way that allows instructors to leave such issues aside, should they choose to do so. The first and second appendices offer a basic means of entry into the rich but complex world of the comic fragments. An English-language bibliography is provided. The edition will interest professional classicists of all sorts seeking an accessible introduction to one of Aristophanes’ greatest plays, to philosophers concerned with Socrates and the sophistic movement, and to theater professionals who wish to stage the play.

On a summer night in 415 BCE, unknown persons systematically mutilated most of the domestic “herms”—guardian statues of the god Hermes—in Athens. The reaction was immediate and extreme:  the Athenians feared a terrifying conspiracy was underway against the city and its large fleet—and possibly against democracy itself.   The city established a board of investigators, which led to informants, accusations, and flight by many of the accused.  Ultimately, dozens were exiled or executed, their property confiscated.

This dramatic period offers the opportunity to observe the city in crisis. Sequential events allow us to see the workings of the major institutions of the city (assembly, council, law courts, and theater, as well as public and private religion). Remarkably, the primary sources for these tumultuous months name conspirators and informants from a very wide range of status-groups: citizens, women, slaves, and free residents. Thus the incident provides a particularly effective entry-point into a full multifaceted view of the way Athens worked in the late fifth century.

Designed for classroom use, Athens 415 is no potted history, but rather a source-based presentation of ancient urban life ideal for the study of a people and their institutions and beliefs.  Original texts—all translated by poet Robert B. Hardy—are presented along with thoughtful discussion and analyses by Clara Shaw Hardy in an engaging narrative that draws students into Athens’ crisis.

A critical history of the recurring idea that technology will free us from work and bring about a truly democratic society.

In popular thought, ancient Athens endures as a place ahead of its time—the birthplace of democracy, a cultural center, and a model toward which modern societies should strive. In Automated Athens, Michele Kennerly examines the many and frequent appeals to this nostalgic vision of the ancient city-state throughout the early age of computerized automation. In the mid-twentieth century, people hoped that automation would free us from mindless, dehumanizing work so that we could attend to creative and communal pursuits. Proponents appealed to ancient Athens, saying automated systems and machines would stand in for the craftsmen, enslaved people, and subordinated women who performed the undesirable work that enabled that city-state’s flourishing. Automated Athens scrutinizes this appeal as it moves chronologically into present debates about the promise of automation and AI. For Kennerly, our inability to settle debates about where accelerating automation may take us, especially politically, reveals a deeper cultural indecisiveness about how to live well and live well together.