Bøger udgivet af Institute of Classical Studies

An intimate insight into the lives of twelve families in the Ancient Egyptian village of Tebtunis. Tebtunis, an ancient village formerly located in lower Egypt, is one of the most enduring subjects of study from the civilization's Roman era. This fascinating volume details a dozen newly-discovered family papers that have survived from the second century AD. Belonging to families of various different classes, this unique documentation provides a rare opportunity to explore how local elites under Roman rule exploited their wealth in the countryside and interacted with its rural inhabitants. Ties That Bind is the first book to investigate these family papers holistically, focusing on the economic activities in which the families engaged: land leases, loans in cash and kind, and the employment of managers and laborers on landed estates. This study also addresses strategy and decision-making among both elite families and villagers, the complexity of interfamilial relationships, and the implications of this social networking. This micro-historical study elucidates the diversity of socio-economic life in a village where no single family dominated.

Apuleius' literary and philosophical fortune has been considerable since antiquity, mostly through the reception of The Golden Ass. The aim of this collection of essays is to highlight a few major aspects of this afterlife, from the High Middle Ages to early Romanticism, in the fields of literature, linguistics and philology, within a wide geographical scope. The volume gathers the proceedings of an international conference held in March 2016 at the Warburg Institute in London, in association with the Institute of Classical Studies. It includes both diachronic overviews and specific case-studies. A first series of papers focuses on The Golden Ass and its historical and geographical diffusion, from High Medieval Europe to early modern Mexico. The oriental connections of the book are also taken into account. The second part of the book examines the textual and visual destiny of Psyche's story from the Apuleian fabula to allegorical retellings, in poetical or philosophical books and on stage. As the third series of essays indicates, the fortunes of the book led many ancient and early modern writers and translators to use it as a canonical model for reflections about the status of fiction. It also became, mostly around the beginning of the fifteenth century, a major linguistic and stylistic reference for lexicographers and neo-Latin writers. The last papers of the book deal with Renaissance polemics about "'Apuleianism" and the role of editors and commentators. This is the sixth and last of the volumes in the series of 'Afterlives' of the Classics, which is being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute.

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 causes of the decline and the later recovery of interest raise important new questions about how Plutarch should be assessed in the twenty-first century. This is one of the early volumes in the series of 'Afterlives' of the Classics, being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg.

From his own middle age onwards, Virgil has been revered as perhaps the greatest poet of the Latin language. Moreover, no classical Latin author has a more continuous history of copying, study, and imitation than Virgil. He has been centrally important to the transmission of the classical tradition, and has played a unique role in European education. It was as a contribution to the richness of his reception that one of the first 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, on 8-9 May 2014.This volume publishes papers from that conference: they range in time from Petrarch to eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, focusing on three main areas: Italian Renaissance poetry, scholarship and visual art; English responses to Virgil's poetry; and, more unusually, emerging literatures in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [Within Virgil's work there is a strong focus on the ways in which later writers and artists have used the Eclogues and the Aeneid.]

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Hélène Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fátima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Hérica Valladares.

Menander set Perikeiromene, or the 'Woman with shorn head' in Corinth, famous for its beautiful women, at a time when the city's troubles were at their height owing to the Macedonian conquest of Greece. The story reflects in miniature some of the turbulence of the times. A mercenary soldier Polemon returns home from service to discover, as he thinks, that his girl, Glykera, has found another lover. In a fit of jealous rage he shears off her hair and goes off to drown his sorrows with companions. Glykera promptly moves out from Polemon's house to the neighbour's house, in which her purported new lover Moschion lives. But all is not as it seems...Typically for the genre of New Comedy, Menander takes his characters to the brink in this lively drama before the recognitions which set everything straight.Discoveries of fragmented manuscripts of this play in the twentieth century have more or less brought it back to life.

A collection of essays on the topical concept of agon in Greek literature. The papers collected in this volume are offered by colleagues and former students in honor of Chris Carey, emeritus professor of Greek at University College London. The multifaceted topic of the agon, or contest of word, and its varying representations in Greek literature aptly corresponds to the outstanding variety of Carey's research interests, which include the works of Homer, lyric poetry, drama, law, rhetoric, and historiography. This volume sets out to reflect on facets of the agon across these literary genres and the pivotal role of competition in ancient Greek thought. It aims to explore the wide range of agonal dynamics, and their generic and cultural value, as well as stimulating fresh discussions under a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches.

Based on recently discovered fragments, this is one of the most complete English-language publications of Misoumenos, or The Hated Man. Menander's Misoumenos, or The Hated Man, is one of his most popular plays to have survived from classical times. Dating to approximately 300 BCE, it tells the story of a mercenary soldier and the captive girl he acquires while on campaign in Cyprus. The play follows the soldier's growing despair as the girl spurns his advances and slowly turns against him, culminating in his suicidal thoughts. The play belongs to the ancient genre of New Comedy, of which Menander was the acknowledged master. This edition presents a significantly updated text and the fullest English language translation of the play to date. It aims to restore as much as possible of the action of Misoumenos, reconstructing the language, stagecraft, and theatrical dialogue of the original based on hypothesis and reconstruction. Some sections can be restored nearly in full, permitting access to brilliantly original theatrical dialogue which had been lost for over two millennia. Apart from meter and sophisticated idiom, the themes of love, despair, and sadness that Menander treats are utterly timeless.