Papers on Ancient Literatures: Greece, Rome and the Near East

Review of this important manual, with a few sugestions for further improvement of later editions.

2015

This paper argues that the reading of novels in classical antiquity, like that of other texts, was a more active process than it is imagined to be in the case of modern fiction; rather than surrender oneself to the fictional world of the literary work, ancient readers were accustomed to engage in a dialogue with the text, arguing back, challenging, even accusing it. Various examples of ancient reading practices are offered, from Plutarch and Synesius, to school texts and scholia, along with Virgil, Heraclitus the Allegorist, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri , and Philip the Philosopher (on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica ). David Konstan is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Brown University. Among his books are Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (1994), and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006). He is currently working on a book on forgiveness in the classi...

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 1120–1148, 2017

The Hittite cuneiform tablet collection (ca. 16th-13th century BC) encompasses a great variety of literary textual genres: historical, legal, economic, ritual, religious, mythological, etc. Under the expression ‘Literature’, we indicate all the written (‘literary’) compositions that, to a close analysis, display different linguistic and stylistic registers in relation to the various textual typologies. The aim of the project was to investigate literary aspects regarding syntax, style, and contents, from the Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, and Pre-Greek textual evidence, from a comparative perspective. The results are disseminated on the occasion of the International Workshop to be held in Rome on the 14th of June, 2023.

Journal of historical studies, 2016

Until fairly recently the Greek novel was of little to no interest to historians of antiquity. Within the previous few decades however academic opinion on the genre has steadily grown more favourable to the point where study of the Greek novel has experienced something of a revival, consequentially resulting in the rehabilitation of the genre into the internationally recognized wider corpus of canonical ancient literature. As a result of this invigorated engagement scholars have, quite naturally, deliberated over sociological aspects of the Greek novel within the historical context of its conception. Of paramount importance within this discussion has been the question of the novel’s intended and unintended ancient readership, as it is known that most, if not all, of the Greek novels were circulated widely throughout the Roman Empire, especially within the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, from the mid 1st century CE to the late 4th century.

BRILL eBooks, 2015

Interest in the literature of Late Antiquity has lagged somewhat behind in comparison with the boom in late antique history. More work has appeared recently, but, understandably in a field where some basic work still needs to be done, most of this has been in the field of editions, translation, and stylistic analysis. Much of current scholarship on late antique literature therefore remains focused on exploring strictly literary issues, i.e. what a text means and what tropes it uses, at best in relationship with earlier, classical literature. The difference between the Second and the so-called 'Third Sophistic' is often assumed to be that in Late Antiquity, literature lost its social prominence and retreated into the school and the private reading room: the third century marks the break between the vibrant Second Sophistic and its arid successor.1 This volume starts out from the hypothesis that these perceived differences should be attributed less to a fundamental and sudden change in the role of literature than to different scholarly methodologies with which texts from the second and the fourth century are being studied.2 As a booming field, the study of Late Antiquity still defines itself in opposition to older visions of a general, political and cultural, decline of the ancient 1 For recent restatements of this view, see M.